Fallen Angel Read online

  When he set off at just after 2 p.m. on 7 November, the crowd was sparse apart from a few workers from the nearby Alfa Romeo factory, but that was hardly surprising. The news from abroad was bad and the war had begun to strike the Italians at home. Almost a quarter of a million Italians were by now in prison camps abroad. The Milanesi had been living under blackout since British Bomber Command had begun raiding on 24 October. The previous evening, Genoa had been devastated. The Vigorelli’s roof had already been damaged in bombing raids. Fortunately the day was foggy, reducing the chance of a visit from Bomber Harris’s aircraft; the record attempt had been specifically timed for the early afternoon, because the Allies tended to bomb at lunch-time and during factory hours to disrupt production. The post-prandial siesta was usually quieter. Even so, the tunnels under the track’s grandstands were kept clear, so they could be used as air-raid shelters if necessary.

  Notwithstanding a dose of camphorated oil filched from a military hospital, Coppi was never quite on the pace. He started too fast, by half-distance he was behind Archambaud, and then came the hardest part. The final thirty minutes of an hour record attempt are unforgiving, as the strain of sitting on the bike in a fixed position tells. There are no changes of gradient or wind to give a little relief, no chance to freewheel for the odd corner, as in a road time trial. Coppi clawed back the deficit and then began a painful final third in which he repeatedly gained a tiny advantage but slipped back each time, ‘furiously snatching a lead then slowing to regain my breath or my strength’, as he put it.

  Coppi’s ghost-written account of the record is compelling: ‘Finally, centimetre by centimetre, I managed to catch up with the demonic clock. I could not see the figures on the black-board. I only knew that I could not fall behind the clock any more, that I had to overtake it, even if it was only by ten metres, in order to win. My chest was like a red hot furnace, my brain knew only the order of the clock: faster, faster, faster!’ He was still level with seven minutes to go and the eventual margin registered by the judges was tiny: a mere thirty-one metres better than Archambaud’s record.

  That final effort left its mark: Coppi never attempted another hour, partly because he feared the suffering involved, partly because he dreaded the stress of the build-up. No challenger came forward to attack his distance, and provoke a response, until he was too old. He may also have been keen to keep the record in the past, because it was not a clear-cut success, in spite of the initial euphoria. The documentation for the record never made it to the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body for cycling) in Switzerland because of the war, and, after the war was over, Archambaud protested that the attempt had not been carried out in legal conditions. When the lap splits were published they showed that Coppi covered the laps in such irregular times as to suggest he may have had a case. The record was not validated until February 1947, and then only after Archambaud’s times had been re-examined as well: both men’s distances were revised downwards, offering plenty of material for conspiracy theorists both French and Italian.

  By the end of his career, Coppi had begun to regret his decision not to make a second attempt: given the dominance he would attain in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he would surely have gone further, and the result would have been an undisputed record. Hindsight led him to realise that the 1942 attempt was carried out without sustained, specific preparation, due in part to his injury and also to the war conditions. He had made no concessions to aero-dynamics, wearing a jersey with flappy pockets and a crash hat with leather bars. To warm up, he had ridden to the track from Castellania. The clinching factor, however, was that he had ridden without using drugs. There were, he said, ‘no chemicals. [In the 1950s], “chemicals” [would] increase performance in an hour record by at least 30 per cent, anyone who says it’s not like that doesn’t know what it’s like riding with amphetamine in them.’ The record would stand until the arrival of Jacques Anquetil, in the mid-1950s. He, if anyone, knew how to use ‘chemicals’.

  * * *

  As with the Giro victory, there was no time to savour the hour. Legnano’s promised 25,000-lire bonus would never be spent, or at least not by the man who had earned it. Even as Coppi was suffering on the Vigorelli, the war in North Africa had turned definitively against the Axis, after two and a half years of advance and retreat along the Mediterranean coast. Montgomery had broken out at El Alamein three days before, on 4 November. On 6 November General Alexander had sent Churchill a message saying that he had captured 20,000 prisoners, 350 tanks, 400 artillery pieces and 1,000 vehicles. As the fighting swept eastwards along the North African coast in the coming months, Mussolini’s generals prepared to throw their remaining troops into one final effort, if not to stave off disaster then at least to ensure that defeat could be depicted as an heroic last stand.

  Not only had Coppi lost his father the previous January, his elder brother Livio was reported missing in western Russia, surrounded on the banks of the River Don with the 230,000 Italians Mussolini had sent to support Hitler’s invasion force. Unlike 75,000 others who perished in the retreat, including Fausto’s former training partner Borlando, Livio at least returned, given leave to work on the farm because both Serse and Fausto had also been called up. By happy coincidence, he came back the day after Fausto broke the hour.

  A former cyclist, Giovanni Cuniolo, now a car dealer, had been pulling strings to keep Fausto Coppi out of the war, and had warned him that if he did not get himself ‘into hospital’ he would end up fighting. There were attempts to smuggle him to Switzerland, and Cavanna had offered to ‘make him ill’ to get him relieved of active service, using the combination of a strange concoction and a Tuscan cigar. He declined both offers. Coppi was willing to submit to something far larger than himself. He explained later that he felt if he evaded service, he would inevitably face public criticism. ‘Friends suggested ways out. I was against it. I would damage my career by going, but I would surely ruin it if I stayed.’ Moreover, Bruna backed his decision, in spite of the dangers he would run.

  The abortive campaign in the French colony of Tunisia was the last gasp of Mussolini’s attempt to recreate the Roman empire in North Africa. Coppi and his unit arrived in March 1943, by which time the Axis troops were clinging on to the Mareth Line, a string of French fortifications at the foot of the peninsula, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and were gradually being pushed into the sea by the Allies. The tone had been set for the ‘campaign’ when the colonel who sent Coppi and his unit to war accompanied them as far as the railway station, where he told them that duty dictated he himself remain in the barracks.

  They ‘skimmed the crests of the waves’ as they flew from Sicily, a memory which still terrified Coppi years later: it was the first time he had been in an aeroplane. From Biserta, at the head of the peninsula, Coppi sent Bruna a coded telegram: ‘Fausto is well, under the palm trees.’ A month later, in April, he wrote that he dreamt of meeting her. As for the fighting, he later described an army in which the soldiers had no belief they could win, and in which as many men were falling to illness as to enemy bullets. The news via the radio of massive bombardments at home merely discouraged them further: what would be left if they did ever get home?

  In spring 1943, Mussolini told Rommel that Tunisia was ‘the fortress of Europe and if it falls the European situation could change for good’. The troops on the ground knew defeat was imminent, however. ‘No one believed hostilities would end with victory for us,’ wrote Coppi. ‘Dysentery, lack of supplies, the bad news that the fascist propaganda couldn’t hide all combined to turn us into a defeated army. We retreated night and day across the desert after pulling back from the Mareth Line and were surrounded, out of ammunition, food and courage, when the English captured us.’

  The first two weeks of May saw a general collapse among the Axis troops, who retreated to the coast. Coppi was captured at Cape Bon on 13 April, just before the end of the entire Tunisian campaign. The Italian troops had been cut off from their
supply lines for forty-eight hours, with their commander alternately calling on the Madonna and screaming down a dead field telephone, his men firing into the air for something to do. Finally, one of Coppi’s comrades tapped him on the elbow and told him to stay still: the English had come. Luckily for him, his general had specified that he would only surrender to the inglesi. The French had already acquired a reputation for mistreating their Italian prisoners of war as a crude means of reprisal for the ‘stab in the back’. Almost sixty years later, Coppi’s former classmate Armando Baselica was still bitter about the way the French had treated him.

  In his prisoner-of-war camp at Megez-el-Bab, where about 10,000 prisoners gathered in a valley close to the top of the Tunisian peninsula, Coppi must have felt the same as Baselica did among the French: ‘[in the camps] you forget about the whole world. I didn’t know whether Castellania was still there, whether my girlfriend was alive. You know you are losing the best years of your life.’ There were lighter moments: the prisoners found a dog and adopted it as their mascot. Coppi did not smoke, so he was able to swap his cigarette ration for food. He shaved with broken glass; he never quite resolved the dilemma of having only one shirt. If he wore it, it would have to be washed, if it was hung out to dry it might well be stolen. He was spotted occasionally, and his celebrity meant that those who did meet him never forgot. Among them was a British soldier named Len Levesley, a London bike shop mechanic in peacetime, who met Coppi under the strangest of circumstances. An Italian prisoner was called to cut his hair, and the barber proved to be none other than Coppi.

  ‘I should think it took me all of a second to realise who it was. He looked fine, he looked slim, and having been in the desert, he looked tanned. I’d only seen him in magazines, but I knew instantly who he was. So he cut my hair and I tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Italian. We managed one or two words and I got through to him that I did some club racing. I gave him a bar of chocolate that I had with me and he was grateful for that, and that was the end of it.’ Later, his cycling club mates would nickname Levesley ‘Holy head’.

  * * *

  Coppi eventually found a role as a mechanic, cleaning lorries for the British and ferrying the occasional Red Cross parcel; significantly, he had declared loyalty to the new Italian government after Mussolini’s deposition on 8 September 1943, so he was treated as a cooperative prisoner. Equally importantly, early in his captivity he had met another Tortonese, Eteocle Ventura, who put both their names on a select list of just eighteen lorry and motorcycle drivers who would be transferred to Naples, where he landed on 3 February 1945. Once on Italian soil, Coppi was held in a camp in Salerno, just outside Naples, but his fellow countrymen saw to it that the rest of his spell as a prisoner was brief. Initially he worked as batman to a sandy-haired English lieutenant who had no interest in cycling, but who at least let him train. The bush telegraph works fast in Italy, however, and eventually he was directed to the offices of a sports journalist, Gino Palumbo, at a newly created newspaper, La Voce. Palumbo later recalled that the guard at the door had no idea who Coppi was, but he recognised him immediately as he stood there nervously in his fatigues, twisting his beret in his hands.

  Coppi wanted one thing: a bike. The one he was using in camp was simply too heavy. Palumbo knew that the paper could not provide one – there was no money – so he put an announcement on the front page: ‘Who would like to give a bike to Fausto Coppi?’ There were just three replies and the one that was taken up was from a carpenter in the nearby village of Somma Vesuviana who brought him an old Legnano. ‘I didn’t understand at first,’ Coppi recalled. ‘Then I burst into tears, and he, the carpenter, could only blow his nose when he saw me like that.’ Two months later, Coppi would race in Somma as a gesture of thanks.

  In early April, he was ‘sprung’ from the camp in Salerno by two older racers, Romano Pontisso and Pietro Chiappini, and a Roman framebuilder, Edmondo Nulli, who obtained his release documents for him. ‘Come on, come to Rome with us,’ they told him. Initially, he could not believe it was actually happening. For a fee of 12,000 AMlire, the occupation currency, Nulli became his first post-war sponsor. The backer could hardly have been more appropriate: nulla is the Italian word for nothing. Coppi was racing with a big zero on the back of his orange jersey; like his country, he was starting again from scratch.

  Initially Coppi’s racing was restricted to events in the south of the country, the north being still at war. There were hints of better days to come, however: for a track meeting at the Appio velodrome in Rome, Coppi received 16,000 lire, but in one of his few surviving letters his spidery script betrayed his anxiety: ‘I’ve begun racing again but I can see I am only the shadow of myself and I’m worried I won’t be able to become what I used to be. For the moment I’m only interested in one thing: getting home.’

  That return took place through a devastated Italy of ruined towns, fresh war graves and broken people. Such trains as ran were intermittent and unreliable, so Coppi rode back to Castellania on his bike, on shell-holed roads lined with mine-fields. The journey’s dangers are summed up by a single episode he told later: at one point he was given a lift on a lorry, laden with returning prisoners and refugees, and was lucky to be sitting on the back, legs dangling above the road. There was a violent shock, and he was thrown into the road. When he looked up, the lorry had crashed. He grabbed his bike and wheels from the carnage and went on.

  His family had had no idea where he was. Initially, he had been reported severely injured in a hospital in Tortona, and later there were rumours that he had been taken as a prisoner to America – one magazine in early 1943 had written that they hoped the Americans would return him as soon as possible. His first stop was Sestri Ponente, the home of Bruna’s parents; she was not there, having returned to Villalvernia, where they had first met. He doubled back to find her, together with Serse, who had survived a brief spell fighting for the Repubblica di Salò (Mussolini’s puppet state); he had been tried by the partisans but had escaped.

  On Coppi’s back was a haversack, containing his contract money from Nulli. He did not know it as he pedalled north-wards, but it was all the cash he had, although before the war he had saved about 36,000 lire from events such as the hour. ‘How many times in Africa did I think of this fabulous sum and the use I would put it to? I wanted to set up home because I had fallen in love. I also wanted to buy a car.’ It would be a Fiat, he thought; his old friend Cuniolo would get him a good deal. Unfortunately, the money had been entrusted to his parents, who had converted it to Italian government bonds, which were worthless by the time he rode up the hill to Castellania.

  * * *

  Cycle racing had continued right up to the resignation of Mussolini’s government on 25 July 1943, the very day that a young man named Ubaldo Pugnaloni won the national championship; when he finished the race, there were no officials there to present the prizes. Pugnaloni removed the fascist insignia from his jersey the minute he crossed the line; he had to wait fifty years to be given the trophy. That year’s Giro di Guerra stopped at its fifth round. The sport resumed after the war in an ad-hoc way, largely under the impetus of Gino Bartali and another influential figure of the time, Adolfo Leoni, a sprinter who would go on to win seventeen stages of the Giro. Between them they mustered as many as they could find of their fellow professionals from before the war; it was this circus that Coppi joined after he was released from detention in Salerno. As the front line moved northwards in 1944 and a form of normality was restored from the south upwards, Bartali, Leoni and company would race with local amateurs on whatever bikes had survived the war.

  Tubular tyres were in particularly short supply. For training, riders would use punctured tyres repaired with rags. The prize money was taken out of a hat passed among the spectators, and shared by those present. Leoni converted an old car into a riders’ minibus, the Caroline, which travelled the newly liberated areas carrying up to ten cyclists, their bikes
and their bags. It was, recalls Alfredo Martini, a time of austerity, ‘no cars, no enjoyment, just the satisfaction of seeing things reborn. There was a human reaction to the bad times, a desire to rebuild, to go back to being something.’ Pugnaloni is less nostalgic: ‘it was disgusting. The roads were in pieces, the hotels were all requisitioned by the Allies and water was rationed in some places.’

  Much of the racing was on the track, because the roads were rarely fit, and with rampant inflation and a primitive economy often the prizes were in kind. After a race, the winner might be seen riding home through the shell-holes with a gas stove under his arm. Or there were barter deals, such as the one Bartali managed, where Legnano paid him in steel tubing, which he sold on to a plumber in Florence. Riders who were hungry would go for lap prizes such as pigs and bottles of wine, and there were curious awards such as paintings and tortoises.

  To compete again, Coppi had to base himself briefly in Rome, where he and Serse stayed in a hotel near Nulli’s shop in Via La Spezia, racing in the colours of the Società Sportiva Lazio. ‘He had no idea about his future,’ recalled Gino Palumbo. ‘He thought that the years he had spent in prison had cut short his career. If Serse had not been there, with his optimistic, forward-looking nature, perhaps Fausto’s career would have ended that year. But it was Serse who said that their lives had not yet begun and Serse who wanted to race the Giro d’Italia if it had been back on the calendar.’