Fallen Angel Read online

  The media found him a mystery, apart from one confidant, La Gazzetta dello Sport correspondent Rino Negri. ‘Very secretive in what he says and on what he intends to do in a race,’ wrote a reporter in 1940. ‘Don’t try to elicit from him a single word more than he might feel he can say without giving anything away.’ ‘He was hard to drag out of himself even though he was naturally well-mannered and well brought up,’ recalled the historian Indro Montanelli, who felt that this was not something the cyclist actually tried to cultivate, but it had its uses. ‘Everyone would look at him and wonder “What is he thinking? Is he on a good day or not? What is he planning to do?” And no one ever knew.’ The writer concluded: ‘He never had many [words] at his disposal. And he seemed to have great difficulty in getting out the words he did have. Perhaps this was why I never managed to understand if he was happy to be the king of cycling. It seemed he wasn’t.’

  He was not a chatterer, not a man who opened up easily. ‘Often Fausto’s silences were long, he seemed a tremendously long way away, closed in his thoughts’, said a contemporary, Romeo Venturelli. On the road, travelling between criteriums and track meetings with team-mates, the talk was of practical matters: racing programmes, holidays, the next day’s schedule. He was obsessed with the logistics, making sure the scheduling was right, that the train tickets were arranged. He was not a man given to daydreams or reflection, even among friends. Fiorenzo Magni noted, for example, that he did not discuss his experiences in prison camp, other than to mention that it had damaged his career because his digestive system was affected.

  Coppi was unwilling to make a spectacle of himself in public. For example, if he gave a gift to a charity, he would be determined that it should remain anonymous. He was a man who never made reckless predictions: he would never say ‘Today I’m going to win’, merely ‘Oggi ci daremo una botta’, We’ll give them a kick up the backside today. The former soigneur of the Italian national team, Giannetto Cimurri, recalled that the campionissimo had his own way of showing someone when they had been admitted to the select inner circle of people who were to be trusted: Coppi would shake hands with them using his left hand. The rest of the world got the right hand.

  Others assert that Coppi had two sides: the public face seen at the races and the quietly humorous man at his home, out hunting with his dogs, relaxing with his brother. ‘He was a very timid man thrust into the spotlight,’ recalls Nino Defilippis. ‘When he went to the cinema, he had to go out while the lights were turned off, because the people wouldn’t let him leave once they knew he was there.’ Coppi did not like the public eye, although clearly he knew he had to live with the exposure. He told Negri: ‘I’ve always hated shaking hands, especially when I was eating and someone wished me “buon appetito” with a vigorous handshake.’ Ettore Milano said simply of him: ‘We talked, he listened.’ And Coppi was aware of his own shyness: ‘Popularity always scared me a bit. More than once, until a moment before a party or a ceremony began, I didn’t know how to behave and wished I could find a familiar face.’

  Coppi was superstitious: his brother Livio recalls him throwing away the jersey he had worn in a race that went badly. On the other hand, he believed that the number 36 was lucky. But in this he was typical of his time and his upbringing. Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi’s account of life among the peasants of the Italian south, in Matera during the 1930s, makes much of their folklore: belief in the powers of witches, wolf-tamers, devils in the form of goats, curses, imps that taunt men in their sleep, love potions. Eric Newby, too, notes the fascination with the occult, and with violent death.

  Superstition is a recurring theme in Coppi’s life and death, and some of those close to the Coppi clan talk about a curse, or at least an unlucky blight on them. ‘A family exterminated by bad luck,’ says one former team-mate. Given his back-ground, and the fact that he had been exposed at an early age to life-changing events – sudden success and riches, war, imprisonment, the premature death of his father – public acclaim must have seemed very fragile. If others lived for the moment, Coppi seems to have wondered how long the moment would last.

  Coppi wanted people around him, not necessarily to do anything, one suspects, but mainly so that he knew they were there. He made sure he had Serse with him both at school and when racing. He also needed reassurance and support, constantly, from those who were close to him. According to Giannetto Cimurri, this was the most important need he had: ‘He needed stimulants but he also needed psychological stimulants, words of encouragement.’

  Sporting champions divide into two categories. There are those who have an urge to dominate the opposition in any field from an early age and carry it with them into sport, and those who are more insecure, who discover sporting excellence as an outlet, a means of self-expression, of gaining pleasure from doing something as well as it can be done. ‘You become a superstar if, having won, you are never completely satisfied …’ said Coppi. As his team manager Giovanni Tragella put it, ‘He is not a weak man, but sensitive. His mood changes over nothing. Even his confidence in his own strength declines. He prepares every race carefully and if things don’t go how he wants, he gets angry and demoralised. Sometimes, he underestimates himself. When he says, “There’s nothing to be done”, insisting otherwise is like beating your head against a wall. But when he realises that everything is working out, he is unstoppable.’

  He was highly observant, with the eye of a peasant farmer buying livestock at an auction: he could spot a rival who had had slightly longer cranks fitted because he felt in form, and he easily read Bartali’s attempts to send spies into his orbit. After a crash late in his career, he was visited in his hospital bed by a small boy; Coppi asked him where he lived, was told the name of the village and then went through the place, corner by corner, pothole by pothole, trying to work out where the house was. He was thirsty for information – ‘who had done this, what Bobet was up to, who had been chasing behind a break’, as one-team mate put it. It would all be filed away for future reference.

  Like that other great peasant farmer champion, the Spaniard Miguel Indurain, instances of him getting angry were rare enough to be notable. One gregario, Angelo Coletto, saw him lose his temper only twice in the years they spent together: once when the mechanic didn’t stick Coletto’s tyre on properly and it rolled; another time when Coletto crashed and broke the eggs he was carrying for Coppi. ‘If someone yelled something offensive at him, he would not answer, he would look at them as if he were 1,000 kilometres up in the air and they were on the ground, small and useless,’ recalled one associate.

  There was a simple straightness about him that appealed to the other cyclists: he kept his word, didn’t go back on deals, paid up when help was bought or bartered. As a result, he had friends aplenty when it came to calling in favours in races. He had a sense of responsibility – or possibly a fear of being badly thought of, fare brutta figura as the Italians put it – that was stronger than his need for money. On more than one occasion he made sure he took reduced fees if a track meeting suffered an unexpectedly small crowd. He won the hearts of the French public by going to watch amateurs race at Paris’s Vél d’Hiv, and was capable of gestures such as doling out signed photographs to an entire team of workmen renovating a hotel in which he was staying.

  He liked simple pleasures, particularly hunting, which began as a need to get outside in the fresh air, and which he eventually found he loved. ‘If I couldn’t go hunting I’d be bored to death,’ he said. Pictures of him shooting abound: fowling from a small boat in the marshes, proudly displaying the day’s catch of pheasants or hares. He also had a passion for hunting partridges; it was his young cousin, Piero Coppi, who would gather them. Before he bought land of his own, he spent hours in the fields around Castellania with his gun and his dogs. Not that he was completely bloodthirsty, as Marina recalls: ‘My father was hunting once in Piemonte, hunting boars, which he had never done before, he had his gun at the ready, the boar ran towards him, and he lowered his gun w
hen he saw the beast’s eyes. Looking at it, he just wasn’t able to kill it.’ As a child, he was a dab hand with a catapult; later, Coppi’s collection of guns was large and eclectic, mostly donated by wealthy fans; his gundogs were well trained.

  When he lived near Genoa, one of his regrets was that he didn’t get to the cinema more often. He liked Westerns and was a big fan of Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Football was also a passion: he said he would rather watch a football match than a bike race. Like many Piedmontese, he fell under the spell of il Grande Torino, the ill-fated Turin side that dominated Italian football in the post-war years. He would travel to watch them train; in Genoa he was regularly seen at the Sampdoria ground, and he would take his young family to matches in his spare time. On 14 January 1950, he and Bartali captained teams of cyclists in a game in front of a massive crowd at the Arena in Milan. Coppi’s team played a 5-3-2 formation, with Fiorenzo Magni in goal and the campionissimo on the right wing, directly opposite Bartali, who was disgusted when his side lost 6–0, with Coppi scoring the final goal.

  Coppi had learned to drive while in prison camp, and, like every other professional cyclist before and since, he was fear-some behind a steering wheel. Ubaldo Pugnaloni still gets the shivers thinking about the time they ran over a dog at 200kph on the way to a race. He once commented to Coppi that they were cutting it very fine as they passed other cars a hairs-breadth away; he just laughed. And, like so many professional cyclists, Coppi loved his cars, which were as much a tool of his trade as his bike; if Gino Bartali bought a new one he would go out and buy one bigger. He was particularly fond of his spacious, curvy Lancia Aurelia; having bought one in the Vatican because it was cheaper, he couldn’t work out how to turn the heating off so he drove it with the windows down.

  Many books on Coppi fail to mention a tragedy involving the cyclist in early May 1947, when Coppi ran down a book-shop owner, Giuseppe Vallino, in the Genoa suburb of Sampierdarena, while returning from the Giro di Romagna. Vallino died in hospital from his injuries, unleashing a series of legal battles that ran on for nearly a year. Due to a lack of evidence, claims for damages from Vallino’s widow and his brother were thrown out, as was a requested six-month prison sentence for culpable homicide. Coppi eventually paid the widow 1.65 million lire in compensation. By Italian standards it was relatively uncontroversial, but it was a little foretaste of bigger, nastier legal wrangles to come.

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  Bruna recalled years later that her happiest memory of their marriage was when Fausto was packing his suitcase to travel to the Giro and little Marina hid in it. This is not a memory of time spent together, but of parting and separation. The marriage was eventually to crumble; Coppi’s suitcase, however, is still in existence. It’s one of the few relics that the Bianchi bike company has retained of the man who put its name on the map. The wooden sides are covered in canvas in the manufacturer’s eggshell blue, edged with leather; the corner plates and locks are in sturdy brass, the cyclist’s name on the luggage label.

  The suitcase is an apt symbol of Coppi’s rapid rise to stardom. It was worked hard in those years immediately after the war. For a cyclist who could switch from road racing in summer to track racing in the winter, there was money to be made all over Europe at indoor venues such as Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver and Antwerp’s Sportpaleis. The velodromes are long gone now. The popularity of track racing as a mass spectator sport depended on the fact that without television fans across Europe seldom if ever saw their heroes in action. Events such as Milan–San Remo and the Giro d’Italia had saturation coverage on the radio, in the sponsoring newspapers and photoreportage magazines, but prior to television the stars could only be glimpsed at the start or finish of major events, or as they sped past on the road.

  On the other hand, at a track meeting at the Vigorelli – rebuilt at speed after being damaged in the war, and reopened on 26 May 1946 – or the Vél d’Hiv, the action was right there in front of the fans. The racing might be largely exhibition stuff, but it was spectacular and fast and, most importantly, the big names were on constant display. The roadmen were the crowd pullers, even though the track boasted showmen of its own: specialists such as the British sprint star Reg Harris and the Italian Antonio Maspes. The record attendance for a meeting with Coppi topping the bill was 20,000, in 1951, and he could earn up to 800,000 old French francs in appearance money.

  To give some idea of the travel that was involved in this year-round racing schedule, we can study Coppi’s programme for the winter of 1947–8. His daughter was born on 1 November, and La Gazzetta dello Sport reports that he raced in Antwerp on 29 November, Brussels the next day, Paris a week later, Ghent the week after that, back to Paris for 19 December, Brussels two days later. After Christmas, it was Paris on 4 January, Ghent on 11 January, Brussels on the 17th, Nice on the 18th, Antwerp on the 24th, Ghent the next day, Brussels on 1 February, and finally Paris on 8 February. Travel in those days was by train, most often overnight.

  The format of the race meetings varied. Sometimes there would be an omnium, in which a group of professionals would compete in several events – a points race, an elimination race, an event paced behind small motorbikes, perhaps – for a cumulative prize. The professionals would sometimes be divided into national ‘teams’, so that the evening’s show could be billed as ‘Italy v France’ for example: anything to draw the crowds. All those meetings bar one included a pursuit match against either another major star of the road, such as the Belgian Rik Van Steenbergen, or a track specialist such as the Dutchman Gerrit Schulte. That winter Coppi rode twenty-one pursuits, and won them all.

  The Italian writer Mario Fossati travelled alongside Coppi over one such winter and described how the campionissimo would get out of the express train in each day’s great city with his bike under his arm. At the station he would find the soigneur who had been appointed to look after him – a young man in a heavy overcoat in Zurich, a dry-faced senior citizen in a sailing top in Amsterdam, a guy with teeth like a horse in Antwerp, in Copenhagen a classy chap in a double-breasted coat who offered them pastis. There were taxi rides through the brightly lit city; the dramatic entrance onto the track among the screaming crowd; the night’s victims; the champagne, the flowers; oysters and steak tartare eaten in late-night restaurants after the evening’s work; the beautiful women lavishing attention on the star.

  It was the antithesis of racing on the road with its mud, dust and potholes, the hours of training in all weathers. At the end of a road race the cyclist would sometimes be invisible apart from his eyes under a mask of muck, in a state of near collapse. Here, on the other hand, was access to good food, glamour, easy money, ready acclaim, popular success. The star, critically, had to play the part: hair had to be brilliantined, sunglasses worn to cover the bags under the eyes, elegant coats and suits donned for the dramatic entry into each night’s venue before he descended to change in the bowels of the stadium. It was a world of unimaginable glamour for the poverty-stricken post-war years, in the Europe of the Marshall Plan and food queues.

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  The huge crowds at the velodromes reflected the fact that cycling had rapidly returned to being an international sport in the years after peace was restored. Post-war, the French, Belgian and Italian papers who ran the major races – the Tour of Flanders, Paris–Roubaix, and so on – were quick to combine forces in organising the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo (named after the founders of the Giro and Tour). This new umbrella competition across the major events, national Tours and Classics, drew cyclists out of their national fiefdoms.

  The Italians were happy to race abroad, once post-war restrictions were lifted. Coppi had made his first trip to France in mid-September 1946, winning the Grand Prix de la Trocadero, a circuit race held in central Paris, as a prelude to an outstanding victory in the Grand Prix des Nations, a massive 140-kilometre time trial. He was pushed hard early in the three and a half hour race by the Frenchman Emile Idée, but pulled away over the little hills in the Ch
evreuse Valley, south of Paris, in an effort that left him flat on his back in the centre of the Parc des Princes.

  Coppi had picked up more than passable English in prison camp, and clearly had a flair for languages: he ended up fluent in French. He travelled more widely, and enjoyed greater international success, than any of Italy’s pre-war champions; he would be joined by Bartali and the country’s other post-war great, Fiorenzo Magni, who was the pioneer when it came to racing in Belgium. They were supported wherever they went by the massive diaspora of Italian migrant workers spread across Europe – many of them under a post-war scheme to provide much needed labour. Marina Coppi still has a heavy miner’s lantern given to her father by the Italian community in the Belgian mining area of Wallonia: ‘They told my father, “When you win, we win because we feel important again.” It’s a huge responsibility for a sportsman to bear.’

  Cycle racing was about to experience its popular zenith. Now the Tour is the one event in cycling that regularly draws truly huge crowds, but during the 1940s and 1950s vast throngs could be seen at races which now sit on the margins or have long disappeared: the Tour of the West and Bordeaux–Paris in France; the regional giri – Lazio, Veneto, Tuscany – in Italy. Thirty thousand might turn up to watch the finish of a Giro di Lombardia; pictures taken at the finish of any race or Tour stage of the time will show crowds twenty deep as far as the eye can see.

  At a time of economic austerity, the spectacle of a major bike race could be taken in for free, and it offered a chance to recall the days of plenty. People across Europe needed diversion and they were limited in where they could travel before the car and motorbike became universal. Cycling went to those people. It was a sport in which they could take an active role: the riders liked to have bottles of water handed up, time gaps or the distance to the finish could be yelled out. The more concerned or less scrupulous could reach out a hand on a mountain and give a firm push to a backmarker or a leader as they dropped behind.