Fallen Angel (11 page)

On the critical stage to Bassano del Grappa, Bartali’s alliance with his fellow Tuscan Aldo Bini helped him chase down Coppi just at the point when the young upstart was threatening his race lead. Coppi complained publicly, but the day
before he had reached an agreement with Bartali to combine forces against the up-and-coming Vito Ortelli. On another Dolomite stage, when Bartali was sick, it was Coppi who got off his bike, poured water over him to clean him up, and offered him encouragement. It was pure theatre, and it was just the beginning. By the end of the 1940s an entire generation of European sports fans would find it impossible to mention one without the other.

The most eloquent link to Coppi’s new life in this new Italy is to be found in the town of Novi Ligure, in a large, elegant house set off a wide avenue of shady trees. Marina Bellocchi née Coppi, born in November 1947, is the image of her father: she has inherited the high forehead, the sweeping hair, the elegant nose and the half-smile in which the upper lip barely moves. But whereas Coppi always appears languid and self-effacing in film footage and television clips, his daughter is lively, laughing, expressive, her appearance belying her sixty years.

Fausto and Bruna moved from Castellania over the Apennines to a flat in the town of Sestri Ponente on the Ligurian coast near Genoa after their marriage at the end of 1945. It was easier to get food near the big city in those times of shortages, and the Mediterranean climate was milder for training than the chillier, foggier winters of Piedmont. A fourth-floor flat in an apartment block with no lift was probably not the first choice for a cycling champion, however. His Bianchi bike (possibly his most valuable possession) was kept in the flat, and when Coppi went out training the
tifosi
would wait outside the building to compete for the honour of carrying his bike up the stairs when he returned, so that his legs would be less tired.

In the mornings before Fausto left to go training, he would have breakfast with his daughter as she prepared to go to infant school. She would have
zuppa al latte
, hot, sugary bread and milk, and Fausto would pretend to steal his daughter’s food, much to her consternation. When he laughed, it came
out like that of a small boy: eheheheh. On winter mornings, he would stuff a thick layer of newspapers under his woollen jersey to absorb the sweat and keep the wind off his chest: as she was eating he would methodically rip out a triangular space at the top of each sheet to allow him to open the zip at the collar of his jersey.

Marina attended a nursery school between the sea and the Via Aurelia, the coast road where Fausto trained most days; as he passed, he would stop at the huge iron gate and call her over just to say hello. Sometimes, as he went training in the morning, he would carry his daughter to school on the crossbar of his bike, a precarious ride she did not entirely enjoy, although she did not tell him so.

Squashed in the pockets of Marina’s heavy coat would be a few of Coppi’s favourite cakes, little baskets of flaky pastry called
gubeletti
, made specially for the cyclist by a local baker’s called Sidea. Usually they were filled with jam, but the baker’s boys took the trouble to fill Coppi’s with orange marmalade so that they wouldn’t be too sweet for him. His other passion was for small pastry fingers known as
bacicci
, little kisses.

Coppi would ride up to 160 kilometres each day, come home, eat a light lunch, and lie down to rest on the sofa with Marina in his arms. Cavanna would be driven the forty-five miles over from Novi Ligure to give him a massage, and he would go to bed at 9.30 p.m. Already, the Coppis were making plans for the future. He wanted to open a bar or a restaurant after he retired, he said while being interviewed by the journalist Gianni Roghi. Bruna overheard, and said the idea would not suit her; the demands on their time would be too great. ‘OK,’ said her husband. ‘We’ll get someone to run the bar and we’ll just take Marina out walking around the town.’

* * *

Outside his family, to most of those who met him, Coppi appeared distant, ill-at-ease. One former team-mate, Michele Gismondi, told me: ‘He always seemed to be fond of us, deep down inside, even if sometimes his mind seemed elsewhere, as if he were thinking of something else.’ Jean Bobet concurred: ‘Out of his racing kit he looked fine, but the suit never seemed quite to fit him. I had the impression he was not at ease. He was always polite but seemed to be watching everyone else, and looked as if he was watching everyone else watching him.’

Coppi was impossible to pin down. Team-mates and friends find it hard to remember specifically what it was that made his character special. He is not, it should be pointed out, the only cyclist of this kind. Orio Vergani of
Corriere della Sera
, for one, believed that most of the cycling champions of that era were reticent men, never letting too much out in public about the efforts they made, the drugs they took, their child-hood, their dreams. They were peasant boys with the peasant’s instinct for caution, thrown into a bizarre, dog-eat-dog world where they gambled every day – on their own strength, on the trajectory of a bend, on the line to take in a sprint – and where they were surrounded with people whose aim was to deceive them.

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 when 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.