Fallen Angel (17 page)

On the Izoard, according to Binda’s version of events, the two men staged a near repeat of the Valkenburg farce. They were both clearly stronger than the rest of the field on the climb, escaped together and gained a big lead, but then slowed to tourist pace, each apparently afraid that the other would benefit. Again, it fell to Binda to resolve matters, not a rapid process. The manager began by reminding them of their deal,
then pointed out their responsibility to the national colours. Finally he warned that as repeat offenders they would face heavy fines if they disobeyed him and disgraced themselves. He talked of the shame they would feel in front of their families, wives, children. Gradually, they speeded up, and remained in front of the field. On the climb, Coppi slid in the mud and fell into the ditch; Bartali waited. On the descent, it was Bartali who punctured and Coppi who waited, enabling his rival to win the stage and pull on the yellow jersey at Briançon, on his thirty-fifth birthday.

Again the image of unity is undermined by the partisans: Cavanna said later that Coppi heard Binda telling Bartali that evening, ‘No one will take the jersey from you now.’ If that is the case, Binda was either wildly inaccurate in his reading of the race or he was trying to reassure Coppi’s great rival; the younger man was only one minute and twenty-two seconds behind, with a time trial stage still to come, and he had looked the stronger as they climbed the Izoard. The following day, en route to the Italian town of Aosta, Coppi was again the strongest, forcing a selection in the field on the Col d’Iseran, the highest point in the Tour at 2,800 metres, then leading Bartali away on the Grand St Bernard. The pair began the descent together, but Bartali punctured, then, having changed the tyre, he crashed, leaving Coppi with a dilemma: should he wait? Initially, he slowed down, in the hope that Bartali would catch up, but eventually Binda told him to go on. The Italian manager had to tell him twice, first sending a motor-cyclist with a message, then driving up to him. The outcome was inevitable: at the finish Coppi had almost five minutes’ lead, and the yellow jersey.

To this day,
Bartaliani
insist that Binda told their man he had not given Coppi the order to leave his team-mate, the race leader. The Dutch writer Benjo Maso speculated that Bartali knew he had lost, and was lucky to puncture because
he was able to portray himself as an unfortunate loser. Certainly, Bartali milked the situation afterwards, saying: ‘When my tyre went flat my first thought was: Italy! The most important thing was that an Italian should win in Italy. So I told Fausto to go on as fast as he could.’ Later, however, he accused the Italian cycling federation of working for a Coppi win, under pressure from the powerful Bianchi bicycle company.

As it turned out, Coppi’s physical superiority was clear from the results of the two time trial stages: in the second, from Colmar to Nancy, over 137 kilometres, Bartali was over seven minutes slower. This was, probably, the moment when the rivalry ceased to matter in sporting terms: there was no question that Coppi was the stronger. His overall victory left no room for doubt: Bartali was ten minutes and fifty-two seconds behind him, while Marinelli, in third place, was twenty-five minutes and thirteen seconds back, having lost over an hour since St Malo.

There was, however, far more to Coppi’s victory: no cyclist had ever managed the double of wins in the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in the same year, and only six others were to match the feat in the next sixty years. They are numbered among the very greatest road racers in the history of the sport: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, Stephen Roche, Marco Pantani. Coppi, Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain are at the top of cycling’s tree because all managed it twice in their careers; Merckx, the greatest of them all, did it three times. Lance Armstrong, so dominant in the Tour in the early twenty-first century, never attempted it even in his heyday.

Coppi’s friend Raphael Geminiani cannot think of any sporting achievement to compare with winning the two great stage races. ‘There is no parallel. The Giro is more than twenty days’ racing, the Tour another twenty or twenty-two. So there
are over forty days of competition when you are obliged to perform at the highest level if you want to win both. If you have an off-day you may lose everything. The double requires strength of character, an ability to perform on the key days. Only the greats of cycling have it in them.’

From a twenty-first-century perspective, this first double remains a colossal achievement, because the demands the sport made on the athlete at the end of the 1940s were far greater than today, and there were many more things that could go wrong in a three-week race, as Coppi had found out when he hit the deck at Mouen on stage five of the Tour. Races were run on roads that in places were hardly surfaced, on bikes which were unreliable, with team back-up that was primitive. To overcome these obstacles took vast strength of character, for Alfredo Binda and the whole of the Italian team as well as for Coppi.

Coppi was already a huge star in France, and the Tour win made ‘Fosto’, as they called him, almost as popular there as he was at home. Jean Bobet tells the tale of a track meeting at Rennes in the early 1950s, pitting him and his brother, the future Tour winner Louison, against the Coppi brothers. They drew a record 9,061 entries, with more than 2,000 turned away. At Paris’s Vél d’Hiv the fans would start queuing in the morning to get tickets for evening meetings with Coppi. As the Tour de France’s official historian, Jacques Augendre, says, ‘Our country quickly fell under his spell. It’s no exaggeration to say that he contributed to the reconciliation between France and Italy after the war.’ (The
Bartaliani
, naturally, would point to their man’s win in the Tour in 1948, and his reception by the French president Vincent Auriol.)

Those international triumphs helped Italy itself regain its pride after the years of defeat and exclusion. Uniquely among Italian national teams, the Tour de France squads of those years were
tricolori
not
azzurri
, wearing the national colours
of green, red and white rather than the usual light blue. This merely added to the sense that Italy’s cyclists were flying the flag. There was no denying the symbolism of Italians crossing the Alps in those colours to the applause of French crowds, and ‘conquering’ France just eight years after Mussolini’s disastrous invasion attempt.

Coppi and Bartali were reconciled as well: not long after the race, the pair visited the Ursus tyre company, a sponsor of Coppi’s, where the Tour winner received a bonus of 500,000 lire which he shared with his great rival. A week later, they went together to the cyclists’ chapel on the Madonna del Ghisallo, on a high hill overlooking Lake Como north of Milan, and presented the parish priest with a yellow jersey. Coppi donated a bike; Bartali’s was, apparently, lost in Portugal.

* * *

Among the fans who now flocked to watch Coppi wherever he went in Italy were the doctor from Varese and his dark-haired, striking, strong-minded wife. In her attitude to cycling, Giulia Locatelli bore no resemblance to the woman who, a year earlier, had been indifferent to her husband’s passion. Her obsession had outstripped that of Dr Locatelli. She was now the one who went out to get the newspapers, which she would scan for mentions of Coppi. Giulia’s passion raised eyebrows in the little village near Varese. She was pursued in the street by children shouting
Viva Bartali
.

At races, she showed the same urge to get close to the champion which had marked their first meeting. She would demand more of him than the average fan, grabbing his hand when they met. She would lie outrageously to gain access to areas restricted to the cyclists and their entourages. ‘I was the fan of the house, a maniac, more obsessed than my husband. From then on, our Sundays were filled with cycling, races,
cyclists, Coppi above all. We would go together, or I would go with friends, to anywhere where there was a race, a track meeting, an award ceremony. It didn’t matter what as long as there was a chance of meeting Coppi.’

To help me find Sandrino Carrea’s house, his wife Anna sellotaped a copy of
La Gazzetta dello Sport
to their gate, which opens onto the main road that runs through the valley below Castellania. The pink paper flapped on the ironwork, which was big, wide and attractive for a relatively small house. Its size is down to Coppi. At the time Carrea was building the house, he and his team leader often passed the site as they trained. ‘You should make that wider,’ recommended the Bianchi leader. Carrea was hardly going to ignore him: as one of the
campionissimo’s
best domestiques, he had spent his working life obeying the great man’s orders, so he duly enlarged the entrance.

After all, both the gate and the house had come to him thanks to his master. Carrea still has the item that was, in effect, the down payment on his home. It is kept in a clear plastic bag, and he takes it out to show me. It’s made of coarsely woven wool, dyed yellow, and has the initials HD in stylised lettering on one breast. It’s a yellow jersey from the 1952 Tour de France and it was Carrea’s for a single day. He pulled it on in Lausanne, having infiltrated a lucky break with Coppi’s wholehearted approval. Even so, he feared that Coppi might feel he had delusions of grandeur and send him home. ‘That would have ruined me.’

It was hot that night in Lausanne. Alfredo Martini left the window of his hotel room open and he overheard Coppi saying
to Carrea, ‘Don’t get to like that jersey too much, Sandrino, it will be mine tomorrow.’ Carrea duly relinquished the
maillot jaune
to his leader the next day, but even so he became, briefly, a celebrity. He earned a dozen track-racing contracts and a trip to Algeria to race with Raphael Geminiani. His share of the prize money from Coppi’s win in the 1952 Tour was two million lire. He doubled it by riding appearance races, criss-crossing Europe, sleeping with his bag of contract cash under his pillow, and he built the house when he came back.

Carrea is now in his eighties, but still going strong. He calls the dog to order, and potters out into the garden to pull vegetables for dinner. That evening everything on the table, it seems, is Sandrino’s own produce: wine from the grapes that grow up the hill, sausage from the pigs, his own apples and chicken, rocket salad. He still loves to go hunting in his patch of ground up the hillside behind the house. Anna wishes he would slow down, but Carrea will not stop.

It is not in his make-up, any more than he ever dreamt of shirking when he worked for Coppi. By then Carrea had survived a spell in Buchenwald and two death marches; in 1945 he was working as a mason when he was brought into cycling by Coppi’s brother Serse, who introduced him to Cavanna. The sage felt his neck and hands; the callouses convinced him that Carrea had potential and he was sent on a training ride with Coppi and his team-mates. Later, with Ettore Milano and Serse, Carrea was one of a three-man elite within the elite that was the Bianchi team.

While Serse and Milano were Fausto’s confidants off the bike, Carrea came into his own on the road: he was the strong man who would wind up the pace to stretch Coppi’s rivals before the leader put in the killer attack. ‘
Vai piano, Andreino
,’ Coppi would yell as Carrea strung the field out. ‘If you don’t slow down, you’re going home this evening.’ Carrea would drive even harder; the warning was their coded signal to him
to increase the tempo. Carrea was the epitome of the team worker who denies himself all glory to serve his leader. He later received the ‘golden water bottle’ after being voted ‘domestique of the century’.

* * *

The relationship between domestique/
gregario
and team leader has no parallel in any other sport. It calls for such self-denial on the part of the team worker that it is clear why Carrea’s lucky break appealed so much to the public. I ask Carrea why he did not want to win races for himself in spite of his obvious physical ability – he barely understands the question. The reasoning was fair enough in a time of poverty: it was better to have assured earnings by serving another than take the risk of riding for yourself. This was after all a time when merely having a bike was a step up socially, and a
gregario
could earn four times the wage of a manual worker.

Being a
gregario
gave a cyclist the chance to travel, often with expenses paid – the
campione
would pick up the tab for training camps, for example – as well as a certain status. Milano and Carrea were not just
gregari
, but Coppi’s
gregari
. Once Coppi had attained legendary status, by the early 1950s, the prospect of merely being in the same team as Coppi was ‘like touching the sky’. Alongside a star such as Coppi a cyclist could double his money; when that kind of reward was available, why take the risk of leadership?

The duties performed by the worker bees were many and various. The most important was filling and fetching water bottles.
^*1
In those days, feeding from team cars was not permitted, so the job involved stopping now and again by the road at public fountains and bars and having to regain the pack
each time. ‘We knew every water fountain in Italy,’ says Milano. Raiding bars and shops for drinks was common: the
gregari
would nonchalantly tell the counter staff ‘
paga la Gazzetta
’– the Giro sponsor
Gazzetta dello Sport
would pay. Domestiques would race laden with food:
panini
with raw steak or ham, jam sandwiches, oranges, bananas, three or four bottles. They would help Coppi regain the bunch if he punctured, although
gregari
recall that at times Coppi was physically so superior that he would lead the chase with a string of them clinging on for grim death. There were other ‘domestic’ duties: a
gregario
would be sent out in the evening to buy expensive cologne for Coppi’s massage. On occasion, a
gregario
would be sent to search Bartali’s room to see if there were any syringes to be found.