Fallen Angel (18 page)

The one thing that mattered was conserving the strength of the
campione
. That started with room allocation:
gregari
would take the top floor rooms if the hotel had no lift. Pushing the leader early in a race was routine stuff. Jean Bobet recalls being taken to the back of the bunch by Hugo Koblet in the Giro di Lombardia: Koblet wanted to show him something. ‘Fausto was freewheeling, with Milano on his left, Carrea on his right, pushing him.’ Sometimes the
gregari
would organise themselves on a climb – one every ten metres, like a human chain – to push the leader from one to the next. It was against the rules, but they made sure the
commissaires
(race referees) couldn’t see. They would push him if he was ill during a stage, or if he needed the toilet, because if he pulled off into the hedge his rivals might attack. Four
gregari
might have to help when the
campione
answered nature’s call: two to push, one to find news-paper, a fourth to collect water for washing if necessary.

Under Coppi, the relationship between
gregario
and
campione
developed to its most sophisticated form. One team rider had to be present in every escape to give the squad control of the race. ‘Coppi started from the principle that having riders behind is useless so he needed riders in front,’
says Fiorenzo Magni. ‘That way, when he attacked, he had support ahead of him; one or two riders who could pull a bit, help for fifty kilometres perhaps, then he would leave them.’ They would also give moral support or offer up a wheel if he punctured or had mechanical trouble. These are the fundamental tenets of cycle racing as a team. Others had raced this way but Coppi adopted the idea more wholeheartedly and systematically than had been the case in the past.

Each worker had his allotted job: Michele Gismondi had to stay in the front until midday, chasing down targeted riders – men who were known to attack in the first half of a race – then simply get to the finish as best he could. Luigi Casola was the ‘banker’, who would do the rounds in the bunch at the start of the event and buy off other riders to race against Bartali. Milano was delegated to assist Coppi on the flat, along with Serse; Carrea would make the tempo in the hills. Their job was simple: to soften up the opposition physically and mentally before Coppi attacked. The theory, Milano told me, was that Coppi was better suited to racing in the highest mountains, over 2,000 metres, than his opponents, even Bartali, and he could simply ride away. ‘The opposition would be half dead already and he could go away so powerfully. It was down to him to decide when, but it was not a matter of deciding, he could feel the moment.’

Reading Marco Pastonesi’s
Gli Angeli di Coppi
, an anthology of tales from his
gregari
, it is not so much the many tales of self-sacrifice that hit home as the degree of deference among the domestiques. Many of the men Pastonesi interviewed seem extraordinarily anxious about whether or not they are meant to use the formal or the informal ‘you’ when talking to Coppi. They seem overwhelmed when they are permitted to use
tu
.

However unassuming Coppi might seem when off his bike, whatever crises of confidence he might have when on it, there could be no stepping out of line: the
campione
could make
or break a team-mate. Hence Carrea’s distress at winning the yellow jersey. Coppi – like the other
campioni
– had the connections to pull strings to get a masseur off his military service, or to prevent a rider who had made him look foolish from getting track racing contracts. More obviously, the income of the
gregari
was linked directly to the winnings of the
campione
: Coppi had his own retainer from Bianchi, but his winnings and the team’s start money were shared communally between the squad, including the back-up staff.

As a ‘head’ of the peloton, with friends and influence throughout the sport, Coppi’s power extended beyond his own team: if a
gregario
in another squad was asked to close a gap, for example, he usually did it. If lesser men wanted to escape or go for an intermediate prize, they would ask permission and explain to Coppi, Bartali and the other ‘heads’ what they were up to. Sometimes, the
campione
might feel like doling out a favour and his
gregari
would work on another’s behalf. Ubaldo Pugnaloni recalled that one occasion, in the 1949 Giro, when he was riding for another team, he asked Coppi for permission to go for a sprint in his home town of Ancona. He was astonished to see the entire Bianchi squad leading him out.

The hierarchy of
gregari
and
campioni
was rigidly structured, which meant that Bianchi was no place for a rider of ambition. Pugnaloni recalls losing a Giro dell’Emilia because the team car was following Coppi and he could not receive assistance at a key moment. On another occasion, he was racing in Milan–San Remo and Coppi stopped because he had conjunctivitis and the mud thrown up from the road was inflaming his eyes. The entire Bianchi team were told to stop as well, including Pugnaloni, who was in contention for a place in the first half-dozen. ‘I want to go on’, he said. ‘You can go to San Remo’, he was told, ‘but your suitcase will be in Milan’. The van carrying the luggage was turning around as well. He is damning: ‘more than a
gregario
, you were a lackey’.

Coppi’s rigid grip on Bianchi, his insecurity, his superstition, gave rise to the notion that champions are set apart, that they should be spoiled, their every whim indulged. This would have suited those who managed the great man: while Tragella needed his team to have a rigid structure with devoted
gregari
, Biagio Cavanna knew the value of mystique, apartness. That was the way the
soigneurs
worked. The impression had to be given that the
campione
and his intimates were out of the ordinary. Raphael Geminiani is explicit: ‘When Coppi arrived at the hotel it was as if an alarm had sounded: he had to have his room ready, there had to be silence, all the curtains had to be drawn because he believed he recovered better in the dark. We had to whisper, not talk, which was also for Cavanna because he could feel the muscles better if there was no noise to distract him. Coppi would come to the dinner table for twenty minutes’ (here Gem’ makes noises,
toc, toc, toc
, to simulate rapid, mechanical eating) ‘then up and off to his room to lie down’.

Sometimes the demands went beyond professionalism, beyond control freakery, into the realms of pure caprice. After stage finishes in the Giro and Tour, Ettore Milano recalls a ‘crazy’ search for white wine vinegar, because Coppi did not want red wine vinegar in the salt, vinegar and water mix used to massage him. On hot days, Coppi might ask for a bottle of cold water, but it had to be in a thermos wrapped in cotton tied with a ribbon to keep the hot air out, and flavoured with mint cordial.

Coppi created an impression on others as well as his
gregari
. Jacques Goddet felt that he was the man who transformed cycling champions from peasants into men of the world. For Goddet, the cosmopolitan, multilingual Coppi – ‘fluent in French, working on his English’ – was a pioneer, who ‘created the prototype of a champion who was a gentleman and a businessman. He was capable of showing up at an embassy or a
salon, and was at his ease on a stage or in front of the terrible inquisition of the press machine. He was capable as well of talking through a contract and throwing himself into businesses that were very different from his experience on the road.’ By the end of his career, Coppi was negotiating his sponsorship deals and building his own bikes. The peasant boy who had walked in order to save half a lira on his bus fare went a long way in the space of fifteen years.

* * *

Coppi hit his sporting peak between the end of 1948 and spring 1950, a period in which he was rarely beaten in any major race. The double of Giro and Tour was the highlight, but there were also two crushing Classic wins outside Italy in the spring of 1950 – the Flèche Wallonne and Paris–Roubaix – a brace of wins in the Giro di Lombardia, a Milan–San Remo, and back-to-back victories in the world track pursuit title. Physically, Coppi was the strongest in the world, as his performance in defeat at the 1949 world road race championship in Copenhagen showed. There were no hills where he could escape alone, as was his habit. So he simply rode as fast as he could, for as long as he could. By the finish only two men were able to hold his wheel, one of whom, the one-day specialist Rik Van Steenbergen, won the sprint.

The result was a bronze medal, but there was consolation in taking the pursuit title on the Ordrupp velodrome, and there were other victories, such as a seventy-five-mile lone escape to win the Giro del Veneto, a result which clinched the Italian road race championship (awarded over a series of races during the season). The year ended with a fourth win in the Giro di Lombardia, at record speed after a lone escape from the Madonna del Ghisallo; the season had included fourteen major wins. Coppi’s status as the dominant force in world
cycling was confirmed when he received the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo, the newly introduced year-long award which rewarded the most consistent competitor in major international races. The trophy had been in the bag by the end of July.

Coppi’s dominance over this eighteen-month period did not happen by chance. He himself was relatively modest when he listed what it took to win. ‘It looks simple, and it is. There is nothing mysterious about living a healthy life, training methodically, watching your health and having a masseur available who knows well what to do and who can make all the fatigue disappear after every training session.’ What is striking, however, is the approach Coppi took in achieving all of this.

‘Coppi invented cycling,’ Raphael Geminiani told me. ‘The war caused cycling to revert to a primitive state: the roads were bad, the bikes were heavy, equipment was poor and not properly maintained, back-up was lousy, nutrition old-fashioned. Coppi was the first to modernise cycling, with the help of the Italian manufacturers: Bianchi bikes were beautiful, marvellous things, but there were also the jerseys, socks, gloves, sunglasses.’ ‘For a rather haphazard and very rough and ready form of cycling, Coppi substituted in fifteen years another sport conceived on an industrial scale,’ wrote Pierre Chany.

Since the war, Coppi and the Bianchi team had perfected the way a squad raced, with the help of the selfless
gregari
and the bike company’s financial power. This was to be a blueprint for future greats. The Bianchi way was emulated by Louison Bobet and Jacques Anquetil – winners of eight Tours between them between 1953 and 1964 – and also by the Red Guard of Rik Van Looy, who dominated one-day racing in the late 1950s and 1960s. The same team principles were applied by Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Lance Armstrong, to name but the best. This was, however, just one area in which Coppi was laying down the foundations on
which professional cyclists and their teams would build an entire sport.

This was a period when cyclists had to evolve their own ways of doing things. ‘You had to work things out, listen, to compensate for the fact that no one told you anything,’ says Martini, tapping his head. Coppi was a rapid learner, a man who left absolutely nothing to chance. He explored any area which might lead to any improvement, always looking to broaden his experience, with a desire to know things ‘
fino in fondo
’ (Martini) – from beginning to end – and an unwillingness to accept received ideas. His approach went far beyond merely riding his bike.

Other cyclists – the Pelissier brothers, Alfredo Binda, Antonin Magne, Georges Speicher – had investigated diet, but Coppi was the first to apply himself rigidly to diet as a way of improving his performance. Contemporary descriptions of what he ate would not look unfamiliar to any top athlete today, including yoghurt, grilled meat, fresh fruit, salad in abundance, herbal teas, soups. He experimented with the vegetarian diets of the American Gayelord Hauser, Greta Garbo’s lover, the idol of American bodybuilders in the 1930s and 1940s, and author of the 1936 bestseller
Eat and Grow Beautiful
. The notion of an Italian peasant’s son, whose education ended early, looking to Hollywood for inspiration truly reflects an open mind, a desire to try anything.

He cut down on meat, and experimented with molasses, yeast, honey and wheatgerm, alongside detoxing – one of Hauser’s diets was a seven-day detox using vegetable soup. This was a complete contrast to the methods that had gone before, such as the ‘
Binda zabaione
’ – twenty egg yolks shaken in a bottle. Such experimentation would have been radical in normal times, but this was the late 1940s, when Italy was still experiencing post-war food shortages and wheatgerm was not the easiest item to buy at the local grocer’s.

With its emphasis on lightly cooked food and more raw vegetables than in the past, the Coppi diet became influential outside Italy. For example, it features in a British cycling training book of the 1950s,
Scientific Training for Cycling
, by Dr C. R. Woodard. Coppi also changed the way cyclists ate during a race. ‘Before, everyone said that the more a rider ate, the better he would go,’ Raphael Geminiani told me. The conventional wisdom was that riders should take the start with a large rare steak in their stomachs, begin eating 100 kilometres into a race, and then eat heavily. Instead, Coppi began using carbohydrate. ‘Coppi demonstrated that with a light stomach at the start you would go better. He would eat little and often – a bit of rice cake, some brioche and jam.’ Thus, Coppi might sometimes start a race having had only a cup of tea and two bits of toast for breakfast, and would begin eating fifty kilometres from the start. Cycling was not entirely receptive to these new ways. Carrea once tried a mouthful of the mix of fruit pulp, grains and orange juice in his master’s bottle: he spat it out because he felt it was ‘
una schifezza
’ – filthy muck. Cavanna felt threatened, naturally, and his immediate reaction to his protégé’s interest in Hauser and his methods was that Coppi should give it all up and eat only pure, genuine fillet of veal.