Fallen Angel (24 page)

Coppi crossed the summit alone, a tiny figure in the narrow corridor that had been cut through the fifteen-foot-high snow-drifts. Giulia Locatelli had travelled that morning from Varese, leaving her husband at home to nurse a headache. With her she took the same chaperones as before, Locatelli’s colleague
and his fiancée. As she stood in her white Montgomery duffel coat among the knots of warmly clad fans in the snow at the roadside, Coppi recognised her and asked as he passed, ‘Are you coming to the finish?’

By the end of the stage, Coppi had the Giro won: on the slippery twenty-two-kilometre descent Koblet’s ability to read the road at speed had deserted him, as happens to even the best descenders when they are forced beyond their physical limit. He fell twice and punctured once, and would not speak to Coppi after the finish, convinced that a pact had been broken. At Coppi’s hotel, Giulia Locatelli made her way through the crowds of fans and between the various body-guards on the doors; the mechanic would allow her and only her to enter the champion’s room. It was there that she allowed him ‘a winner’s kiss, very innocent, the kiss of a child’. After dinner the pair sat at Giulia’s table – fortuitously, her chaperones had gone out to buy postcards – and spoke mainly, by her account, about Coppi’s life.

At the finish of the Giro the next day in the Vigorelli velodrome, in spite of the presence of Dr Locatelli, Coppi slipped a clandestine note into her hand as the fans crowded around. ‘Our relationship began there,’ she later recalled. ‘I felt different and Fausto looked different to me. He gave me his hand. I felt something there, a piece of paper.’ The message on the card was brief: ‘Tomorrow, at four, at Tortona station.’ She was collected by Coppi’s
gregario
Giovannino Chiesa – the duties of the closest team-mates went far beyond fetching bottles of water – and she and Coppi had a brief meeting in a car parked at a motorway exit. Few words were exchanged, but it marked a turning point.

It was Coppi who initiated the final, decisive step from flirtation to adultery and scandal. In spite of financial incentives from
La Gazzetta
– which lost three weeks of massive sales – and attempts by industrialists to influence him through
his friends, he decided not to defend his Tour title. He would miss the 1953 race to concentrate on preparation for the world championship, the one major title he had not won. But he did not stay away from the Tour. ‘I’m going to see Bartali,’ he told little Marina as he left for what purported to be a training camp with his Bianchi team-mates. Giulia was on holiday near Ancona when she received the phone call. It was brief: be at Tortona station tomorrow, bring your passport. She had to find a car, fast, and she knew where to go. Having retired from racing, Coppi’s former
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Ubaldo Pugnaloni was now running a driving school in the town. Pugnaloni also rented out cars: she took one to meet Coppi. She had apparently forgotten her passport: at the Montgenèvre customs post, he had to pretend to the officers that the beautiful brunette at his side was his wife.

They spent the night in a small hotel in the French village of Clavière, where Coppi had booked a room in advance. They drove the next day up onto the great scree slopes of the Col de l’Izoard, where he had escaped alone among the Death Valley rock pillars to win a stage of the 1951 Tour, and where he and Bartali had left the field behind in the 1949 race. They stood by the roadside like any other spectators, Coppi shouting to friends in the peloton, and taking photographs. Television footage of the pair on that day shows Coppi looking relaxed, happy. Then the press photographers arrived. On returning from the Alps five days later, Mrs Locatelli saw the pictures of herself and Coppi in newspapers in Pugnaloni’s office. ‘She didn’t know what to do,’ the old
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remembers. ‘I, for my part, didn’t know that she had gone with Coppi, only that she had left her car with me. She asked me if I could do her an immense service and tell the doctor that she had gone to the Alps on a trip that was organised by me. What was I to say? Who could say no? I remember she went away with the doctor, and he thanked me for looking after his wife.
He thanked me just like that.’ More than fifty years on you sense that Pugnaloni is not at ease at having provided the alibi for the lovers’ excursion that precipitated the scandal.

* * *

The bike Coppi used to win that year’s world championship is kept by the Bianchi company at their factory in Treviglio, east of Milan. It still bears his race number, 60. His feeding bottle, covered with cloth to keep the liquid cool, is held firmly in the bottle cage. Compared to today’s fat-tubed carbon-fibre or aluminium machines, the bike looks archaic with its frame of slender, fragile steel. Even so, with its ten-speed Campagnolo gears, upright frame design and narrow tyres, it is recognisably modern compared to the bikes Coppi and company were riding just six or seven years before in the postwar years.

Cavanna had told Coppi that this would be his last chance to win the world championship. He had always been unsuccessful before: quite apart from the Valkenburg debacle in 1948, the courses were never selective enough for him to get away from the field. This year, however, the circuit included the tough, cobbled climb of the Crespera, tackled on each of the twenty laps. Given the problems he had had with the Italian team over the years, Coppi wanted
un’uomo di fiducia
– a totally reliable team-mate – and a second-year Bianchi
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, Michele Gismondi, was the man chosen by Cavanna; the young professional had just emerged from the blind mage’s ‘nursery’. Getting Gismondi into the team needed almost as much work as actually preparing for the event: he recalls travelling from Paris to Rome to ride the selection race with Coppi acting as
his
personal
gregario
: getting the sandwiches, making sure he rested in his couchette.

Making sure Gismondi rode the race was merely part of
Cavanna and Coppi’s meticulous preparation. To avoid fatigue, Coppi gave up all his criterium commitments for a month before Lugano, missing out on 53 million lire in potential earnings. He rode one race in France, the Bol d’Or des Monédières, because the circuit in the Dordogne was similar to that in Lugano. For a week before the race, Coppi and Gismondi trained together on the course, finding the easier sections where it would be possible to eat during the event. Both men put in long sessions with Cavanna’s ‘nursery’, outings that included solo efforts and that extended into the afternoon heat, when the race at Lugano would be decided.

While Bianchi was Coppi’s personal fiefdom, the same could not be said of the Italian national team, even now. Although he had at least managed to persuade Binda not to include Gino Bartali, there were those, he said, ‘who would sell their souls to the devil to see him lose’. The evening before the professional event, the Italians should have been celebrating the victory of Riccardo Filippi in the amateur race, but instead there was a dispute over who would or would not help Coppi. Petrucci said he was there to win and accused Coppi of egotism. There was conflict about whether Gismondi was there for the team, or solely for Coppi: should he wait for another rider, Rossello, if he punctured, or should he devote himself entirely to Coppi? Gismondi is adamant that he and Coppi were largely on their own in the race: ‘It should have been everyone for Coppi, and it seems that way because he won, but several guys in the team were riding for themselves.’ In the event, it made little difference: Coppi left the field behind with eighty kilometres to go, gaining 200 metres’ lead in no time, and then pulling inexorably away.

Only one man managed to hang on: the Belgian Germain Derycke, who was a better sprinter than Coppi. The Italian knew that if he did not get the Belgian off his back wheel, he might lose the title. On the final ascent of the Crespera,
Coppi tried everything: he zigzagged across the road so that the climb would be longer for the Belgian, whom he felt was on the verge of cracking. He tried to manoeuvre him in front, so that he could attack from behind, but Derycke remained glued to his wheel. ‘I saw him pass with Derycke,’ says Fiorenzo Magni, ‘and I yelled, “Make him work.” He looked at me as if to say, “Don’t worry.”’ Finally, on the toughest part of the climb, as they accelerated out of a hairpin bend, he sprinted. That was the end of Derycke. In the ten kilometres that were left to the finish line, he lost a colossal six minutes. There was one pleasing irony as Coppi rode to victory: a Chianti company that was producing Bartali wine had bought many of the publicity hoardings around the circuit, so as Coppi stamped his authority on the race he did so with his rival’s name as a backdrop.

Coppi did manage to raise one arm in celebration when he crossed the line – he never used the double-handed salute – but he had terrible cramp in his legs. When he told Cavanna, the answer was predictably terse: ‘With what you’ve taken do you expect to feel as if you’ve been on mineral water?’ He had been put on a course of strychnine a week before the race, and on the day he was given pure caffeine. That was not the only stimulus, says Gismondi: ‘There were other things that spurred Coppi to win – the lady with the flowers.’

The Bianchi boss Aldo Zambrini had taken Giulia Locatelli to the finish line so that his man could see her as he rode. The cycling rumour mill had been grinding since photographs of the pair had been published after the Tour de France; Coppi, it was said, had missed the Tour so that he could be with his mistress. But there had followed a hiatus in the affair. Coppi had declared himself to Giulia; they were now lovers. He had told her, in their little hotel – she said – that they would spend the rest of their lives together. Giulia had returned home to find Dr Locatelli in bed with an ice bag and his
suspicions, and the atmosphere in the little house in Varano Borghi was chilly.

The day before the race, a newsreel had shown Marina reading out a letter in which she asked her father to bring her home the rainbow jersey. However, it was Giulia with whom Coppi shared the glory on the podium, although not every newspaper that acquired the pictures of the two lovers knew who she was. One Swiss paper captioned the image ‘Fausto Coppi and his wife Bruna’. On the front cover of
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, she is visible on the periphery. Coppi, tellingly, dedicated his victory to his mother and Marina. Not his wife.

While it is Giulia’s presence in Lugano that has captured headlines since, Bruna was also at the race, and she apparently encountered Giulia in the Italian team hotel afterwards. To avoid a confrontation, Coppi did not go to the post-race dinner: he, Bruna, Cavanna and Gismondi drove straight home. ‘Bruna felt that something was going to happen, there was a dinner afterwards but she couldn’t wait to get out,’ Gismondi told me. Instead, they had a sandwich in Varese, where Cavanna joked that Coppi had better get him some sparkling wine because they had done nothing to celebrate the fact that his protégés had won both the amateur and professional titles.

The drive home was triumphant: the Italian fans queuing at the border in clouds of smoke from the burned out clutches of their cars cheered their world champion as he passed. So many
tifosi
had crossed into Switzerland to watch Coppi that customs checks on the border were suspended so that they could get home; when they did so they were laden with chocolate and cigarettes on which duty had not been paid. When
La Gazzetta dello Sport’s
Rino Negri arrived at his home in Milan on the Monday, his paper’s presses were still running as a total of 630,000 copies were sold across Italy, double what would normally be considered a big sale.

The following weeks were packed with track appearances and circuit races. In early October, Coppi teamed up with the amateur world champion Filippi to take another stunning win, at record speed, in the Baracchi Trophy two-man team time trial. On his bike, Coppi seemed unstoppable but what was happening in his private life also had a momentum of its own. Giulia remained with her husband, and Coppi stayed with Bruna, but another daring step towards the inevitable was taken at the end of the year. Coppi took Giulia to visit his mother in Castellania. Given the place of
la mamma
in all Italian men’s hearts, gaining Angiolina’s approval was like a marriage blessing, while exposing his peasant roots showed how far Coppi was placing his trust in his beautiful and very middle-class mistress.

‘
Vélo
is an anagram of love’ – Louis Nucera,
Mes Rayons de Soleil

Just outside the town of Novi Ligure where farmers’ fields are squeezed uneasily by a sprawl of factories and industrial estates stands a tall, elegant villa set among high cypress trees, a little way back from the main road. The handwritten label by the bell on the gate reads simply: Coppi.

The house has barely changed since Coppi and his lover Giulia Locatelli moved there in 1954. It is still the home of their son, also named Angelo-Fausto, usually known as Faustino, and his family, which includes a little Giulia. But everywhere the past can be felt. I park my car under a line of fir trees at the top of the drive: a little later in the house Faustino shows me photographs of his father, his face prematurely lined by age and stress, lying on a camp bed under those same trees with his leg in plaster, examining a hunting rifle in one picture, eating a bowl of pasta in another.

When I call Faustino to arrange the visit, I learn that the telephone number has not changed since the days of his father. The interior of the house is ornate, with chandeliers, elaborate plasterwork, fine wallpaper, decorative furniture, vertiginous ceilings: it is a massive step up from anything Castellania can offer, and from Casa Coppi, where Fausto’s mother Angiolina used to keep her kindling in the fridge he had bought her.

The photographs leave no doubt as to the identity of the previous owner. There is a series of pictures of Coppi sitting
on a sofa drinking wine with a journalist, others of Faustino driving a pedal car. Another shows Fausto putting Faustino on a bike, not long, surely, before the
campionissimo’s
death. There is a series of pictures taken while Fausto and Giulia were on holiday on Elba, endearingly amateurish and unposed. One shows Giulia to the left, with the sea taking up the rest of the frame. She looks tired, her body a little floppy: you can envisage her scolding Fausto for not making it more flattering. Her picture of her lover shows him bending sideways, displaying all the thinness of his body, his clearly defined leg muscles. As Faustino Coppi admits, the house is home to ‘a cult of the dead’. By any measure, his can hardly have been a normal childhood, among the photographs of his illustrious father and the trophies brought back from races around Europe, all retained by his grieving mother.