Fallen Angel (34 page)

* * *

‘
Il Mito Coppi
’, Coppi the myth, reads the graffiti on the wall below the cemetery in Castellania. But
il campionissimo
is a ubiquitous presence far beyond his birthplace. In 1987, on my first visit to an Italian bike shop, a single room full of dusty chainrings and fading tubular tyres in the Venice suburb of Mestre, run by a little old man in his seventies – presumably a contemporary – there Coppi was in a torn black and white photo pinned on the wall. Look hard enough in any Italian bike shop, and a similar image will be there somewhere. The same goes for the faded writing on the roadsides.

Coppi has become an inspiration, to novelists, artists, fashion designers. The British designer Paul Smith has a picture of Coppi on his desk, and is a fan of the
campionissimo
. Speaking of his first experiences of cycling in the 1950s,
he told me: ‘The aesthetics of the whole sport were very appealing … there were the clothes. Who could resist the modernity of white kid gloves with knitted backs, special shorts or black shoes that laced to the toe with big holes drilled in the leather to keep your feet cool?’ The image is that of Coppi, whose kit has inspired a retro revival in recent years with the British clothing company Rapha to the fore.

As with all style icons, it is only partly because of what Coppi wears in the photographs – the perfectly cut suits, the Bianchi winter training tops with huge lettering on the chest, the turned-up wool collars, the simple designs of the jerseys with only one or two sponsors’ names, only on the chest and back, the elegant tropical shorts. It is also the fact that he is rarely seen without sunglasses (in fact due to his fears of conjunctivitis) which in turn adds to his detachment from the world. As a model should be, he is tall and has no jarring features that distract from the clothes (Bartali has that broken nose, Magni is bald with a leathery face). There is his distant, ambiguous Mona Lisa smile, the perfect white parting in the black Brylcreemed hair.

Coppi’s iconic status is a product of his time: before a multiplicity of sponsors made cycling jerseys a mish-mash of logos; when a cyclist’s value was dictated not by how often his jersey appeared on the television screen, but how he looked and performed for the crowds at a track meeting or a circuit race. The mythology is not merely visual; before blanket television coverage of races, the mystery of what actually happened on the road enabled writers such as Orio Vergani and Dino Buzzati to give full vent to their imaginations. Vergani defined Coppi as a heron, awkward on the ground, graceful in flight. He coined a phrase now synonymous with his death, ‘the great heron closing his wings’.

No cyclist has inspired so many writers. Gianni Brera’s
Coppi and the Devil
is a fictionalised version of Coppi’s life, intermingled with Brera’s accounts of how he met Coppi later
in life. It is never made clear what the devil is: fate? Cavanna? The act of bike racing? Or a malignant force that presents temptation in the form of Giulia? Brera also makes the parallel between Dr Enrico Locatelli and Gustave Flaubert’s cuckolded country doctor, Charles Bovary, in the classic French love triangle.

Coppi’s Angel
, recently translated into English by Michael McDermott, is a short story by Ugo Riccarelli, in essence a description of Coppi’s realisation that he is past his best, with forewarnings of his death, prompted by his meetings on a hill (symbolically named
il Padre
, the Priest) with a mysterious blond youth who could be guardian angel or nemesis. Mauro Gorrino’s
Serse and the Beast
is similar – it traces a fictional breakaway made by Coppi’s brother in Milan–Turin. The ‘beast’ may be the peloton unleashed in pursuit, or the Grim Reaper, waiting for Serse at the end of the race. For some, Coppi simply riding his bike was an artistic act in itself. ‘From this fastidious act, which consists of turning the pedals at a regular rhythm, he manages to create an artistic spectacle,’ wrote the Frenchman Louis Nucera in
Mes Rayons de Soleil
.

As Nucera says, Coppi has been ‘deified’. There are places of pilgrimage, including memorials on some of the greatest Alpine climbs used by the Giro and the Tour: the Stelvio, the Col de l’Izoard, and the Sella Pass, between Val Gardena and Canazei. More obscurely, there are stones commemorating Coppi on the Bocchetta Pass between Genoa and the town of Gavi, a key point in the Giro dell’Appennino, and on the Agerola climb (between Castellamare and Amalfi), as well as outside the chapel of the Madonna del Ghisallo. In Turin, not far from the Autovelodromo, an elaborate memorial incorporates stones from cycling’s most celebrated roads: the cobbles of Paris–Roubaix and the Crespera climb from the 1953 world championship circuit at Lugano as well as the great climbs of the Alps and Pyrenees.

There are also religious overtones in the fans’ and writers’ devotion. At his greatest triumphs, the Lugano world championship and the Cuneo–Pinerolo stage win in the 1949 Giro, there are reports of
tifosi
crossing themselves as he passed, while at Lugano they were kissing the tarmac, kissing pictures of the
campionissimo
torn from newspapers. The writers depicted him as they might an Italian saint. For Gian-Paolo Ormezzano, he was a champion ‘with a cross on his back’. For Pierre Chany his eyes were ‘fixed, staring out of their sockets as Piero della Francesca liked to paint them’. To Roger Bastide, Coppi was ‘like a church window, all length and thin-ness; the lines on his face, drawn by suffering and effort, were like those of an ecstatic monk. When he was suffering one thought of the road of the cross.’ And to his
gregari
, of course, he was God. As the obscure Valerio Bonini said: ‘[Being near Coppi] was like being next to Jesus Christ. I don’t want to speak ill of Jesus Christ but Fausto was a bit like him: a being outside the norm, a saint in flesh and blood.’

* * *

The White Lady and Bruna are long dead, but the
polemica
about Coppi’s relationships never seems to stop. In 1995, nine million viewers watched the two-part television biopic
Il Grande Fausto
starring Ornella Muti as a pouting, sensual Giulia. It was as controversial as could have been expected – Faustino Coppi attacked the film as poorly researched and inaccurate. Bartali was ‘furious’.

The Coppi myth has a momentum of its own. The man still makes headlines, with new twists to his story uncovered every year, usually on the anniversary of his death. There have been and still are lesser murmurings over the champion’s spiritual inheritance: the mausoleum, the establishment of the
Casa Coppi museum and documentation centre, the cycle path built in his memory from Tortona to the village, which is better engineered than the road used by the residents.

Most bizarre was the ‘revelation’, in January 2002, that Coppi had not died of malaria but had been poisoned by a witchdoctor during his racing trip in Upper Volta. The tale, which made the front page of
Corriere dello Sport
, hung on the evidence of an Italian Olympic Committee member, Mino Caudullo. He claimed to have been told by a Benedictine monk that, in the confessional, the latter had been informed that Coppi had been poisoned. ‘The monk explained to me that the potion was well known in Burkina Faso because it is derived from a local herb. It acts slowly and the fevers it induces can lead to death.’ This being Italy, a judicial inquiry was organised, amid speculation that the body of the
campionissimo
might be exhumed. Almost a year later, inevitably, the magistrates’ office in Tortona decided that Coppi had died of malaria after all.

The best example of the mythologising is the never-ending debate about the ‘bottle picture’ from the 1952 Tour de France, in which a bottle of mineral water is being passed between Coppi and Bartali on the Col du Galibier. The moment itself is not important. This is a relatively common act. Cyclists continually pass bottles to and from each other as they ride up mountains. The bottle picture does not show a moment that defines an event, for example when a race is lost and won. In the context of the relationship between Bartali and Coppi, or of the victory in the 1952 Tour, the moment when the old man gave his young rival his wheel on the stage to Monaco the following day was more important. On that day Coppi could have lost the Tour, but Bartali was there and helped him out. But it is the bottle picture that has inspired the debate, the articles, the television programmes.

It is not even as if this is the only ‘bottle picture’: there is another from 1952, an earlier one from 1949. What matters is not the incident, but what the photograph of it has come to represent, the way its continual exploration and exposition has turned a banal moment into something legendary. As Daniele Marchesini wrote in his chapter about the photograph in
Coppi e Bartali
: ‘It has become the defining moment of an unrepeatable season, the greatest cycling has ever known.’ As Marchesini tells it, the debate began a few days after the photograph was taken when the magazine
Sport Illustrato
published it, and the readers began writing in to ask who was passing the bottle to whom. The key element in the picture, says Marchesini, is that it shows Coppi and Bartali, the great rivals, joined together by the bottle.

That has a deeper message: the photograph shows Italy united, in the cooperative act of sharing the bottle. That idea was important for a nation which had just been ripped apart by the war, and which was still uncertain about its physical boundaries. The picture shows Italians cooperating in spite of their apparent difference; in this Tour de France one of the deepest and longest rivalries cycling has ever seen was put aside in favour of shared national interest. It also shows Italy successful on the international stage, because the alliance ensured that Coppi and his Italians dominated that 1952 Tour de France.

The image also encapsulates an era. The Coppi and Bartali years have a particular significance in the collective Italian psyche, one that goes beyond the merely sporting and is similar to the 1966 World Cup, Stanley Matthews or the Bannister mile for the English. The nostalgia is heartfelt, but there is a paradox: the late 1940s and early 1950s were not easy years in Italy. The nostalgia is for the aspiration and inspiration the men represented, not for their time. Cycling in the post-war years, at its popular zenith, boils down to two men: Gino and
Fausto, the rivalry by which all others are judged. Whenever the Italian sports media whips up disagreement between two sports stars, their every pronouncement studied and hyped, it is done in the shadow of Bartali and Coppi.

On the hilltop, the old men gather in the clear winter air. They have come in their dozens, muffled up against the January cold in green Loden coats, dark puffa jackets and hats of every shape, size and colour, from trilbies to flat caps via black berets. Echoing the scenes at Coppi’s funeral nearly forty-seven years before, their Fiats are lined up for half a mile, with two wheels in the verges among the sapless vineyards and the stunted oak trees. They gather, as they have done every 2 January for forty-seven years, since Coppi’s death. Most are regulars at this annual Mass in memory of the great cyclist and his brother Serse. They must have aged together, getting a little older and stiffer at the joints at each annual meeting in the little square.

In fact, to call the space where the old men are gathering a square is an exaggeration: it is a car park. On one side is a small and apparently disused weighbridge; on the other stands the ugly brick chapel, a large wooden cross and the marble memorial where Fausto and Serse now repose. Their bodies were moved here ten years after Fausto’s funeral, when the number of
tifosi
making the pilgrimage became too much for the little cemetery.

The gathering is solemn but not morbid, a reunion rather than a wake. The souvenir stand selling Coppi calendars, books, photographs and desk diaries is hidden tastefully behind the weighbridge hut. Coppi’s former
gregari
, the men who built his victories by serving him body and soul on their bikes, line up for what resembles a team photograph, joshing and
jostling a little as they do so. They pose for photographs and sign autographs; once in Coppi’s shadow, now they can bask in reflected glory – ironically given that their
raison d’être
was to deny themselves any chance of glory and that they felt guilty if they so much as thought of victory.

‘We are like the
Garibaldini
,’ one told me, referring to the small army that began Italian unification in the nineteenth century. ‘Whatever else we have done, we are known because we raced with Coppi. It doesn’t matter that I won forty races including an Italian championship. I am known as Coppi’s team-mate.’ Like the
Garibaldini
; Coppi and his
gregari
stand for Italy at a certain stage in her history. They are the men of the reconstruction that finally united this diverse country after the Second World War.

Inside the little brick chapel next to the memorial and the souvenir stand it is standing room only, shoulder to shoulder, on this January day as 10.30 approaches. It is not the most formal of ceremonies. The doors remain open throughout; close family members turn up late; mobile phones keep trilling. This is Italy in the twenty-first century after all. The buzz outside is a constant background to the chanted responses and prayers.

It is hard to separate Roman Catholicism from cycling. The priest draws his own parallels: Christ as team leader, John the Baptist as the
gregario
. The denial of worldly temptation on the road to a Tour de France win compared with Christ’s refusal to turn the stones into bread; Coppi’s generosity to fellow competitors as a metaphor for his preparation for eternal life.
La Gazzetta dello Sport
is quoted as readily as the Bible. Behind the chapel, to the right of the monument to Fausto and Serse, stands the trophy room, its walls hung with glass cases containing jerseys donated by the men who have ridden in Coppi’s shadow in the last half-century. Not one of the Italian champions of the past half-century is missing.

The inscriptions on the glass cases tell their own story about how Coppi is venerated. The ritual of dedicating a jersey to
il campionissimo
is described in terms that also refer to religious fervour: ‘
reverente pellegrinaggio
’ – a reverent pilgrimage. Almost every cycling champion has made the same journey up to the shrine that the old men and I have made this January morning, leaving something of themselves behind in the same spirit the fans show when they leave drinks bottles, caps, inscribed stones, at the various memorials. The fallen of
il Grande Torino
, who perished when their aeroplane crashed into a hillside near the Superga basilica in 1949, have inspired a similar kind of ‘civic religion’. Again there is a museum, again there is an annual Mass, again the fans gather on the anniversary. But
il Grande Torino
was an entire team, who died together in a single instant of appalling tragedy while at the height of their powers; Coppi was just one cyclist, the best in the world in his heyday, but a shadow of his former self by the time of his death. No other cyclist’s passing is marked in this way; in the wider world of sport, few stars receive such honour.