Fallen Angel (7 page)

Coppi rode twenty pursuits during 1940, 1941 and 1942; both invitation events and the Italian championships in each year. He remained unbeaten in the discipline, a feat which is rarely remarked upon, mainly because events elsewhere made sport largely irrelevant. The war had yet to reach its crisis in Italy but, elsewhere, France had fallen, Dunkirk had been evacuated and Britain had been defended by ‘the Few'. Russia was close to collapse; the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height and Italians were fighting in North Africa. In Italy, however, cycle racing continued up to the moment that the government took the side of the Allies in 1943, and Italy was not unique: occupied France, for example, also had a
racing calendar right through the war. Apart from bombing raids, the conflict had not yet been unleashed on Italian soil. The campaigns were all abroad, and although they were not going well it was still possible for life to continue in a relatively normal way.

Coppi's cycling career was gaining momentum within the confines imposed by the war, but it stuttered at the end of 1941, with the first in the sequence of premature deaths that would eventually lead to talk of a ‘curse of the Coppis'. As soon as the telegram was handed to him in his barracks, Coppi must have felt something was wrong: his family only communicated deaths and births in this way. His father, Domenico, had died on 29 December, from the after-effects of an accident in which he had been crushed while yoking a pair of oxen. He was not yet fifty. His final act had been to ask that his window be opened, so that he could see the land where he had toiled twelve hours a day for so many years.

‘I loved my father, because he more than anyone else had convinced my mother to let me race. For weeks, destroyed by the event, I could do nothing. I was completely lost,' recalled Coppi. ‘It took all the authority of my brother Serse and the affectionate remonstrations of my comrades and officers to make me train again.' This was not the first time, or the last, that Coppi would be on the point of giving up cycling when adversity raised its head.

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Today the Vigorelli velodrome is a cycle racing track in name only. The imposing art deco towers still flank the ceremonial entrance, not far from the Milan exhibition centre and the San Siro stadium, but it has not hosted a serious competition for over twenty years. The boards on the fearsomely steep bankings are so splintered and cracked that no tyres will roll
here again until major restoration has been carried out. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of that happening.

When I visited, it had been turned temporarily into the Fiat snowpark.
Bambini
in bright ski jackets on their Christmas holidays were bouncing at high speed on plastic seats over the moguls of a giant ice rollercoaster. The shrieks of delight and pumping music were a tantalising hint of better days, in spite of the chained-up entrance, the shadowy, deserted tunnels, the dusty ranks of seats. It was hard to envisage what went on in the terraces: 20,000 people moving as one when the sprinters attacked, and the most aggressive fans attempting to force the barriers to get at a rider who had just pulled a dirty move. The great track's decline mirrors the increasing marginalisation of the sport itself.

The future of the Vigorelli has been in jeopardy since the roof collapsed under the weight of a snowfall in winter 1985. But until track cycling faded away and ceased to be a major spectator sport in the 1970s, this was one of Europe's legendary venues, together with the Vélodrome d'Hiver in Paris, the Oerlikon in Zurich and the Sportpaleis in Antwerp. For European followers of sport, not just cycling fans, it had the lustre of Barcelona's Nou Camp or Manchester United's Old Trafford. This was once the fastest track in the world. The high canopies – designed by the German architect Frans Schurmann under commission from Mussolini – provided shelter from the wind, and its maple-wood planking was famously smooth. From the Second World War until the end of the 1960s, the Vigorelli was the chosen venue for record attempts, and it was here that Coppi's career took its second great leap forward with an attack on the world hour record.

The hour is often called cycling's Blue Riband. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: a man, on a bike, looking to go further in sixty minutes than his predecessor. Unlike the myriad complexities of road racing, there are no might-have-beens.
The cyclist is either quick enough, or he isn't. In terms of concentrated effort it is cycling's hardest event: the rider is alone on the track, with nowhere to hide, and there is absolutely no respite.

It had taken Coppi most of 1942 to recover from his father's death, and the idea of entering came to him and Cavanna while he was in the process of winning that year's Italian national pursuit title. They had ample time for reflection; this was a uniquely drawn-out affair. Coppi had crashed heavily while warming up on the Vigorelli between winning the semi-final and contesting the final, where he was up against one Cino Cinelli, who later went on to fame as a handlebar maker. He broke his collarbone, and Cinelli should then, according to the rules, have been awarded the title in a rideover. Cinelli showed sportsmanship that was truly Corinthian; or, more probably, he was aware that he had more to gain from a noble defeat than from a lucky win. He agreed to postpone the final from the end of June to the start of October, although he must have known that he stood no chance of victory.

While Coppi was recovering, he was persuaded to tackle the hour. It has been suggested that it was in part a forlorn attempt to postpone his departure for the war, as more and more troops were sent to prop up the disastrous front in North Africa, but there were other reasons as well. Winning in Italy was all very well, but the war meant there was no chance to compete on the international stage. ‘Only a great exploit would allow me to lift myself above the rest, to dominate the ranks of international roadmen,' explained Coppi. A record attempt was all that was possible: this was the only form of competition that was internationally recognised, but which did not require cyclists from more than one nation to be present. The record would be a victory well above the status of anything he could achieve in Italy, and that might just tip the balance with the authorities when it came to
sending him to fight. Moreover, the hour was a feat Bartali had never attempted.

The record was held by the Frenchman Maurice Archambaud, with a distance of 45.840 kilometres. Coppi could ride quickly enough in a five-kilometre pursuit: he averaged around 48kph, once as high as 50.3kph, so on paper riding at just over 45kph for sixty minutes was not impossible. Even so, in hindsight, it was a crazy enterprise as Coppi was not yet in his best form, having been two months without cycling after his broken collar-bone. It was the conditions imposed by the war, however, that made the attempt truly bizarre. Petrol rationing meant that it was impossible to carry out motor-paced training, the usual way of gaining the ability to ride at a sustained, set speed necessary for the hour. The Vigorelli itself was being used by the army as a clearing station, so it could not be used for training, and special permission had to be given for it to be opened for the attempt. To practise, Coppi located a straightish, flattish bit of road, the same stretch between Novi and Tortona where he had met Bruna.

When he set off at just after 2 p.m. on 7 November, the crowd was sparse apart from a few workers from the nearby Alfa Romeo factory, but that was hardly surprising. The news from abroad was bad and the war had begun to strike the Italians at home. Almost a quarter of a million Italians were by now in prison camps abroad. The Milanesi had been living under blackout since British Bomber Command had begun raiding on 24 October. The previous evening, Genoa had been devastated. The Vigorelli's roof had already been damaged in bombing raids. Fortunately the day was foggy, reducing the chance of a visit from Bomber Harris's aircraft; the record attempt had been specifically timed for the early afternoon, because the Allies tended to bomb at lunch-time and during factory hours to disrupt production. The post-prandial siesta was usually quieter. Even so, the tunnels under the track's
grandstands were kept clear, so they could be used as air-raid shelters if necessary.

Notwithstanding a dose of camphorated oil filched from a military hospital, Coppi was never quite on the pace. He started too fast, by half-distance he was behind Archambaud, and then came the hardest part. The final thirty minutes of an hour record attempt are unforgiving, as the strain of sitting on the bike in a fixed position tells. There are no changes of gradient or wind to give a little relief, no chance to freewheel for the odd corner, as in a road time trial. Coppi clawed back the deficit and then began a painful final third in which he repeatedly gained a tiny advantage but slipped back each time, ‘furiously snatching a lead then slowing to regain my breath or my strength', as he put it.

Coppi's ghost-written account of the record is compelling: ‘Finally, centimetre by centimetre, I managed to catch up with the demonic clock. I could not see the figures on the black-board. I only knew that I could not fall behind the clock any more, that I had to overtake it, even if it was only by ten metres, in order to win. My chest was like a red hot furnace, my brain knew only the order of the clock: faster, faster, faster!' He was still level with seven minutes to go and the eventual margin registered by the judges was tiny: a mere thirty-one metres better than Archambaud's record.

That final effort left its mark: Coppi never attempted another hour, partly because he feared the suffering involved, partly because he dreaded the stress of the build-up. No challenger came forward to attack his distance, and provoke a response, until he was too old. He may also have been keen to keep the record in the past, because it was not a clear-cut success, in spite of the initial euphoria. The documentation for the record never made it to the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale, the world governing body for cycling) in Switzerland because of the war, and, after the war was over,
Archambaud protested that the attempt had not been carried out in legal conditions. When the lap splits were published they showed that Coppi covered the laps in such irregular times as to suggest he may have had a case. The record was not validated until February 1947, and then only after Archambaud's times had been re-examined as well: both men's distances were revised downwards, offering plenty of material for conspiracy theorists both French and Italian.

By the end of his career, Coppi had begun to regret his decision not to make a second attempt: given the dominance he would attain in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he would surely have gone further, and the result would have been an undisputed record. Hindsight led him to realise that the 1942 attempt was carried out without sustained, specific preparation, due in part to his injury and also to the war conditions. He had made no concessions to aero-dynamics, wearing a jersey with flappy pockets and a crash hat with leather bars. To warm up, he had ridden to the track from Castellania. The clinching factor, however, was that he had ridden without using drugs. There were, he said, ‘no chemicals. [In the 1950s], “chemicals” [would] increase performance in an hour record by at least 30 per cent, anyone who says it's not like that doesn't know what it's like riding with amphetamine in them.' The record would stand until the arrival of Jacques Anquetil, in the mid-1950s. He, if anyone, knew how to use ‘chemicals'.

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As with the Giro victory, there was no time to savour the hour. Legnano's promised 25,000-lire bonus would never be spent, or at least not by the man who had earned it. Even as Coppi was suffering on the Vigorelli, the war in North Africa had turned definitively against the Axis, after two and a half years
of advance and retreat along the Mediterranean coast. Montgomery had broken out at El Alamein three days before, on 4 November. On 6 November General Alexander had sent Churchill a message saying that he had captured 20,000 prisoners, 350 tanks, 400 artillery pieces and 1,000 vehicles. As the fighting swept eastwards along the North African coast in the coming months, Mussolini's generals prepared to throw their remaining troops into one final effort, if not to stave off disaster then at least to ensure that defeat could be depicted as an heroic last stand.

Not only had Coppi lost his father the previous January, his elder brother Livio was reported missing in western Russia, surrounded on the banks of the River Don with the 230,000 Italians Mussolini had sent to support Hitler's invasion force. Unlike 75,000 others who perished in the retreat, including Fausto's former training partner Borlando, Livio at least returned, given leave to work on the farm because both Serse and Fausto had also been called up. By happy coincidence, he came back the day after Fausto broke the hour.

A former cyclist, Giovanni Cuniolo, now a car dealer, had been pulling strings to keep Fausto Coppi out of the war, and had warned him that if he did not get himself ‘into hospital' he would end up fighting. There were attempts to smuggle him to Switzerland, and Cavanna had offered to ‘make him ill' to get him relieved of active service, using the combination of a strange concoction and a Tuscan cigar. He declined both offers. Coppi was willing to submit to something far larger than himself. He explained later that he felt if he evaded service, he would inevitably face public criticism. ‘Friends suggested ways out. I was against it. I would damage my career by going, but I would surely ruin it if I stayed.' Moreover, Bruna backed his decision, in spite of the dangers he would run.

The abortive campaign in the French colony of Tunisia was
the last gasp of Mussolini's attempt to recreate the Roman empire in North Africa. Coppi and his unit arrived in March 1943, by which time the Axis troops were clinging on to the Mareth Line, a string of French fortifications at the foot of the peninsula, but they were hopelessly outnumbered and were gradually being pushed into the sea by the Allies. The tone had been set for the ‘campaign' when the colonel who sent Coppi and his unit to war accompanied them as far as the railway station, where he told them that duty dictated he himself remain in the barracks.