Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham Read Free Book Online Page B

Bartaliano or Coppiano . Bartali made the running early in the stage, with Coppi struggling to follow him. Twice Coppi punctured, with Bartali waiting. On the final climb, however, it was Bartali’s turn to have a flat tyre. Coppi attacked at once, only to be told by Pavesi that he must wait: ‘Pacts are things that you must respect!’ In his autobiography, Bartali was adamant: ‘If I’d been from another team he wouldn’t have won the Giro. He was not experienced and had his limits on the climbs, he would suddenly have nothing in the tank. When that happened in the Dolomites I was the one who saved him from disaster. I didn’t do it for him, but for Legnano who paid my wages.’ He added that if he had helped Coppi he had done so unwillingly, ‘because he asked for things he shouldn’t have’.
    One eyewitness, Beppe Pegoletti, writing for La Nazione , described how Bartali waited for Coppi, shouting encouragement, pacing him ‘with patience, even with love’ as the young man struggled to hang on to his wheel. At one point Coppi stopped, and Bartali took a handful of snow and rubbed it on Coppi’s forehead, then he dropped it onto the nape ofhis neck. Towards the end of the stage, on the descent to the finish in the little town of Ortisei, Coppi missed a turning and punctured: it was Bartali who gave him his wheel.
    Coppi rode into the vast Arena in Milan two days later, the clear winner of the Giro at his first attempt at the age of twenty. The 27,000-lire first prize was his, including a 10,000-lire Premio del Duce . The entire Coppi family had travelled to Milan to welcome him in the great open-air stadium, deliberately built to resemble an ancient Roman amphitheatre, on the edge of the Sempione park. The men of the family – Domenico, Uncle Fausto, Livio, Serse – had listened to the mountain stages around the one radio in the village, which was kept in the schoolroom. They had received occasional postcards from their Faustino, two or three of them with a brief message: ‘Don’t worry, the maglia rosa is on its way.’
    Whatever the extent of Bartali’s assistance, it was a remarkable achievement in a race of such complexity and distance. Usually, stage races favour the older rider: winning such an event at twenty is truly rare. Suddenly Coppi was thrust into the limelight, as he recognised in his memoirs Le Drame de Ma Vie , published in 1950. ‘It’s a curious thing, becoming a star. In one day, a hundred new friends turn up whom you didn’t know the day before; the cinema, press and radio take you over. Your legend is born in such a different form compared to the reality that it astounds you. Another Fausto Coppi came into the world, who bore no resemblance to the Fausto Coppi I felt I had quite a few good reasons to know.’
    It was also the first act in what would become Italy’s greatest sporting rivalry. Bartali clearly resented playing second fiddle to his young team-mate. ‘You can rest but don’t have too many illusions: give it a year and I’ll put things back how they should be,’ he told Coppi. Instead, they had to wait six years for the Giro to be run again.

CHAPTER 4
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‘A VERY REGRETTABLE PHENOMENON’
    Two days after shocking Italy with his Giro d’Italia win, Coppi was called up. The transformation from obscurity to overnight celebrity to infantryman No. 7375 in a couple of weeks must have been bewildering, but this was in keeping with the times. Italy had declared war on France and Britain the previous day, on 10 June 1940. Mussolini was about to perform his ‘stab in the back’, the attempt to conquer France through the Riviera. Invasions of Greece and North Africa were shortly to follow.
    Incongruous as it is to think of sport continuing in a relatively normal way at such a time, the formative years of Coppi’s career had coincided with Europe’s descent into