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  ‘Eh – old style!’

  Italy’s bicycle-repair artists, I went on to discover, come in two flavours – sweet and sour. Giacomo, as this cheery, flip-flopped gentleman instantly introduced himself, oozed glucose – mmm! – from every pore. Before I’d had the chance to fail to explain my predicament, he’d wheeled the Hirondelle into his cavernous back-room workshop and hoicked it up on a work stand, cooing and beaming all the while. ‘Super old style – magnifico!’ Three bike-fixing assistants abandoned their stations and came up to say other nice-sounding things, though one of them perhaps enjoyed my outfit a little too much, and later made a ‘gurning deviant’ face when he tried the goggles on.

  With a regretful sigh Giacomo pronounced old Brooks dead; I kept its severed nose and left him the rest. He rooted around under the counter, extracting a proposed replacement. ‘Old style?’ Well used it certainly was, though the balding fake suede and aluminium rails were hardly period correct. Still, it was the right kind of brown and there didn’t seem any gain in quibbling. Not even when Giacomo scratched his stubble, shrugged and asked for fifty euros. Mind you, this did include fitting, and a ninety-eight-year service.

  Forty minutes later, with the brakes and bottom bracket extensively overhauled and my reanimated loins the talk of the workshop, I completed a test circuit of Giacomo’s car park. My bike would never be quite the same without the Brooks – nor, oddly, ever quite as comfortable – but it now felt markedly more dependable. I shook Giacomo’s hand, absorbed a torrent of good wishes, then blurted out a farewell message that combined inexpertly rehearsed phrases with the withered fruit of that Business Italian course.

  ‘I now go a Tour of Italy to the year 940 by a French bicycle from this epoch. Respectfully yours!’

  The storm that laid waste to the 1914 field hit its dreadful peak as the bedraggled survivors approached Biella. From this point on, Paolo’s account began to sound less like the report of a sporting event than some dread prophecy of the imminent horrors of trench warfare. Uprooted trees blocked the way; bikes and cars skidded into ditches or sank to their axles in the mire; rivers burst their banks. With the road swallowed by flood waters and most of the route signs blown down, many riders found themselves utterly lost in surging tides of mud. Calzolari recalled desperately shouting out for directions from farmers braving the storm to rescue livestock.

  As sunrise approached, a group of soldiers spotted ‘two mud-soaked ghosts’ stumbling hypothermically past their barracks: Calzolari and Luigi Ganna, winner of the inaugural 1909 Giro. The soldiers dragged the unprotesting pair inside and dunked them in hot baths; a while later, the semi-comatose Calzolari was roused by a passing commotion and belatedly learned that he and Ganna had been in the lead, but now weren’t. He pulled his soaking kit back on, staggered deliriously out to his bike and set off in wayward pursuit.

  Biella, a grubby textile town in obvious decline, presented a suitably drab backdrop to my own more humdrum travails. Once again I ran out of juice right at the death, making such a weary mess of dismounting in the hotel car park that the Hirondelle and I both ended up flat on our backs. A moment later, when the kindly and bilingual receptionist recommended a restaurant outside town and suggested I travelled to it by bicycle, a furious riposte burst reflexively from my lips, along with the boiled sweet I had just taken from the basket on her desk.

  ‘Sorry,’ I gurgled, wiping purple saliva off the Formica and avoiding her wide-eyed alarm. ‘I’ve just ridden a hundred and ten kilometres with half a saddle.’

  Instead, I shuffled up the street to a garish parade of demonstrably unpopular dining establishments. I went into the only one that didn’t have enlargements of glistening fast food displayed outside, and was led into an uncustomered back room dominated by a wall-mounted mega-telly that kept me very loudly up to speed with some spirit-withering junior talent show. As fat-faced young punchables warbled above me, I manfully dispatched a pizza topped with raw oven chips: a necessary carb-fest that may rank as the most challenging meal I have ever completed in southern Europe.1 My appetite was not improved by Paolo’s introduction to the 1914 Giro’s post-Biella progression: ‘The attack on the Passo della Serra began at dawn.’

  I was up before then, driven from my bed by a plague of mosquitoes. Like the 1914 riders I had packed no more than the bare essentials of life on the road, but it’s fair to say our concepts of necessity may not have overlapped. An awful lot of my bag-space seemed devoted to tackling or preventing maladies they would have just put up with, like saddle sores, sunburn and tooth decay. And insect bites: I now blearily embalmed myself with military-grade concentrated repellent, too tired to recall the warning supplied by the Dutchman who had given it to me in the middle of a Swedish midge cloud many years before. His words burst into my groggy brain when I ran my tongue across sun-dried lips and felt it shrivel and froth, like a slug in salt. ‘This is serious shit, my friend: get some in your mouth and it’s bye-bye salivary glands.’ Thodding bollocth.

  A night apparently spent licking oven cleaner off cane toads doesn’t seem like ideal preparation for a marathon bike ride, but for whatever reason I was bang on it that morning. I rolled on empty weekend roads towards the foot of the Passo della Serra, then put my head down and ground steadily up its verdant contours. It was no more than a big hill, in fact, though the commanding view from the top made its nonchalant conquest seem more impressive. A giant sparkling lake, a fecund plain ripening in the sun, and in the hazy distance a dim rank of Alps. When the day was done I’d be right at their feet, having pedalled off the edge of my Lombardy map and all the way across its Piedmontese successor.

  The fickleness of good form is one of the durable frustrations of long-distance cycling. In the week ahead, Calzolari would win a stage by twenty-three minutes, and lose another by over an hour. It was the same for him and for me: you simply never know if you’re about to wolf down the miles or choke on them. All I can say is that through some alchemic combo of a tailwind, two mid-morning espressos, benign terrain and a jersey pouch full of hotel-breakfast buns I covered 142.4km that day – an achievement, I’ve just established, bettered only twice during my Tour ride.

  I can’t even hand much credit to the Pepebike pit stop. Giacomo’s remedial work was audibly undone before I crested the Passo della Serra, and on the descent the bottom bracket acquired a new double-lurch in each turn of the pedals: ker-dunk-pa-donk. Number 7 quite plainly required extensive daily fettling of the sort I was not technically or temperamentally cut out for. The best I could reasonably expect of myself was a cursory morning once-over, an assessment of basic roadworthiness governed by one maxim: fuck it, that’ll do. Anyway, that day it did.

  Freed from the smothering preoccupations of fatigue, I could for the first time take proper stock of the blue-hued world beyond my bidons. It was properly rural around here, the air heavy with the muscular smell of rosemary and sileage, topped with wafts of gently frying garlic and two-stroke Vespa fumes in the villages. String-vested husbands tended their sunflowers, wives sang in their kitchens, kids filled their paddling pools. Maize seemed to be the crop of choice, crisped-up and harvest ready; it only now occurred to me that all the women I’d seen sitting in field-side camping chairs weren’t sweetcorn vendors waiting for a new delivery of produce, but – and a good afternoon to you, madam! – prostitutes. Approaching Turin I detected a sad pattern that would be copied at every other city I passed in and out of: Africans furthest out, then old Eastern Europeans, then young Eastern Europeans. Belatedly I recognised the odious brazenness of punters in Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga Italy, the well-dressed husbands who’d popped out in the family Fiat for a quickie in between lunchtime courses at Grandma’s house, happy to flaunt their sordid roadside negotiations in front of passing cyclists.

  Cyclists plural, because now – on a weekend and near a major settlement – I was no longer the only two-wheeled show on the road. When a mini peloton of club riders wobbled towards me out of the heat-haze, my frenzi
ed ding-ding-wave-hail-ding-ding greeting was met with a guarded half-nod. I understood why when group after group of cyclists – some old, some young, but all in matching jerseys and riding machines of recent high-end manufacture – began pedalling by in both directions. By the time I broached the suburbs of Turin I had encountered more proper road cyclists in an hour than I did during my entire circuit of France. I’m guessing this explains why Italian riders have won seventeen Grand Tours since 1990, and the French only one. (Well, this and the ropey doctors who made Italy the cradle of EPO.)

  The day before the sun had been a bully; now it was a warm companion. I spent the entire day failing to feel guilty about the persistently glorious atmospheric conditions, by rights a disrespectful affront to the storm-lashed 1914 survivors now inching into an Alpine blizzard. My bidons were drained with refreshing sips, not the desperate gulps of yore. The minute one was empty, a street fountain seemed to magically appear. Turin’s were wonderful, cast-iron antiques decorously topped with the city-emblem bull’s head. I checked my shadow as I leaned over to fill from one. Big peaked cap, shielded goggles, one foot in the clips and the other on the cobbles: I’d never felt more Alfonso.

  ‘Eh, mister-sir, how you are, bye-bye!’

  Clearly I didn’t look very Alfonso, though. Funny that 1914 Giro fashion should so accurately identify a twenty-first-century Englishman engaged in some daft challenge.

  Turin was even more subdued on a high-summer Saturday than Milan had been on a Thursday. The only shop that had its shutters up was an African grocery, with a sign outside that said: ‘Yes – we are open in August!’ So it was that I traversed the Italian Job city’s many-laned avenues without alarm, or indeed excitement of any sort: the cold logic of satellite navigation steered me right through Turin without offering even a glimpse of any centrepiece attraction, picking a route through careworn, undistinguished districts that might only lure a tourist if he had a sewing machine to repair or a sudden fancy for halal kebabs.

  Out of town I headed westwards, into the setting sun, towards Alps that reared abruptly from the foreground plain, as if someone had jolted the horizon with a defibrillator. I dispatched the last breakfast bun, soggy with chest sweat, then stopped at a village Spar for what would become my standard late-afternoon restorative: a litre of milk and a bar of Milka Extra Cacao. One hundred kilometres, 120, 140. I settled down in the drops and let the road come to me. Hubris welled unstoppably: this was a piece of piss. It didn’t even seem an issue when the rear wheel developed an elliptical imperfection, which, at speed, bounced my buttocks clear of the saddle, as if I was riding a horse. What of it? I raised the revs and bucked into Susa, gateway to the bastard Alps.

  Susa was one of those curiously grubby Alpine valley towns, its chalet-roofed apartment blocks streaked grey with glacial grit. It bustled, though, and largely with beach-phobic French holidaymakers: the border lay just behind one of those monstrous flanks of Alpine rock that hemmed the town in on three sides. It wasn’t just the number-plates that gave them away. Italians manifestly enjoy life, but a Frenchman on holiday is Eeyore with cancer.

  I found a small hotel just behind the main drag, run by a kindly old couple. The wife seemed genuinely thrilled when I suggested that I keep my bike in my ground-floor room, and as I wheeled it past reception her husband fairly jumped to his feet. ‘Bella, bella,’ he cooed, the entrée to a jolly chat about vintage cycling, near the start of which he gently corrected the more ridiculous errors in my prepared speech about going the Giro of 940.

  I could at least accurately inform him, by parroting the title of Paolo Facchinetti’s book, that the Giro I had chosen to retrace was il più duro di tutti, the toughest of all. At this his wrinkled face wrinkled further. ‘No, no,’ he protested, ‘Charly Gaul, Monte Bondone.’

  Having encountered both names while researching famously awful Grand Tours, I knew he was referring to the 1956 Giro. The snowbound Dolomite stage in question was a horror indeed: sixty riders, including the race leader, abandoned in sheer frozen agony, dumping their bikes outside bars and farmhouses and blundering rigidly indoors for warmth. Gaul, a tiny Luxembourger who later earned the nickname ‘Monsieur Pipi’ for his pioneering achievements in the field of on-the-move urination, had started the stage sixteen minutes off the pace, and would end it with a Giro-securing lead. Amphetamine use was then almost universal, and Gaul later admitted he necked more pills than anyone: prodigious consumption of a drug that raises metabolism and thus body heat probably explains why he rode through the blizzard in a short-sleeved jersey (by the finish it had frozen to his torso, and had to be cut off him).

  Throw in the heroic travails of Fiorenzo Magni, as the hotelier now did, and you have the ingredients for suffering-based infamy. Despite riding halfway round Italy with a broken collarbone and humerus, Magni somehow finished second, keeping the pain at bay by gritting his teeth round a strip of inner tube tied to his handlebars. Only forty-five riders finished the race, but that was a lot more than eight: terrible though the 1956 Giro certainly was, 1914 was, like, way terribler. I didn’t have the words to explain why, but it seemed a small tragedy that I needed to at all. The 1914 Giro and Alfonso Calzolari meant nothing to even an old man, one who lived on the fateful route itself, right beneath the mountain that only half the starting field would reach the top of. The last surviving Great War veteran died just before I set off, and with an inward sigh I realised the 1914 Giro had now also passed from living memory. In the weeks ahead I encountered precisely no people who knew anything at all about the race. Woollen roll-necks and wooden wheels, twenty-hour stages on strychnine and Chianti: these were now the forgotten tales of dead men.

  ‘Solo?’

  Slightly less hurtful than ‘Just one?’, perhaps, but walking into a restaurant alone isn’t fun in any language. Once again I was led to a dingy, rearward corner, then covered in an old horse blanket and pelted with slops. It wasn’t much better when I went over the road for an after-dinner digestivo: the barman placed my thimble of bitters on a distant table underneath a blaring radio speaker, then gestured at me to go over and join it.

  I’d brought along Paolo’s book to set the scene for my morning challenge: the ascent to Sestriere. Translation was always tricky – my 162-gram pocket dictionary didn’t make the packing cut. Trickier still given the barman’s fondness for weapons-grade Euroshite pop, tumultuously dispensed by some station with an idiotic English name, like 104.5 Jolly Wellness or Sexy Jeans Box FM.

  Sestriere was already notorious to me as the ascent where Horrid Lance won his first Tour in 1999, speeding ludicrously away from the world’s greatest climbers to build an unassailable overall lead. What I hadn’t properly grasped, until very slowly running my finger along Paolo’s words with a head full of New Look Gossip Sound, was the climb’s dreadful enormity. ‘From Susa to Sestriere it is needed an ascent of 40km.’ Forty? Forty? That didn’t seem possible: go uphill for 40km and you’d surely be, I dunno, in orbit. The sat-nav said we were at 521m, and the map told me Sestriere topped out at 2,035m. The road between the two did an awful lot of twisting about: one ominous compaction of hairpins brought to mind my O-level diagram of the human digestive system.

  Sestriere – the cursed mountain. Paolo’s heading for his account of the climb didn’t help the bitters go down. My stomach lurched as I read that the fun had begun right here, almost bang outside the bar.

  Lucien Petit-Breton, a double Tour de France winner and the brightest international star in the field, had already endured more than his share of punctures that night; with the rain now torrential, he flatted again in downtown Susa. At the messiest end of his tether, he tore off first the tyre, then his sodden jersey, yelling at the attendant team car for a dry one. On being told they’d run out, Petit-Breton suffered ‘a genuine hysterical crisis’, mounting his bike and roaring away up the flooded street, one-tyred and bare-chested. When the team car caught him up, he vaulted out of the saddle, raised his bike aloft and battered it repeatedl
y against the support vehicle before collapsing into the gutter. ‘An inglorious end for a great champion,’ said Paolo of Petit-Breton’s impressively French abandonment. The Giro has no respect for reputation: this was Petit-Breton’s third and final attempt at a race he never finished.

  Faithful to the tradition of mountain climbs, it got worse higher up. The rain turned to sleet, then a full-on blizzard. Defeated by the frosted mud, all the surviving riders got off to push their bikes up the path laid by Napoleon’s troops a hundred years previously. They were joined on foot by journalists and race officials, fleeing their glaciated Fiat Tipo Zeros to desperately stamp in some body warmth. Racers cried like children and begged the Lord for dry clothes. ‘This was a Calvary,’ concluded Paolo, and for once the default metaphor for extreme sporting duress seemed apt: if Jesus had been made to ride up Sestriere on frozen gravel with no gears, Christians would now be wearing little bikes round their necks.

  On my way back to the hotel it suddenly began to bucket down. I broke into a jog and at once my right knee seized solid, almost pitching me into Petit-Breton’s gutter of wet surrender. When I started to walk again the joint wouldn’t bend; I made my way back to the hotel like a man with a full-leg plaster cast.

  The juddery interface between old steel frame and Italian road had been steadily eroding my sense of touch, and my toes bore blistered tribute to the shoes of Gerard Lagrost, tenaciously preserving the strange contours of their former master’s feet. But this was a whole new level of disability. Why now? I levered myself awkwardly down onto the bed, smeared a palmful of ibuprofen gel into the affected patella and tried not to think about what lay ahead. It wasn’t easy in a room festooned with wet cycling clothes, and a bike jutting out of the en suite.