Gironimo! Read online

  I sank to my haunches and absently noted that my knee had stopped hurting. An old body can heal itself with use, but an old bike cannot. Running my fingers along Number 7’s scabbed and ancient crossbar, I thought: You didn’t ask for this, you poor old sod. What way was this to treat a ninety-eight-year-old? My wife’s great aunt Lilja is only ninety-two, but I wouldn’t make her give me a piggyback up a mountain. Even if I did, I’d surely have the good grace not to make a fuss when her ankles popped.

  Doubt and defeatism had been whispering in my ear all the way up this enormous mountain; I’d made it to the top and now they were shouting right in my face. That grinding 40km ascent was about to be reversed at unthinkable speed, and entrusting my downhill well-being to this disintegrating antique was a suicidal folly. Would it really be so shameful for us old-timers to take early retirement, here and now? Bail out atop Sestriere and we’d still have made it further than most of the 1914 crew.

  With some heat in the air I might have sat there feeling sorry for us all day, but shuddering Alpine cold soon enforced activity. Fumbling frozen pliers in numb fingers, I bullied the caliper back until the manufacturer’s name faced forwards. Stamped into the blackened metal in cursive, Edwardian script: Le Bambin.

  For some reason I began to sing these two words, loud and often, in the fruity fashion of Maurice Chevalier. For some reason this performance caused misgivings to recede. As I worked on I warmed up, in heart and soul: doubt gave way to faith, and fear to bravado. Satisfied with a set-up that at least applied some cork to some wood, though much more of it to rubber tyre and thin air, after an hour I bundled all the tools away and pointed Number 7 downhill.

  Prudence beseeched me to walk the bike down to the valley floor – I’d have done it by lunchtime – but I didn’t listen to her. Life-shortening though it might be, no way in clicking heck was I missing out on the zoomy reward for all my Alp-ascending toil. Going fast downhill is kind of the whole point of cycling; it’s what makes it better than walking.

  Momentum built exponentially, and unstoppably. As I joined the main road the valley opened sumptuously beneath me, a postcard panorama of retreating snow-veined pinnacles and chuckling Alpine water. The momentary distraction of this beckoning prospect was enough to accumulate more speed than I could ever hope to get rid of. Cattle, chalets and frost-cracked mountain tarmac flashed past; the rear-wheel bobble hit a million RPM, delivering perineal punishment of a very specialist order. My goggles claimed their first victim, a large UFO that splattered the right lens with bits of abdomen. A quick-fire, half-glance down: 51kmh on the speedo, and painted names strobing crazily by on the blurred roadway below, a legacy of the previous year’s Giro. I began to feel strangely detached, as if someone else was enduring this crisis, no doubt because I really, really wished they were.

  Snatching at the brake levers, as I’d just discovered up in the car park, was not a recommended course of action. Nibali’s such a classy descender, Phil, you can see him just feathering the brakes through these corners . . . Drawing deep from all those years of exposure to Tour commentary, I curled two fingers round each lever and squeezed tentatively, hoping at least to slow down to a pace that might allow me an open-cask funeral. Fifty-two, 55, 57 . . . feathering be damned. Not very gradually I squeezed the levers hard, harder, hardest, like a man trying to juice potatoes in his fists. Sproink! The right-hand lever suddenly slackened: I was in no position to confirm it, but I knew I’d just shed one of my rear blocks.

  If you’re going to die in a bicycle race, chances are you’ll do it by losing control down a mountain. Chances are that mountain will be in Italy. More riders have died in the Giro than in any other race; the most recent victim was Belgium’s Wouter Weylandt, who in 2011 paid the ultimate price for looking over his shoulder while descending a Ligurian peak at 80kmh. In the pre-helmet, crap-brakes age, the toll was truly grim: every mother with a son in the 1914 Giro would have known that six professional cyclists had died on Europe’s tracks and roads the year before, a casualty rate never exceeded before or since. Frozen mud made their descent from Sestriere especially exciting. Of the forty riders still in the race, most fell at least once; one shattered his bike beyond repair and abandoned.

  Maurice Garin had won the first Tour de France without any brakes at all, slowing himself via the application of shoe to road. This technique was still widely used as an auxiliary brake in 1914, and after a soul-freezing brush with oncoming traffic at the first tight bend I knew there was nothing else for it: with wind and G-force pleating my cheeks and the road beginning to oscillate I drew my feet out of the toe-clips and eased my buttocks forward off the saddle. Sixty-one kilometres per hour . . . The thought of voluntarily planting parts of my body onto this savagely abrasive surface at juddering high speed seemed an outrage against reason. But then a sign flashed past warning of an imminent tornante, which I’d found out the day before meant hairpin, and Gerard Lagrost’s thin leather soles hit the deck hard.

  A very short while later I scraped to an inelegant halt in the village of Pragelato-ruà. Friction warmed my feet uncomfortably, and a number of the little tacks that affixed shoe upper to sole were now denting my flesh. I hadn’t turned a pedal for 10km, but nervous exhaustion meant my breaths came hard and fast. There was a bar opposite: I shakily dismounted and tottered inside for restorative sustenance and predicament analysis.

  What to do? There was still an awful lot of Alp to hurtle down: the sat-nav said we were at 1,411m, higher than Ben Nevis. I looked out past the window-box geraniums and spotted a ski jump, and at once imagined myself skittering helplessly down it on the bike, both feet on the floor and scrabbling for purchase. Foreboding and double-espresso jitters got to work, and with a stifled dry retch I remembered that the brake block I’d just lost was my last.

  ‘Sughero?’

  My conversation with Giacomo and his fellow mechanics had unearthed a few key words, and this one was supposed to be ‘cork’. The barman had other ideas, first pointing at the toilet door, then proffering a bowl of sugar sachets. In the end I had to mime pulling one out of a bottle in the traditional stance, which let me tell you now is a procedure open to serious misinterpretation.

  When the nervous laughter died down I pointed at the Hirondelle leaning against his threshold. ‘Sughero per la bici?’ I said in a very small voice. At once the barman splayed out his hands and made a eureka face, then ushered me out into the sunlight and gestured at the shop next door. I had somehow previously failed to notice the two bicycles chained up outside this establishment, or the others filling its window, and most unforgiveably the large banner above it which read, in English, ‘FREE-BIKE’. I went inside, and didn’t come out for six hours.

  Free-Bike was a one-man seasonal operation run by a shy, unabundantly haired young man called Fabio, a mountain cyclist who led off-road tours, hired bikes and – oh, sweet mother of YES – fixed them. He was fascinated by the Hirondelle, and at a wonderfully loose end, a magic combo that catalysed a full-scale mechanical overhaul. Number 7 went up on his work stand, and for the balance of that morning and most of the afternoon, I watched the earnest and kindly Fabio make it all better.

  He popped out the cotters, wrapped each in heavy tin foil and tapped them back in: ‘No more clack-clack now,’ he said in his commendable English. He nipped to the bar and came back with lunch and several prosecco corks: ‘Is more ’ard, better for make stop. Sughero for brake – bizzarro!’ While he sculpted these into shape, and rebuilt the problematic brake lever, and properly straightened the bent caliper, I settled into my own task: trying very hard not to kiss him full on the lips, over and over again.

  I very nearly cracked when Fabio noted and remedied several accidents I hadn’t even noticed waiting to happen. The bucking-bronco rear-wheel action had, he spotted, caused a three-inch lesion to spread along the tyre-wall. Tufts of bare fabric poked out through the rubber; I’d been no more than one pothole away from a catastrophic downhill blow-out.

  �
�Ciclo-cross tyre,’ he murmured, easing it off the rim. ‘OK for grass, no for road.’

  ‘Yeah, but they look really good,’ I said, unlashing a spare from the saddlebag. As I did so, Fabio noticed that my modern replacement saddle was already failing to cope: he cable-tied a fat rubber brake pad under the chassis to prevent it collapsing further.

  His headline achievement, however, and one that detained this loveliest of men for most of those many hours, was making my wheels the right shape. Neither had been especially round even before absorbing 409km of fully laden punishment. I watched Fabio squat down at his wheel-trueing jig in a mood of bitter-sweet déjà vu. Been there, done that, torn the oil-stained T-shirt to angry shreds.

  We talked as he twiddled. Fabio admitted he didn’t care much for road-race cycling, but seemed keen to hear about my journey and the 1914 Giro. ‘In eroica time, true spirit, no doping,’ he said, waving away my talk of strychnine and red wine. ‘Today in Italy . . .’ He shook his head sadly and told me that despair at endemic drug use had compelled him to give up what sounded like a promising career in competitive mountain cycling. ‘Even one small local race, prize was a salami, and I see doping!’

  The sun was low when Fabio put down his spoke key. We agreed that it was probably unwise to head on down the mountain; he recommended a hotel just up the road. As I feared he refused payment for all those hours of expert labour, though after much insistence suggested €50. I gave him €60 and shook his oily hand. ‘Wait, two thing. First is, ah, some poesia.’ He wiped his fingers on his overalls and fired up the laptop on the shop’s counter. ‘Here – read. It is about you.’

  I bent down to the screen and saw it filled by a poem, translated from some unknown language into approximate English. Dies slowly he who transforms himself into the slave of habit, it began, repeating every day the same itineraries. Fabio’s head nodded significantly beside mine. Dies slowly he who does not risk the certain for the uncertain, to go toward a dream that has been keeping him awake. How very moved I was: to think that a free-spirited young off-roader like Fabio should look up to me, suburban, middle-aged me, as the standard bearer of flinty-eyed solo adventure. Moved, then ashamed. Dies slowly he who passes his days complaining of his bad luck and the incessant rain, ended the poem, words which might have been lifted straight from the introduction of How to Be Me by Tim Moore.

  Fabio’s second thing was no less touching: he wanted a go on my bike. We took the Hirondelle out into the long, rapidly cooling shadows and I watched him pedal gingerly up the road and back. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone else ride Number 7, and would be the last.

  ‘Is . . . fun, maybe a little strange,’ he said after dismounting, jiggling his wrists on an imaginary set of unsteady handlebars.

  ‘It is,’ I agreed, inwardly delighted that it wasn’t just me.

  We shook hands again, then I rode slowly away towards the hotel. The Hirondelle felt like a different bike, tauter, smoother, younger. With the Alps behind me – or at least beneath me – I felt much the same. Slightly disheartening though it was to have completed only 10 kilometres that day, we had just hugely improved our chances of completing the 2,700 that remained.

  CHAPTER 8

  DIES QUICKLY HE who rides his bike really fast into a tractor.

  Fuelled by gravity and impatience, the next morning I covered just over 40km in the first hour. An imprudent rate of progress: even my Fabio-tuned cork brakes could do no more than delay the onset of terminal velocity. I leaned rakishly through tunnels and swished in and out of villages, sometimes risking a half-wave at one of the club pelotons crawling miserably up to Sestriere. Who in their right mind wouldn’t cheat in order to mitigate such drawn-out torture? I could hardly think ill of the two rank-amateur aspiranti who were nabbed being towed up Sestriere by a car in 1914; far easier to hate the spiteful officials who waited for the pair to finish the stage, more than seven hours behind the winner, before announcing their disqualification.

  The road settled into a gentle valley, then bee-lined across a vast alluvial plain carpeted with trim plum and apple orchards. Behind me the Alps were slowly smothered by warm haze. Before me and beside me, a new challenge took loud and wayward shape: it was Tuesday, and with August all but over, the roads were for the first time teeming with Europe’s unmellowest traffic.

  Those with experience of both will understand the divergent mindsets of driving a car and riding a bicycle. On a bike, momentum is precious, something effortfully acquired, often painfully so. It’s therefore more than bad manners when some cock in a van cuts you up, and your hard-won product of mass and velocity is lost in a squeak of brakes. But the desire to chase this cock down and teach him a lesson is tempered by the second principal difference: if a collision ensues, he loses his no-claims bonus, and you lose your legs.

  These simple rules of engagement, I now discovered, are less simple in Italy. By the time I stopped for lunch, inexplicably at a garden centre, I’d enjoyed a detailed overview of the more nuanced relationship that exists between the Italian motorist and his pedal-powered road chum. Its basis is respect, and the rather touching assumption that every cyclist is as good at riding a bike as he is at driving a car. There’s just one snag: he isn’t good at driving a car. Or a lorry, or a bus, or a combine harvester.

  British drivers don’t like cyclists, but being British they tend to grudgingly recognise their personal space. ‘I’d really rather you didn’t drive too close to me’ – this is the understated message I try to transmit as I ride through London traffic, and with general success. Italians, however, simply don’t understand why anyone, in any circumstance of human life, would want or expect a wide berth.

  The first time a speeding vehicle shaved my elbow with its wing mirror that morning, a shriek of terrified abuse burst from my lips. It was the same after my initiation in the native arts of being eased into kerbs, street furniture and parked vehicles, and when I paid the price for respecting one traffic signal too many. That shriek would be lying in wait at the back of my throat for the balance of my journey. Indeed longer than that: the night I came home, my wife was woken up at 3 a.m. when in the depths of sleep I very coherently shouted: ‘Why don’t you ever fucking indicate?’

  It isn’t malicious. I soon learned that in contrast to their British counterparts, Italian drivers hold cyclists in great affection, employing their horns to communicate greeting and encouragement, not Anglo-pattern reproach or irritation (though I could really have done without the encouragement of HGV drivers: the sudden and terrible blast of their thunderous foghorns generally caused two or three of my vital organs to swap places). It’s actually a tremendous compliment when they career past down a medieval alley, allowing you up to 1.8cm leeway between speeding metal and ancient wall. Anything less would be an insult to the deft proficiency of your bike-handling skills. An Englishman who lived in Italy once told me it was considered very poor form for a passenger to put on a seatbelt: the driver would take the implication of perceived danger as a slight on his abilities.

  Let’s try to be fair: Italian drivers have been raised in a claustrophobic motoring environment. Most towns are a compression of tight old streets, and even major arterial roads are often proportioned in sympathy with the era of fun-sized Fiat 500s. Motorists frequently have no option but to cut things fine, and even if they wanted to give you enough room, it probably isn’t there.

  Now let’s try to be honest: Italians are an appalling liability at the controls of any conveyance, from Vespa to cruise liner, because their main preoccupation – way above arriving with all passengers alive and body panels intact – is showing off.

  This infuriating attribute is underpinned with a thick seam of impulsive recklessness. Italians are fundamentally shambolic. Their what-the-heck, go-for-it spontaneity is fantastically well suited to catering and public celebration; less so to negotiating a roundabout. I dare say that the rash expression of daring artistry is consistent with the heady lust for life articulated
in Fabio’s poem, even though I’ve just found out it was written by a Brazilian. To me, though, it seems like juvenile hedonism, the helpless indulgence in life’s simplest pleasures: yummy ice cream, playing ball games on the beach, watching ladies with big boobies on telly, and getting in a shiny red car and going brumm-brumm-BRUMMMM. Plus every Italian has a frankly childish aversion to doing what they’re told, whether it’s declaring taxable income or looking even one way when pulling out from a side road.

  The only exceptions to all these rules are female drivers over the age of sixty, who sit at the wheels of their ancient Fiat Pandas with but one simple thought in mind: crushing me to death.

  All of this business would quite regularly force me off-piste. South of Saluzzo, on a busy road that I alone felt wasn’t wide enough for two lorries and a bike, I soothed my nerves but not the sat-nav by plunging off down a rural side-turning. It was delightful at once, a sleepy lane that meandered through the shade of towering maize plants, and in sort of the right direction. I paused to take a drink on a little bridge that vaulted a bend in a broad and shallow river. The sun glinted off my bidons and the stilled waters, silvery olive trees shone beneath a cloudless canopy of deep metallic blue, crickets buzzed above the rushing hush of a distant weir. I thought: Thank you, bicycle, for bringing me to this wonderful place. And then I thought: Sod you, Henri Desgrange and Armando Cougnet, for snatching the priceless gift of free-range bike touring, and perverting it into a fiendish torture.

  I reached Cuneo just as the markets were winding down, and 97.244 years after Angelo Gremo led the thirty-seven surviving riders to the end of that first and most attritional stage. Paolo didn’t specify a precise finishing point, but I figured it would probably be the Corso Nizza, downtown Cuneo’s workmanlike main thoroughfare. I trundled up its bike lane, clicking through the sat-nav screens to find that Alfonso Calzolari was now 162km ahead in our silly virtual contest, having required less than eighteen hours to do what had taken me almost exactly five days. Calzolari came in third, but was hailed as the ‘true revelation of the race’: an unknown amongst the big names who finished in front and just behind. The Red Devil (the wine-loving, customs-officer-kicking Giovanni Gerbi), Lucien ‘The Invulnerable’ Petit-Breton, Carlo ‘The ’Tache’ Durando (who rolled in second and flaunted his bushy lip furniture in that start-line photo): this was an age of compulsory sporting nicknames, and the next morning’s papers introduced Calzolari as ‘Fonso la Mort’. I can’t imagine his parents were too happy to see their son christened ‘Fonso the dead’, any more than I was when I read Paolo’s account of its derivation: Calzolari’s unearthly capacity for suffering seemed beyond that of any living soul. I’d planned to spend the night at Cuneo, but it felt like the right thing to channel some of that impervious spirit. I rammed my feet into the toe-clips and banged out another 30km to Mondovì. It was what us blank-eyed pedal-zombies did.