Gironimo! Read online

  In common with a distressing majority of the towns I’d be sleeping in henceforth, Mondovì was positioned atop a towering rock. My distance that day would be a new record, but nothing in the first 146km I covered prepared me for the 147th. The sat-nav’s predilection for crow-flying directness led me to an overgrown track that threw itself recklessly at the slope; soon I was staggering through vertical brambles with my bike on my back. At 7 p.m. the heat was still withering. My sweaty hands struggled for grip on the varnished frame, and body brine coursed painfully into my eyes.

  Pensioners tended to greet my time-warp appearance with a double take, and the black-headscarved widow who saw me lurch out of the upper Mondovì undergrowth recoiled as if she’d seen a ghost. It must have seemed as if I’d been holed up in there like one of those forgotten Japanese soldiers, an impression I probably didn’t dispel by tipping the entire contents of both bidons directly over my head.

  By the time the last finisher rode into Cuneo, nearly seven hours behind the winner, everyone had packed up and gone: after enduring twenty-four straight hours of historic awfulness, poor Mario Marangoni had to pedal all round town looking for an official to clock him in. More than half the field had by then abandoned the race, amongst them all but three of the aspiranti, who wobbled together into Cuneo not long before Marangoni and then faced the nightly task of sourcing their own food and lodging. Feebly slapping a filthy glove against the locked door of Mondovì’s only hotel, I had an idea how they must have felt.

  ‘You hopeless cock-warblers,’ I mumbled drunkenly, when it became clear no one was going to answer. I put my face right up to the door and strafed it with a long, messy raspberry, then turned round to find a woman jingling a big bunch of keys at me. In mind of what I’d just said about and done to her establishment, I waited for these to be forcibly inserted into my nostrils. Instead, she took in my oily, brambled derangement with a look of motherly concern and said: ‘Oh, poverino!’ You poor thing. An hour later, laid flat out on the double bed of a huge apartment suite as my kit sloshed round in a washing machine, I thought I probably didn’t deserve Italy.

  It was a thought that crystallised in the hours ahead. Showered and ravenous, I set up shop at a table outside one of the half-dozen bars and restaurants arranged around the wonderful main piazza, an encirclement of arched colonnades bookended by vast Baroque churches. The sun went down, the streetlights blinked on; a carafe of local sfuso frizzante and a rocket-garnished pizza the size of a bin lid were placed before me. Thus began my inspirational and modestly shit-faced vigil.

  I’d never heard of Mondovì, and judging from the spirited, snazzy crowd I watched slowly gather on the sheaf-patterned cobbles before me, neither had any other non-Italians. A full moon sidled into position above the pantiled roofscape, and an off-key clonk of ancient bells rang out the quarter hour. It all seemed so perfectly theatrical, right down to the cast: dapper rogues, young guns, giggling girls, grand madams gazing superbly down from their balconies. ‘Riding the Giro is like living in Italy,’ an unnamed rider told the Guardian the week before the 2013 edition rolled out. ‘Nothing is straightforward; there are surprises around every corner, good and bad.’ Mondovì was a cracker.

  I left an extravagant tip, and weaved through the boisterous chatter to a neighbouring bar. Here I pointed vaguely at the strangest-looking bottle behind the counter, from which the barman decanted an unexpectedly colossal glass of herbal booze syrup. Halfway through this alcoholic challenge, I spotted a man I’d earlier seen wearing a white coat behind the till of the piazza’s pharmacy. Passers-by nodded at him with evident respect as he made his way across the cobbles to a sleek new BMW, and I suddenly thought: Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I earn a handsome living and the esteem of a grateful community in exchange for dispensing medicated shampoo while gazing out at this wonderful, wonderful view?

  I sighed, belched and drained my overproof cough linctus, then meandered back to bed with a lazy grin smeared over my face, along with a load of tomatoey stuff that I didn’t notice until the next morning.

  Not nearly enough hours later I was looking back at Mondovì, perched winsomely above the plain on its little hemisphere of rock. I missed the town a little, but the plain a lot more: at 9.45 a.m. I was already off and pushing up the first of many enormous inclines.

  It was a naked Michael Gove of a day, one that had begun with the horrible, hungover realisation that I’d left all my kit in the apartment’s washing machine overnight. I suppose it could have been worse: I could have been sexually assaulted by a giant scorpion. I wrung everything out until my fists shrieked, then rolled it tightly up in all available dry fabric: towels (sorry), bedclothes (sorrier), curtains (sorriest). Then I put it all on, and stood for a long time with my entire body set in a rictus of damp disgust.

  The morning after the 1914 Giro’s apocalyptic first stage, race director Armando Cougnet was asked if he regretted the severity of a challenge that had already wiped out half the field. ‘Not at all,’ began his cheery riposte. ‘As long as one rider finishes the race, that’s enough for me!’ A century on, those dreadful words still echo: as recently as 2011, over a quarter of the Giro’s starters failed to finish. It is, and has always been, the most terrible ordeal on the racing calendar.

  In the hours ahead – and then the days and weeks – I came to understand how the Giro earned its fearsome reputation. It’s horribly simple: Italy is riddled with vast hills. With the northern plains behind me, I now had a good 2,000km of rolling, rearing up-and-downery to deal with. My kit had just about been baked dry by the sun when I swept up to the first hairpin below Montezemolo; by the time I creaked out of the last it was sodden once more.

  The woman at the village’s grocery clearly didn’t like what she saw, pressing a bonus brioche into my hands with a look of grave maternal concern. I accepted it like the brave little soldier I was, recalling that something very similar had happened the day before, when the waitress at the garden-centre café had surreptitiously served me both the options on the lunchtime menu. The last time I looked as if I needed feeding up, I couldn’t even ride a bike.

  Montezemolo’s attempt to drown me in the milk of human kindness intensified as I ate my charity handout on a bench by a roundabout outside the village, trying to ignore an overview of the very lumpy terrain that lay in wait. A silver-haired chap on an expensive-looking road bike clocked me as he passed; after a cartoon-grade double take he did a full circuit of the roundabout and pulled up at my feet. Off came his suave Marcello Mastroianni shades, exposing his suave Marcello Mastroianni face.

  ‘Has one hundred years and without gear-change,’ I began, wheeling out some new catchphrases, then wheeling them back in when it became plain he wasn’t paying attention. He leaned his bike against the bench, placed his hairy brown hands on his shaven brown thighs and stooped down to inspect the Hirondelle.

  ‘Incredibile,’ he said, shaking his silvered head. ‘Tutto incredibile.’ Then he rose, turned to me and spread his arms wide. I stood up, and leaned uneasily into the proffered embrace. As he’d just cycled up all those hairpins in the midday sun, and in a sleeveless, unzipped gilet, this was a very warm place to be, and a slightly moist one. ‘Coraggio,’ he breathed into my ear, one arm tight round my waist and the other berating my shoulder blades hard and often. ‘Bravo, coraggio.’ At length he released me, remounted and bid farewell with a brisk, military nod.

  That day I had begun to chronicle my progress via voice recordings, rasped into my phone on the move. This soon became standard practice, but it seems I had yet to master the technique, because after dictating a shockingly dull appraisal of some abandoned glass factory, I failed to press the stop button before dropping the phone into the front pocket of my jersey. The consequence was a covert forty-eight-minute aural slice of my journey, which is sure to prove a game-changing archival asset for anyone who doesn’t like me.

  The first thing that strikes the listener is the constant and maddening shake, rattle an
d roll of the Hirondelle in motion, the difficult sound of an elderly machine at war with itself. Focused on the ongoing miracle of my self-healing knee, I clearly hadn’t noticed that just two days since St Fabio had done his stuff, Number 7 was once more coming apart at its rusty seams. A mammoth descent suggests a spin drier full of gravel and bottle tops, rounded off with the protracted, creaky halt of an old locomotive ending its final journey. Extraneous mechanical noises regularly pass through the soundscape: the whining drone of a Vespa, articulated roars and rumbles, car after speeding, honking car.

  Then there are my own sporadic contributions, an unwholesome medley that I now present in full:

  ‘Fuck socks.’

  Flob.

  Yawn.

  ‘Ya-hey!’

  Flob.

  ‘Oh JESUS.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? I want to go to the centro.’

  ‘Row, row, ROW YOUR BOAT, gently down the . . . WHAT THE NAKED FUCK ARE YOU DOING, YOU DAFT OLD SOW? THAT WAS TERRIBLE FUCKING DRIVING.’

  ‘Dear oh dear.’

  Long yawn.

  ‘I really am massively, massively hungry.’

  ‘Ow, that was bad, OW.’

  Truly enormous yawn.

  ‘Coming through, thank you, ladies, ciao bella.’

  ‘Oh, wow, there it is.’

  And, wow, there it was – the twinkly, sun-spangled Mediterranean. I coasted to a halt by the railings on Savona’s elevated promenade, and looked down at the late-afternoon beach scene: a fat dad wrestling the air out of his lilo, a vanilla-faced tantrum, many irksomely brilliant displays of gel-haired keepy-uppy. For the first time it seemed like I’d come a properly long way, from ski slopes to seaside, from pines to palms, right across two large maps. I turned to the brooding peaks behind and suddenly felt a surge of proprietorial conquest – that was my horizon, those were my hills, this was my beach. I’ve defeated them all with my own fair legs, I thought, then realised I really needed to eat something.

  Two snack-shack paninis later I was off eastwards down the Riviera seafront, now gawping up at a ten-deck cruise ship, now weaving through a mob of flip-flopped Scandinavians, now catching my reflection in the window of an amusement arcade and understanding why mothers kept pulling their kids away as I approached.

  The coast road wasn’t nearly as flat as I’d have liked, hewn sometimes high into the cliffs and regularly meandering to face a stiffening breeze that propelled eye-stinging particles of sea through my goggle shields. I swooped into and laboured through a very Italian assortment of Riviera towns, some full of bougainvillea cascades and heart-stoppingly desirable cliff-side villas, others all derelict warehousing and football-shirted goatherds driving scabby flocks along dried-up river beds. In between were stretches of beach, a gruelling psychological challenge. Why couldn’t I be lain out under a parasol with a word search over my face? Almost everyone out there looked too fat to deserve it. For once I had it worse than the 1914 boys, kind of: having started out from Cuneo at 3.45 a.m., they would have pedalled past these beaches during the less inviting breakfast period. And in a refreshing downpour, the jammy bastards.

  Having savoured it at trundling close-quarters, I can recall almost every inch of my passage through the Italian countryside in photographic detail. Cities, though, passed in a panicked blur, knuckles whitened around bars, eyes taking in nothing beyond the murderously wayward traffic. I can tell you almost nothing of Genoa, not even my route through it: engulfed by flyovers and speeding metal boxes the sat-nav lost signal, so I just went with the flow, swept helplessly along like a pooh-stick in a tsunami. After an hour I washed up at a suburb named Nervi, coaxed out a hollow laugh and called it a day.

  The hotel I found was fantastically schizo, a Renaissance villa with a palm-lined gravelled drive and marble balustrades, which appeared not to have been updated, redecorated or possibly even cleaned since the Hirondelle rolled off the St Etienne production line. A ceiling fan like a Lancaster propeller almost brushed both walls of my room, which was otherwise dominated by an aged basin the size of a cattle trough. The bathroom, just a humiliating towel-wrapped trudge away down a wonky corridor, was a wonky corridor. I sluiced my kit in the trough, strung it up on the ancient shutters and went out to bring the day to a Nervi ending.

  The town’s otherwise rather lovely piazza had a thunderous, decaying flyover slung across it – a popular downtown look in these parts – but I wandered down to the seafront and found a delightfully inviting seafood restaurant, looking out at the moonlit Med and patrolled by waiters in white dinner jackets. I surely deserved a reward for not being smeared along the wall of a Genoese underpass, so ordered double chips with my burger at the bar next door. Palming this lot into my face while reading a book about an old bike race didn’t seem like the look of love, but that didn’t stop me being pestered by one of those rose-in-a-plastic-tube salesmen. I told him I had brakes of cork and he went away.

  Paolo’s roll-call of the stage-one fallen read like some sporting premonition of the ghastly war that lay just months ahead. The cannon-fodder aspiranti had been decimated, along with two-thirds of the independent isolati. Fonso was left with just two Stucchi teammates, and the pre-eminent Bianchi team lost almost half its riders. Most shocking of all was the total annihilation of the strongly favoured Atala squad, led by Lucien Petit-Breton. None of its six riders finished the stage, amongst them the first British rider to ever start a Giro, Frederick Henry Grubb.

  An eccentric and rather difficult Londoner, Grubb had made his name by setting a number of long-distance solo records: his time of 5 hours 9’ 41” for the 105-mile ride to Brighton and back stood for fourteen years. This was an age when being a non-smoking teetotaller marked Grubb out as a sporting maverick, and he went the extra mile by riding in the colours of the Vegetarian Cycling Club. As ‘the most talked-of cyclist in Britain’, Grubb was the first name on the team list for the only cycling event at the 1912 Olympics, a murderous but entirely era-appropriate 315km time trial round the lakes of Stockholm. Grubb’s silver medal – he won another for the British team’s overall contribution – attracted the attention of pro teams, and in 1914 he was finally persuaded to take the money and ride. ‘F. H. Grubb has returned his amateur licence to the National Cyclists’ Union,’ reported Cycling magazine. ‘He will take part in all the big Continental road races, and should prove a very worthy British representative abroad. He is twenty-five years of age, and scales 12st stripped, and when he gets accustomed to the Continental methods there is no reason he should not shine as a star of the very first order in the professional ranks.’

  The Giro represented Grubb’s first experience not just of professional racing, but of cycling in a pack of other riders, rather than alone against the clock. His bid to get accustomed to the Continental methods would end in retirement at Susa after just eleven hours on the road – undone not by the insufferable conditions, but his own arrogant aloofness. ‘Conceited and temperamental, Grubb quickly created many enemies on the road,’ reads one Italian assessment of his experience.

  For a sport that’s about destroying opponents by any means necessary, road-race cycling has always been curiously companionable. There’s a brothers-in-arms unity in all that communal suffering, and an honour-amongst-thieves complicity in all the devious means of reducing it. It never pays to properly fall out with your rivals: you never know when you might need a bit of help in a breakaway, or a drink when your bidons are empty. As a foreigner, Grubb was already a target – indeed, none of the five non-Italians in the field would survive that first stage. As a wine-averse, hoity-toity Olympian lettuce-muncher who failed to work with other riders or in any way fraternise with them, his fate was sealed.

  Everyone suffered some form of equipment failure that day, but only Grubb’s ‘mechanicals’ were the result of enemy action. He returned home chuntering bitterly about ‘the Continentals’ and their beastly ways: ‘They would stick an inflator in your spokes as soon as look at you.’ Disi
llusionment was instant and impressively profound: after an eleven-hour career as a professional cyclist, Grubb retired – aware that having returned his amateur licence, this meant he would never be able to compete in any sort of race ever again. Instead, he set himself up as a lightweight frame designer and builder. ‘At first he struggled in business due to his unlikeable character,’ records one online authority, but Freddie Grubb bikes were still being sold in the late Seventies.

  I toasted Friendless Freddie with a Sambuca – along with that burger, it’s what he wouldn’t have wanted – then walked back through a delicate sprinkling of raindrops. In the alley behind the hotel I passed an alfresco mass, or possibly some foully Satanic call to arms, being delivered by a droning little baldy to a semicircle of shiny-eyed acolytes. I pressed awkwardly through the chanting throng, wondering how Alfonso Calzolari would have interpreted this manifestly significant episode. Unusually devout and superstitious even by native standards, two days before the race began Fonso had visited a Bologna prophetess, miracle healer and all-round holy superwoman named Sampira. Placing her hands on his head, Sampira announced that great glory lay ahead for their hometown: its archbishop would be the next Pope and its recently founded football team would win the national championship.