Gironimo! Page 14

  ‘Um . . .?’ said Fonso.

  ‘Sorry, yeah, and after enduring untold suffering and facing death and that, our proud city’s sole representative in the race will claim victory in the 1914 Giro d’Italia. That’s you, by the way.’

  Almost sixty years later, Calzolari trembled as he related this prophecy to Paolo Facchinetti. You won’t be surprised to learn that Sampira went on to score a predicto-hat-trick, though Bologna FBC did keep her waiting for eleven years.

  My own future looked rather less glorious when I woke up four hours later with a wet face: horizontal rain was gusting in through the shutters, and the small gaps between my formerly drying clothes. Things were about to get 1914 on my ass.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 11

  (Milan–Cuneo, 420km)

  Angelo GREMO 17:13:55

  Carlo DURANDO +13:55

  Alfonso CALZOLARI +13:55

  Timothy MOORE +9:45:10

  Stage starters: 81

  Stage finishers: 37

  * * *

  1 Please see the appendix for a full breakdown of results and a list of riders.

  CHAPTER 9

  The true pleasure of the bicycle is freedom. You may go where you wish and when, stop wherever takes your fancy, as carefree as a horse rider, not confined and constrained by railway carriages and timetables. The bicycle now allows us to conquer space and time . . .

  MARINATED IN GRIM irony, this was the quote with which Paolo Facchinetti chose to introduce his account of the utterly appalling 1914 Giro. When the critic and social commentator Alfredo Oriani penned his poetic eulogy in 1897, he was articulating a widely held faith in the horizon-busting, spirit-unshackling potential of a machine that another Italian writer dubbed ‘the poor man’s spaceship’. Compare and contrast Oriani’s rosy insight with Alfred Jarry’s dystopian novel The Supermale, published just four years later, which describes a 10,000-mile race between teams of riders literally bolted to five-man bicycles – their ‘external skeletons’ – and fuelled with a generally fatal cocktail of alcohol and strychnine known as ‘Perpetual Motion Food’.

  Jarry appears to have been a gigantically slappable Pete Doherty-pattern pain in the arse, who referred to himself in the royal plural, insisted on calling his own bicycle ‘that which rolls’, and once expressed his love of absinthe by riding through Paris painted green, firing two revolvers in the air. However, unlike Pete Doherty, Jarry was a true visionary: beyond the artistic overstatement, his dreadful forecast of cycling’s competitive future proved compellingly prescient.

  It was partly the manufacturers’ fault, and partly our great-great-grandparents’. Hell-for-leather track racing still had its appeal – six riders died in velodrome crashes in 1907 alone – but bicycles were increasingly considered long-distance tourers, not speed machines. Gruelling endurance events promoted the hardy reliability of this new breed of bicycles, and fed into a burgeoning public fascination with the spectacle of drawn-out suffering.

  Mankind’s most conspicuous physical asset is neither speed nor strength, but stamina. We’re built for marathons, not sprints. Anthropologists agree that our fledgling species prospered through ‘persistence hunting’ – the capture of four-legged prey by pushing them to exhaustion over long distances. Most mammals need to offload the dangerous heat of intense exercise by stopping to pant; only we and horses can sweat it out on the move. Our sub-Saharan forebears were no match for an antelope in a savannah dash, but could gradually haul one in over many hours in the midday sun, hare-and-tortoise style.

  The impulse to express this unique talent for endurance built throughout the Victorian age. In 1871, brothers John and Robert Naylor became the first to walk from John O’ Groats to Land’s End. Four years later, Captain Matthew Webb dived off the pier at Dover and splashed away towards France. (After this famous success, Webb went on to fashion a career from unlikely feats of aquatic endurance. He floated in a tank of water for 128 hours, and ten years after his Channel triumph, attempted to swim across the rapids at the foot of Niagara Falls, an endeavour perceptively described as suicidal.)

  The craze for exploring the limits of human stamina came of age at the 1908 London Olympics, when the first marathon was held. ‘As I led the field into the stadium the pain became impossible to bear, and I fell to my knees,’ said Dorando Pietri, reluctantly reliving this event’s terrible finale. ‘I got up automatically and launched myself a few more paces forwards. I no longer knew if I was heading towards my goal or away from it. They tell me that I fell another five or six times.’ Yet for the spectators, Pietri’s delirious, stumbling indignity was as good as it got. The marathon’s arcane official distance – 26 miles 385 yards – was cemented that year, the consequence of a route specifically laid out to allow royal enthusiasts the fullest view of the ongoing agony: the race started at Windsor Castle and ended in front of the royal box at White City Stadium.

  Watching Pietri wobble towards coma, the very excited Queen Alexandra ‘beat a tattoo on the floor of the stand unrestrainedly with her umbrella’. All around her, the Italian runner’s grotesque ordeal was savoured with a baying relish that would have made the Colosseum blush. Arthur Conan Doyle spoke fondly of ‘this fascinating struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame’. ‘The most thrilling athletic finish since that Marathon in ancient Sparta,’ gushed the New York Times the following day, ‘where Pheidippides fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died.’ Pietri was disqualified for being helped over the line, but the next day Queen Alexandra awarded him a special silver cup in recognition of his entertaining near-death experience.

  The new sport of professional road-race cycling appealed like no other to these unedifying base instincts. ‘In the ideal bicycle race,’ wrote Henri Desgrange in 1903, ‘there would only be one finisher.’ As the creator of that year’s inaugural Tour de France, Desgrange had a fair crack at bringing this grim vision to life: the 2,500km itinerary accounted for two-thirds of the field, and in his post-victory interviews, La Française-Diamant’s Maurice Garin could speak only of pain and distress. ‘A single thing sticks in my memory: I see myself, from the start of the Tour de France, like a bull pierced by the toreador’s spears, pulling them along with him, never able to rid himself of them.’ Prompted to expand, Garin croaked, ‘I cried all the way from Lyon to Marseille.’

  Garin’s convict-of-the-road ordeal seemed vividly reminiscent of the infernal, endless, hamster-wheel torture foretold by Alfred Jarry, though he was at least spared the fate of Jarry’s winner, whose reward as the triumphant ‘supermale’ was to be shackled to an electric love machine, which then literally shagged him to death.

  But one cycling race came closer than any other to realising Jarry’s awful prognostication, punishing its competitors with a brutality Desgrange may have dreamed of but never quite mustered, and it’s perhaps no surprise that it was held in the land that fathered both Maurice Garin and Dorando Pietri. No sporting challenge of the post-Spartan era can hold a candle to the solar fireball of suffering that was the 1914 Giro d’Italia, which covered 3,162km in circumstances that made Garin’s boo-hoo ride to Marseille look like a charity fun run. How it tickled me that the victorious supermale of this attritional apocalypse was a pint-sized Bologna bedmaker.

  Getting rained on as I slept was at least a small step towards empathetic hardship with the 1914 Giro’s storm-tossed, frostbitten survivors. Over breakfast a rather more impressive menace revealed itself: there had been a military coup. Wherever Italians gather to eat you will find a colossal television hoisted above them, and I looked up from my small mountain of Perpetual Motion Krispies to see this one filled by a heavily decorated nine-star general. His face was sombre and so was his tone. ‘Fellow Italians,’ he was probably saying, ‘there is amongst us a British cyclist unaccustomed to Continental methods. You know what to do.’ Then he strode across to a big map, and pointed at several stylised lightning zigzags superimposed on Genoa and its environ
s.

  Later I came to love the roster of Pinochet-uniformed air-force officers inexplicably hired to do the breakfast weather on Rai Uno, the main state channel. But that day, Group Captain Grim had nothing but bad tidings: storm clouds were unmetaphorically gathering over northwestern Italy. I stuffed my jersey full of bread and strode briskly to the dry-goods larder, where the Hirondelle had slept chained to a crate of beer. We had a tempest to outrun.

  Up from the sea to a town perched high in the coastal cliffs, down to the sea, back up again – unhelpful terrain for a getaway. Thunder rumbled from behind; I dropped my head, tightened my fists round the wooden bar grips and tried to force the pace. Doing so without gears meant a journey into the red zone. Worryingly vivid images marched unbidden into my head: the Polish painter’s disembodied smirk; a toasted club sandwich on a bed of prawns; Alfonso, out of the saddle, number 18 flapping on his filthy back, caning past without a glance. No surprise to hear a demented mantra grunt forth from my sagging jaw: ‘Cat-piss tarp, cat-piss tarp,’ in a monotone loop of the Postman Pat theme.

  I came back from the dead at Sestri Levante, courtesy of sugary fluid and a thousand stone-baked calories. Slowly the scrag end of the Riviera came into focus, an Italian Skegness with ranks of empty sunloungers marooned between container terminals. It seemed as flat as Lincolnshire, too: how glad I was to have put those dreadful coastal cliffs behind me, and to have stayed ahead of the black clouds that now shrouded them. I pulled out Paolo, ready as ever to take solace in how much worse it was in 1914.

  Stage two had begun before dawn in lawless chaos. As the riders saddled up outside the Cuneo tavern where they’d gathered at 3.45 a.m. for breakfast, the landlady was heard loudly complaining that half of them hadn’t paid. Her grievances rose to furious yells when she noticed that all the hams and salamis hanging up in the rafters to cure were now conspicuous by their absence. The innkeeperess ran out into the street just as the starter fired his pistol, giving her a rearward view of thirty-seven jerseys with some very funny lumps in them disappearing at speed. The high-minded, herbivorous F. H. Grubb would have despised this episode in its every detail, had he not already given up and gone home.

  Conditions remained tirelessly appalling. A cocktail of fog, rain, mud and bone-chilling cold had everyone hitting the deck: Girardengo after running over a dog, Alfonso after slamming knee-first into a guard-rail, an incident that would add a little top-note of pain to every pedal revolution from then to the finish. Up the coast out of Savona a galloping wind hurled facefuls of sea at the riders, and at his team feeding-station just outside Genoa, Girardengo – in the lead but paying heavily for his effort – stopped for seven long minutes to devour everything on the table. Calzolari and two Milanese riders took the opportunity to escape, pulling out a lead through towns that were freshly familiar to me in Paolo’s roll call: Nervi, Rapallo, Chiavari, Sestri Ponente, Poi il Bracco.

  Then the Bracco. The Aubisque, the Izoard, the Galibier . . . I was unhappily aware from my Tour ride that a definite article isn’t something you want to see attached to a geographical obstacle. I remounted, let out a rippling Fanta belch, and pedalled off into the tranquil early afternoon, hoping to get all my serious uphill pushing done while everyone was still slumped over their thirds at Mamma’s lunch table.

  Italy never smells of nothing. In the airless dry heat of days gone by I’d inhaled aromatic nosefuls of herbs and barbecue. Now, after a little splash of rain to freshen up the biological juices, it was shit and death. Outside Sestri, the stench of brewing nappies gave way first to slow-cooked farmyard ordure, and then – as the road wound ominously upwards – extra-mature roadkill. Some kind of weaselly thing, a flat cat, many hedgehogs and a poor little bloated mole, its fat pink feet raised to the grey heavens. At 300m I saw my first ex-snake, its skin deeply worked into an aerosoled exhortation to Damiano Cunego, a celebrated Italian rider. Any doubts that this climb had been recently massed with indigenous cycling fans were banished by the tarmac artwork I rode over round the next corner: a jaunty parade of spunking cocks.

  Alfonso Calzolari made his name on the Passo del Bracco. When he told Paolo the story over half a century later, the details were still vivid in his mind. The moment he turned to face his two Milanese rivals on the lower slopes, and saw – even through the masks of mud – their deep grimaces of fatigued distress. How, thus emboldened, he pulled the trigger and rode off. By the head of the pass Fonso the Dead had built a six-minute advantage, and would extend that steadily over the balance of the stage.

  Calzolari had set out from Cuneo in third place, fourteen minutes off the lead and still an unknown to most Italians. Astonished by his own performance, he crossed the stage-two finish line laughing in disbelief – an exercise repeated up and down the country once the full results were published. Alfonso Calzolari now headed the Giro’s general classification by over an hour, and his hands were already being pressed into a metaphorical square of wet concrete on Italian cycling’s walk of fame.

  I paid what homage I could with a mojo-battering slog up the Bracco, or anyway large parts of it. Six hundred and fifteen metres sounded miserably unimpressive, even when I reminded myself that the climb had begun at zero metres, down by a sea that was – oh – now lost in a curtain of black rain. The first fat drops hit the tarmac just as I sped past the foot of the Bracco in the Hirondelle’s default runaway manner.

  ‘Al controllo di La Spezia . . .’ Paolo’s words, for no sensible reason, had fired within me an irresistible determination to reach La Spezia that night. So the 1914 riders passed through a checkpoint there – so what? If only I’d thought this as I ground soddenly past hotel after dry and welcoming hotel. A bad time for the day’s many hills to catch up with me: even after the old milk ’n’ choc pick-me-up I was still weaving about the road. A sign fuzzed out of the downpour; I wiped rain off my goggles with a greasy glove and squinted at it. ‘LA SPEZIA 7.’ Right, I thought, failing to stifle an extravagant yawn, I can do this.

  Fatigue is a generous contributor to the cause of road-traffic accidents, and not just on four wheels. The steady upturn in Grand Tour wipeouts over recent years can be most plausibly explained by the clampdown on EPO and its ilk: in the Armstrong years a peloton could ride hard all day with no lapse in concentration, coordination or all the other mental symptoms of exhaustion. Watch a stage race these days and you can expect regular spills or pile-ups, especially in the run-in. When the heavens open at the Giro, carnage generally ensues, with riders sliding painfully about on the tarmac at every downhill corner. In the 2013 edition, Sir Bradley of Wiggo suffered such a crisis of confidence after one wet wipeout that he thereafter, in his own words, ‘descended like a girl’, losing long minutes and any hope of victory. (Lord Wiggo retired two stages later – for a handy encapsulation of the relative challenges posed by Tour and Giro, consider this: in five attempts at the latter, Wiggo has finished no higher than fortieth.)

  Anyway, the point of all this is that the 7km that lay between me and La Spezia were all very, very steeply downhill, two-thirds of them soaking and the rest enclosed in a hectic tunnel that I can still see when I close my eyes. Still hear it too: the echoing judder and scream of my wine corks, the madly clattering bidons, the terrible Doppler blare of passing horns, the gutless, defeated whimper that somehow segues into a drawn-out vocal preparation for sleep. I have been more tired, and more scared, but never at the same time.

  You know how sometimes you pitch up in a strange town and just instantly fall for it, knowing that however long you spend there won’t be enough? La Spezia was not one of those. I suppose it just looked like what it was: a big port that took a fearful pasting in the war, and was then rebuilt by distracted Italians out of reinforced porridge. It didn’t seem worth trying to find anywhere nice to stay, not that I could have summoned the wherewithal for a search. Thus I groggily sloshed my way to the station and stumbled into a hotel that looked as tired as I felt.

  ‘Ah, bici antica! Bici di Binda!’


  Not a bad guess: Alfredo Binda won a stack of Giros in the Twenties. Ongoing vocabulary issues prevented me from correcting the proprietor, a tubby old gent in a vest, but I had a few new phrases to try out. ‘I am sorry, saddle not original,’ I told him as he handed me my key. ‘Bicycle in the room of me, is possible?’

  The room of me proved unastonishingly disagreeable. Mosquitoes lined up in wait all around its scabrous walls, all but three of them too high up for a man standing on a chair to get at with a shoe. Drifts of hairy lint were piled up along the skirting boards, and the dismal sloosh of rainy traffic seemed louder than it had been four floors down.

  Undisputed lowlight was my antique en suite, which incorporated an imaginatively repulsive shower/bidet combo. I climbed lethargically into it, yanked my kit off and hit the taps: a mighty jet from the intimate spray nozzle shot bum-water straight into my face. This really is no place to linger, I thought a short while after, slumping bonelessly onto the grubby bedspread and instantly crashing out.

  Twelve hours later La Spezia ensured I came away with the worst possible impression, pitching me unfed into the breakneck obstacle course of the morning rush hour. Darting, ever-erratic scooters buzzed me into collapsed drain covers. Lorries blasted hydrocarbons into my face at point-blank range. I was pursued through two tunnels by the bendy bus of death. Following some evident shift in the street hierarchy since my last visit to Italy, pedestrians now showed up as serious players in the irresponsible urban-transit scene: newly empowered and congenitally Italian, they swaggered out into the mad traffic at will, protected by a forcefield of cocksure bravado. My brakes, such as they were, proved to have no respect for this forcefield. I’d like to pretend this upset me.