Gironimo! Page 2

  The hour record was, I reflected, something riders generally attempted as a finale to their sporting careers. This would be the crowning achievement for what passed as mine. I was going to bury myself one last time, before someone else did it for me.

  Obviously, had I known that Lance Armstrong would end the year thrashing himself ever deeper into the quicksands of disgrace, I could have spared myself – and more importantly spared you – everything that now follows. Blame him. These days everyone does.

  *

  How very rewarding it would have been to have homed in on my quest in appropriate fashion, perhaps through a series of encounters in derelict velodromes that led to a rasped first-hand account of suffering and glory from some leathery veteran, ideally on his deathbed. However, for an impatient man in the age of Google, that was never going to happen.

  ‘Hardest ever grand tour’

  Click.

  About 3,900,000 results (0.38 seconds)

  www.bikeraceinfo.com/giro/giro1914.html

  ‘The 1914 Giro was without a doubt the hardest-ever Grand Tour. Only eight riders were able to finish this staggeringly difficult race.’

  Confirmation of this stark verdict was delivered a week later, in the pages of a slim account of the event, embellished with some evocative photographs. It was written by a veteran Italian sports journalist in his native language, which presented certain difficulties: in 1985 I signed up to a course in Business Italian in order to gaze at an extremely beautiful young woman, then noticed she had really hairy forearms and quit halfway through. Astonishingly, this dried-up puddle of knowledge proved sufficient to translate Paolo Facchinetti’s title, though online assistance was required with the subtitle and the rear-cover blurb.

  THE 1914 TOUR OF ITALY: TOUGHEST OF ALL TIME

  Those Magnificent Men on their Pedalling Machines [translator’s note: may sound better in Italian]

  Eighty-one riders set off, and just eight finished. Terrible weather conditions, appalling roads and 400km stages proved too much for even the greatest champions of ‘il ciclismo eroica’ . . .

  Il ciclismo eroica, as I was to discover, succinctly embodied the spirit I hoped to recapture. In recent years, Italians have developed a powerful affection for their ‘heroic age of cycling’, when the sport ruled supreme in Italy, and Italian riders led the world. Between the 1920s and early Fifties, Italians won almost as many Tours de France as did the French, while maintaining a monopoly of their own national tour, the Giro, which had cemented itself as cycling’s second-most prestigious race, and first-most gruelling.

  That the toughest race in history should have been a Giro seemed inevitable now that I considered the event’s fearsome reputation. A few recent verdicts:

  ‘The Giro d’Italia: Why Grown Men Will Cry’, Peloton magazine, on the 2011 edition.

  ‘A massive, brutal physical overload,’ Dan Hunt, Team GB’s cycling endurance coach, 2012.

  ‘There’s so much more carnage than at the Tour. You keep thinking: “Why on earth did I choose to do this bloody race?”’ Sir Bradley Wiggins.

  Of course my challenge would wind up being a Giro. The race that Lance Armstrong – hah! – dared enter only once, and then finished eleventh. The race that raised the curtain on Eddy Merckx’s Grand Tour reign in 1968, and brought it down in 1974. And the race that introduced the world to Fausto Coppi, a template for tragic heroism and one of the most exquisitely flawed sporting geniuses of all time: a five-time winner in the Forties and Fifties who received a two-month prison sentence for adultery, gaily blew the lid off the sport’s endemic amphetamine habit and died of malaria at forty.

  As an unassuming specimen with ideas above his sporting station, I’d always held a candle for Fausto, a beaky, pigeon-chested rake of a man whose physique made no sense until you put him on a bike. That silky, tireless pedalling action bagged him his first Giro at twenty, and an hour record that stood for twelve years. At thirty-two, riding towards his second Tour de France win, he set a time up Alpe d’Huez that no one bettered for three full decades.

  As a mark of Coppi’s extraordinary, transcendental achievements, my father – a man with absolutely no interest in sport of any kind – recently identified him alone in a photographic quiz of athletic legends that included Pele, Björn Borg and Muhammad Ali. (In the interests of full disclosure, my father spent part of his childhood in Rome, and was living there when Fausto passed through the city en route to his debut Giro win: ‘Viva Coppi was painted on half the walls in town,’ he told me. ‘Though to be honest, I only recognise his face from the adultery trial.’)

  So the Giro d’Italia was exactly the sort of epic challenge I was after: a hard race for proper heroes, which you could win on guts alone without looking the part, which was everything Lance Armstrong wasn’t. I’d just begun to warm to my task when I made the mistake of opening Paolo Facchinetti’s account of its uniquely onerous eighth edition.

  The 1914 ‘Giro of records’ in numbers:

  Longest ever average stage length: 396.25km

  Smallest number of finishers: 8

  Highest percentage of retirements: 90%

  Longest individual stage by distance: 430km, Lucca–Rome

  Longest individual stage by time: 19h 34’ 47”, Bari–L’Aquila

  The Bullet Points of Doom in Paolo’s foreword abruptly put my planned endeavour into perspective – on the Spinal Tap scale, too much fucking perspective. An average stage length of nearly 400km? On my Tour ride, 100 a day had almost done for me. And back then I was nearer thirty than forty. Younger than the oldest Tour winner. Younger, much younger, than David Beckham when he signed up for a swansong at Paris St Germain. Now I was the wrong side of forty, the extremely wrong side, the one hard up against fifty. At thirty-five you can still cut it. At forty-seven you’ve forgotten where you put the scissors.

  The best I could manage for inspiration was Bernard ‘The Executioner’ Hopkins, who at the age of forty-six had just won the IBO and WBC light-heavyweight titles. But though Bernard made a great case for the physical feats one could still achieve in late middle age, he made a very poor one for their cost. Here he is addressing journalists before a subsequent title defence: ‘I just found out a month ago, the doctor will be here before the press conference hopefully to explain this, but I must confess that I am not human. I am an alien. No, seriously. I’m from Mars.’

  Try as I might to suppress it, the memory of my one significant two-wheeled undertaking of the previous decade now reared its putrid head. In 2007, the year the Tour de France started in London, I rode to Canterbury along the route of the first stage. My preparatory training programme reprised the schedule that had done me proud seven years earlier: do absolutely nothing, and get through on will-power alone, the ‘suitcase of courage’ that veteran cycling commentator Paul Sherwen so memorably references a rider digging into as he toils through adversity. In sedentary middle age, as I discovered to my cost, this metaphorical receptacle was more a ‘handbag of sick’. With that emptied out onto an Ashford lay-by, I had nothing left in the tank. Many unspeakable hours later I crawled onto a train home, fumbling chips into my slack and pallid gob and vacantly submitting to a new reality: I had now passed the age where determination could stand in for preparation.

  Possibly I was even too old to prepare. A couple of years after that game-changing debacle I went mountain-boarding with my teenage son, rolling down a Surrey hillside on knobbly-wheeled skateboards. As we never got up above a trundle it didn’t seem like I was asking for trouble, but I got it anyway. An innocuous rollover on our final run somehow severed an important shoulder muscle – the one that lets you go about your daily business without imitating a 498-year-old Chelsea pensioner. It took four months to heal, ample time to contemplate a looming future of age-related infirmity. ‘There’s Mr Moore over by the telly: poor chap had a bit of a tumble last week. No, Mr Moore, that’s Countdown – the Tour de France doesn’t start for six months. No, months. MONTHS. Just give him
a nod, he likes that.’

  Every physical undertaking emphasised that these days I should be taking it easy, rather than contemplating the polar opposite. A year of weekly badminton sessions brought on tennis elbow and a dicky knee, while doing nothing to deflate my horrid first-stage man-boobs, those pert little cherry-topped David Cameroons. I turned our mattress over, as I do every spring, then couldn’t get off it for two days.

  That should have been the end of the whole daft business. Retracing the 1914 Giro was, quite plainly, no contest for old men. But there was a counterbalancing aspect to my planned endeavour, one that played very much to the strengths of a male’s middle years.

  CHAPTER 2

  EVER SINCE PAOLO’S book arrived, I’d been captivated by its illustration of the Stucchi road bike that won the epic race. Humble didn’t begin to describe this rhombus of slender tubing, not so much low-tech as no tech: a gearless machine with chunky drop handlebars and a stout saddle, clearly plucked at random from the company’s Milan production line. I smiled every time I looked at it: pure, simple, honest, the graceful antithesis of today’s six-grand pro bikes, with their stubby, artless geometry dictated by drag coefficients, material science and biomechanics. After a while that smile hardened into a frown of covetous determination. With a bike like that I could pay proper tribute to Eddy and Chris’s finest hours, to il ciclismo eroica. I could stick it to Generation Armstrong: out with energy gels and titanium, in with heavy steel and sarnies. Spending months trying to get in shape for this monstrous enterprise would be witheringly dull, and probably pointless. No, I would for now focus on doing what people of my age and gender do best – stockpiling rusty old shite.

  Initial enquiries mixed good news with bad. Hundred-year-old racing bicycles were more common than I had anticipated, but also more expensive. eBays on either side of the Atlantic offered restored examples at a grand and a half upwards. A complete but very distressed ‘barn find’ wouldn’t cost me less than £700. Italians, as I was simultaneously excited and disappointed to discover, nurtured an unrivalled attachment to bicycles from their golden age. Excited because I could already picture myself riding a wave of warm nostalgia through cobbled hill towns, and disappointed because this wouldn’t be happening with a period Italian machine between my knees. Stucchi was a now-defunct marque whose survivors all seemed to be on public or private display. It was the same with the Mainos, Gannas, Globos and Atalas that had lined up alongside them on the 1914 start line. The closest I found for sale was a 1913 Bianchi, Stucchi’s bitterest rival and the only firm still in business today. The pedals didn’t match and it was priced at €3,400.

  At length, ignorance and creeping dismay had compelled me to broach the final frontier of male desperation: I asked for help. One website kept cropping up when I Googled period manufacturers, a Gallic forum of old-bike enthusiasts that styled itself TontonVelo (‘Uncle Pushbike’ – in French it probably sounds less like the nickname of a wanted paedophile). These tontons knew their stuff but were refreshingly relaxed about its application. For every fanatically authentic, nut-and-bolt collector’s rebuild there was a tale of some knackered old crock unearthed in a neighbour’s shed, doused in WD40 and ridden to the shops until it broke in half.

  As the nation that invented the bicycle, held the first ever bicycle race and still hosts the globally pre-eminent bicycling contest, I had imagined that France would venerate its related relics with the loftiest respect and price tags to match. I had imagined wrong. As the sheer number of barn-find stories on TontonVelo suggested, and as the incorporated discussion of comparatively modest euro-sums confirmed, there was nowhere better on earth to buy an extremely old bike. I registered on the forum, fired up Google Translate and posted a request for assistance in the ‘pre-1945 racing bicycles’ section.

  Almost at once a private message arrived from a poster who called himself Roger Rivière. I rather wished he hadn’t: Rivière was a rider who famously came to grief in the 1960 Tour de France, plunging through the barriers and down a mountainside while off his face on pills, and spending the rest of his days in a wheelchair. Anyway, this new Roger kindly alerted me to a forthcoming vintage bike festival in northern France, where he said I might be able to source a period machine. He also, more arrestingly, provided a link to a classified advert on leboncoin, his nation’s leading online craporium. It was Max’s, and offered the aforementioned mountain of aged parts for €400.

  Having already spoken to Max, Roger reckoned this to be quite the bargain. Along with a great assortment of random spares, the collection included the full component pieces of two venerable machines. One was a 1940s racing bike, in which I had no interest beyond its appealing bonus inclusion. The other, though, was a La Française-Diamant. Having inspected an emailed photo, Roger could date this frame no more precisely than 1910–20, but that would do for me. I didn’t know much about the marque, but I knew enough: Maurice Garin, winner of the inaugural Tour de France, had ridden to victory on a La Française-Diamant.

  My heart leapt, then distended several neighbouring organs when I Googled up the stirring image of a grandly moustachioed Garin astride his garlanded LFD at the 1903 winner’s pageant. I’d wanted an Italian bike, but surely nothing could trump the daddy-champion’s chosen steed. In my excitement I immediately booked a ferry ticket, then went straight outside and removed the passenger seat from my car to make space for all that wonderful booty. This took me four hours, which seemed a poor omen for the rather more complex engineering that lay ahead.

  Anticipation and supermarket energy drink had fuelled me all the way to the end of Brittany, and over-proof trepidation kept my synapses a-tingle as I took stock of Max’s stack. Most of it, I’m pretty sure he told me – all his English seemed to have been used up in that welcoming salvo – had come from the back room of a local bike shop that closed when its elderly owner retired. Wrestling my mind away from the appalling mechanical challenge it presented, I could see in this pile beauty and fascination aplenty. There was a brown paper sack full of winsomely engraved brass bells; a magnificent pair of ancient handlebars, splayed and sinuous like a detail from some old Parisian Metro entrance; a couple of hundred spokes in their original inter-war packaging; a tin bucket groaning with oxidised sprockets. Half a dozen wooden wheel rims, a crate full of brake bits and a shoebox of pedal parts, a mummified assortment of leather saddles and toolbags . . . tip into the mix those square brass bolts and a thousand more mysteries and this much was plain: I had myself a big load of really old bike stuff. Max, a compact chap of middle years with a trim grey ’tache, raised his eyebrows at me and smiled again. ‘Il y a beaucoup,’ I said.

  In French as rusty as the bits piled up before us I asked Max how he’d acquired this motley collection, and why he was now selling it. To introduce his explanation he led me through the garage and into a side cellar dominated by a gleamingly immaculate vintage motorbike.

  ‘Ma Velocette,’ sighed Max, gesturing fondly at this symphony of gloss black and chrome. I gathered that the La Française-Diamant was to have been the follow-up to this frankly overbearing achievement. ‘Mais, uh, ma femme . . .’ With the shrug perfected by shed-centric tinkering husbands worldwide, Max indicated why Project Vélo had been reluctantly shelved.

  In truth, he hadn’t got very far. A single brake caliper had been nickel plated, and he’d crudely slathered the ancient frame with white primer-undercoat. This made for a fairly dismaying spectacle, though at least Max had wisely first removed the La Française-Diamant frame badge. Like a religious relic this was now housed in its own tiny glass jar, a miniature brass escutcheon emblazoned with the marque’s name, its city of origin, Paris, and five ‘diamonds’ that stood proud of a glorious starburst. The shield that broke the finish-line tape at the inaugural Tour de France. I gazed at it with the portentous rapture of that Nazi as he opened the Lost Ark, then plunged it into my pocket before my face melted.

  It was almost dark when I left, supervising a ginger three-point turn
through the €400 scrapheap that entirely filled the car. As I slowly reeled Britanny back in, rusty tubes grazing my neck and my nose wrinkled against the scent of sour iron and stale oil, I began to consider again just how and why I expected to succeed in a task that had already defeated – or anyway been abandoned by – an inestimably better equipped man. Over many delicious crêpes prepared and more or less folded into my helpless mouth by Madame Max, I had been brought up to speed with the many relevant things that her husband was and I wasn’t. Max was a plumber by trade and a ninja-grade DIYer by inclination, a restorer not just of vintage motorcycles but of nineteenth-century Japanese architectural models. Max had built the furniture we were sitting on and eating at, and was also a landscape gardener and a communist. There was some common ground between us, though, as it later transpired that Max was a thunderous bullshitter.

  Riffling through the newspaper a few mornings after my return, I came across a large picture of a dismantled bicycle, part of a Canadian photographer’s project to capture everyday objects reduced to their individual components. I’d always thought of the bike as a triumph of utilitarian engineering, an invention whose global success was dependent on its pared-down mechanical simplicity. The deconstructed bicycle in the Canadian’s photograph was a low-end, low-tech 1980s Raleigh, yet this humble machine had, I learned, been assembled from no fewer than 893 bits, an overwhelming profusion arranged in neat geometrical groupings around the frame. Beside it were a similarly dismembered digital camera and a chainsaw, which together mustered forty-eight parts fewer.

  I stared at this appalling image and felt my appetite ebb nauseously away. Unbidden, my career in bicycle maintenance now spooled through my mind. It didn’t take long. At the age of twelve I could repair a puncture, as long as it didn’t involve taking the back wheel off, a daddy-grade skill. At the age of thirty-four I could change a set of brake blocks. Between these landmark triumphs, failure outweighed success. Mechanical prowess was not my friend. Mechanical prowess didn’t call or write. Despite hours of filthy-fingered, filthy-mouthed tinkering, I never even vaguely understood how to index the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub gears that graced most of my early steeds. Sturmey-Archers had a knack of letting you down in extremis, when you stood up on the pedals to tackle the lower slopes of Hanger Hill, or to effect a blistering getaway from the gathered ranks of the 577 Crew. And when they did let you down, you knew about it. If you were lucky, the sudden loss of mechanical resistance introduced your groin to the saddle with great violence. If you weren’t, it was the crossbar.