Gironimo! Page 24
Moore’s getting his head down, Phil. If he can treat this like an individual time trial he might just have a chance. I honestly don’t think I could have made it without Paul Sherwen. When a mighty side-wind blew up: These are always dangerous moments, but Moore’s got the race-face on and he’s pumping those two big pistons he calls legs. When this same wind shot-blasted my left-hand side with pellets of big, fat summer rain: What an incredible job of work this is in these conditions, Phil. This man has a rendezvous with destiny and I do believe he’s kicking again!
What an almighty slog it was, though, a great, long wet and windy grind. I wrung out the last drops of pizza-fuel up a final ridge topped with wind turbines, then wobbled through Matera’s busy outskirts as the streetlights blinked on. He’s under the red kite and now he can enjoy this, Phil, there’ll be no more pain in those legs. And there wasn’t, nor any blood in my head or sweat on my brow. As Matera’s many clocks struck eight I lowered my brittle, ruined husk of a body onto the steps of a sombre old bank at the edge of the Piazza Vittorio Veneto. My support crew arrived just in time to stop me taking furtive fortifying bites of limestone out of its threshold.
After a hard day – and of late there seemed to have been nothing but – I was never much fun to be with. At least I assume so: until full-blown schizophrenia kicked in I was poorly qualified to assess my own solitary company. But slumped at the restaurant table I found it hard to muster any show of enthusiasm as my darling aged parents clicked through their photos of a day they’d spent sightseeing, and which I’d spent flogging myself through renal purgatory. (Brainlessly failing to realise it would upset her tremendously, I’d already treated my mother to a mumbled rundown of my brush with organ failure.)
A more awful truth suggested itself once I’d been reanimated with house red and linguine alle vongole. I just generally wasn’t much fun at all, yammering tonelessly on about the 1914 Giro d’Italia, and how my 1914 Hirondelle No 7 Course sur Route and 1964 legs were coping with its reproduction. I had no interest in anything else, obsessed to a point beyond rationality: had I not been their son, the two gentlefolk learning all about Alfonso Calzolari’s knee problems would have long since stopped smiling indulgently. I had apparently forgotten that in common with almost everybody I’ve ever shared a home with, my parents have absolutely no interest in watching or playing sport, and therefore less than none in hearing somebody else drone on about it. When my father expresses astonishment at my Tour de France endeavour – as he still does, regularly – it’s not because he’s impressed that I cycled 3,000km, just enduringly and utterly bewildered that anybody should ever want to attempt such a thing.
In the morning I saw what darkness and hollowed exhaustion had deprived me of. My apartment was a delightful vaulted capsule hewn into the living rock; I opened the shutters and blinked out at a tumbling panorama of bleached walls and windowless grottoes under a deep blue sky, unavoidably suggestive of Jerusalem in the Life of Brian era. Matera’s Sassi district is an extraordinary ancient netherworld, home to the planet’s oldest continuously inhabited houses – at the seat of that compaction of ancient white masonry lay caves that have been lived in for over nine thousand years. It was the sort of view that cried out for an extended wander, which I could be sure my parents would be taking care of on my behalf. I left them to it after an alfresco breakfast and a deep drink from my father’s well of cotter-pin knowledge – ‘Oh dear. Have you tried banging them in with that wrench?’
It was Saturday and I rattled northwest on a supine and deliciously unpopular dual carriageway. This swiftly delivered me into Puglia, which seemed very keen to showcase its credentials as the hottest, driest and most ancient region in Italy. The sat-nav thermometer hit 34, and the tawny, barren landscape had a savagely desiccated look to it. I couldn’t begin to understand what had been attracting living creatures here since the dawn of time: I rode past a quarry that is home to 30,000 dinosaur footprints, and a cave where archaeologists recently found the fossilised skeleton of a 400,000-year-old hominid. Near Altamura I rolled through a hillside piled with pre-Roman remains and bronze-age tumuli, and then into a shocking demonstration of the barbaric inhumanity to which its long-civilised townspeople have now sunk. The towering wrongness of Saturday-morning school has enraged me ever since I first encountered this odious Continental practice during my French exchange, and watching children of all ages dash out through gates right across town I felt an urge to hug every one of them to my hot chest. Happily I resisted this urge, even though it went down pretty well on the French exchange.
The fifth stage ended at Bari, and I knew I was nearing the city when two cheery blonde street ladies hailed me from a tatty roadside sofa: ‘Signore! Ménage à trois?’ Then careworn outskirts, a grid of grimy old boulevards and – skreeeeeeeeek-k-k-k – up to a halt by the esplanade railings.
More than two weeks before, just past La Spezia, I’d turned my back on the Mediterranean; now here I was looking out at the sun-jewelled Adriatic. Coast to coast, north to south, west to east. How extraordinary to have made it this far. From the saddle-snap on that first morning to the previous afternoon’s organ malfunction, almost every day had featured some potentially terminal, sceptic-pleasing calamity. ‘Into the home straight,’ I said, giving Number 7 a matey slap on the down-tube, and deciding not to tell him that straight was 1,300km long. Then I sat down heavily on the pavement, took a commemorative selfie of the two of us, and at least thought about terrifying the afternoon rollerbladers and pram-pushers with a mighty, spittled roar of hard-won achievement.
True to the 1914 Giro’s curse, it was bucketing down in the capital of Italy’s driest region when Giuseppe Azzini crossed the line at just after 5 p.m. A large crowd stood waiting in the rain, drawn by the news that Alfonso Calzolari had passed through Matera forty-seven minutes down on his rival. Azzini had started the stage over an hour in arrears, but anticipation built as the clock ticked on and the rain beat down from a darkening sky. The hour was up by the time Calzolari finally ploughed doggedly into view; he stopped the clock 3 minutes 15 seconds later. Over to you, Paolo: ‘Incredibly, after 2,000 kilometres and a thousand adventures, our two heroes were separated by the blink of an eye.’ Bianchi’s Giuseppe Azzini had snatched the race lead, by six seconds.
I felt I should have lingered in Bari to pay tribute to this extraordinary turn of events, but away from the seafront it seemed a tirelessly drab and disordered city, with great sprawls of brownfield wasteland and a general air of almost war-torn neglect. Stray dogs roamed the dusty, quiet pavements and a feisty grey-brown example hastened my exit by pursuing me at full, slavering pelt through a derelict industrial estate. This was no bark-heavy warding-off: all I could hear was insistent, purposeful panting and the fast-closing scatter of gravel. I have no doubt that my flesh would have been multiply pierced had he caught me, and ensuring he narrowly did not meant reaching speeds I would never again equal on a flat road.
To avoid another ugly collision between the forces of sightseeing and Sisyphean toil, I’d arranged to meet my parents at Giovinazzo: a 94km ride seemed about 15 shy of the daily distance beyond which I started hating everyone. Courtesy of his abrupt mastery of the SMS, I met my father outside the extremely wonderful hotel he’d found for us, a former monastery overlooking the sea. I glanced around my room and sighed: just two more nights of four-poster beds and complimentary mineral water, then it was back to the stained hovels.
It had been an immeasurably better day, which sired an evening to match. We dined outdoors beneath moonlit baroque façades; I cheerfully perused their daily harvest of digital images and discreetly jabbed a fork in my leg every time I felt the urge to discuss the history of competitive cycling. The balmy Puglian night and a second bottle brought on an expansive mood: I nominated Lucera as our next rendezvous, an ambitious 120km foray deep into my red zone of Vacant Contempt.
Sunday morning was establishing itself as my favourite slice of the Italian week. The towns were vibrantly a
buzz; the roads between them wonderfully moribund. Old men in caps like mine shouted cheery abuse at each other across outdoor café tables, hailing me with cries of ‘Forza Girardengo!’ and ‘Eh, il campionissimo!’ Every pasticceria was full of jolly cake-faced families soiling their Sunday best, and I picked my way through downtown traffic jams amusingly athrob with amplified Disney hits.
When the 1914 boys sped through the port of Molfetta at 1.15 a.m. they wouldn’t have been missing much. On any other day, those gusts of rancid seaweed would have sent me smartly out the other side, but with the town seeing out the week in such style under a bright blue sky I slowed to a wobbly dawdle. A police marching band trumpeted round a palm-lined harbour, and the street outside the big white cathedral was packed with a funeral parade jauntier than most English weddings. The main square was thronged with one of those endearingly hopeless street markets: shoes made from leather-look cardboard, luminous net-curtain lingerie, acrylic vests emblazoned with thoughtful messages like ‘Sweet Fashion Years’ and ‘Funky Dance Trend’. Every town in Italy seems to host one of these weekend craporiums. No one ever buys anything but they’re always teeming with locals, drawn by force of ancient habit and that unstoppable urge to congregate.
As utterly clueless businessmen, Italian market stallholders are certainly in good company. Any settlement you pass through will be bookended by boarded-up, half-built or burned-down commercial ventures, all of them shriekingly ill-considered. How I’d love to have heard these wrong-trepreneurs explain themselves to their bank managers.
‘What are you on about? There’s no such thing as too many roller discos.’
‘Come on, you show me one other cutlery warehouse in Bari that offered regular customers access to an indoor adventure playground.’
‘Puglia’s largest range of coloured gravels . . . if I’m guilty of anything, it was daring to dream too big.’
My favourite was a bricked-up retail unit I’d passed in the countryside outside Potenza.
‘Franco: you like guitar effect pedals, right?’
‘Are you kidding? I love those little guys! Vreeooommm-om-om-wowwwww!’
‘Me too. Wonder if anyone else round here does?’
‘Hmm. I think that friend of Gianluca’s might, you know, the foot masseur at the wellness space.’
‘I suppose there’s only one way to find out.’
‘Ask him?’
‘Don’t be stupid. Let’s build an absolutely enormous shop on a hill miles outside town, and call it Guitar Pedal Valley.’
‘Excellent! You design the logo and order a load of pedals and stuff, and I’ll book the bailiffs in for next year.’
After Barletta – where Giovanni Gerbi went all stampy on that customs officer – the route turned inland, and the blustery cross-wind realigned itself to my disadvantage. For the next four hours I reeled in a prostrate enormity of industrial-scale Europlonk vineyards, now being energetically harvested. Romanian cries echoed out from the mile-long vine corridors, and tipper lorries rumbled gingerly past, brimful of dusty grapes. Since starting out in the north, I’d watched the roadside produce slowly swell and ripen around me: mine was a season-bridging, nation-spanning accomplishment. This stirring thought kept the forces of tedium and wind-faced lassitude at bay for up to thirteen minutes.
I tried very hard to appreciate the dead-straight horizontality, aware that from Lucera onwards I would be spending several hundred kilometres cresting the perpendicular granite vertebrae of Italy’s spine. But there was just far too much of it, a geometric infinity of tarmac and parallel vine-lines that stripped away any sense of progress, as if I was back in the training loft on my exercise bike. Reading Paolo the night before, I couldn’t understand why dear old Mario Marangoni, the perennially hapless table-propper who had been last over every line, had finally bailed out on this undemanding plain. Now I completely did.
With Alfonso Calzolari currently 500km up the road in our sat-nav showdown, over recent days I’d been working on an undercard battle with Marangoni, who seemed much more like my kind of guy. Here, the action was hotting up. Mario had ended the stage from Rome 22hrs 16’ 56” in arrears, having covered the race to date at an average speed of 18.3kmh; my own at that point was 16.8. After a typically disastrous performance on the following stage to Bari – last again, seven hours behind the winner – Mario’s AVS slumped to 17.79kmh. Mine was currently 17.0. Poor Mario had now fallen by the wayside – Paolo describes him lying flat out in the road, not caring if he was picked up or run over – but his AVS lived on, as my target. Me v Mario, mano-a-long-dead-mano. Yes, I was doing this race in bite-sized chunks, not massive, raw 400km slabs. But I would finish it, and I would do so with a faster average speed than its slowest competitor. Reach for the sky! Well, you’ve got to pick your battles down my end of the sporting spectrum.
The headwind was blowing like a bastard now: two steps forward, one step back. Every time I opened the map it wound up wrapped round my head. Presently I battled it off and saw a sign ahead: FOGGIA 40.
OK, I thought, I can do that: Foggia was a large town just shy of my destination. Then, five flat and blustery kilometres later: FOGGIA 53.
You hopeless, filthy goat-botherers! I lowered my nose to the bars and cursed this horizontal gust-factory with the very worst words the English language has to offer, and then, after my food ran out and hypoglycaemia began to erode cognitive function, in a tongue known to no man.
As dementia kicked in I sang into the wind – an hour of gasp-along-a-Beatles – then roared at it, proper iron-throated bellows that I sustained until a huge black airborne insect of some sort ricocheted off my front teeth. When something that wasn’t a big straight road or a grapeless vine wandered into view I wished it hadn’t: a derelict shack with a hollow-cheeked Romanian child burning pallets on the doorstep, a warning sign with all the red sun-bleached out of it, encouraging right-turns it had once prohibited.
The rash of roadside memorials suggested boredom-related recklessness was endemic round here, and more than once I emerged from an a cappella Motown anthology or extended kneecap survey to find myself in the middle of the tarmac. Full attention was thoughtfully restored by a pick-up truck, which approached me from behind at enormous speed before violently slamming its brakes on. A screeching, slithering halt left a gap of perhaps four inches between my rear wheel and a front bumper that had visibly played this game many times before, and lost. When this vehicle then sped past trailing a jolly gale of male laughter from its opened windows, I found I was too stimulated to articulate an objection.
A text from my father pinged in as I nosed out of the Plain of Terminal Disheartenment and into the outskirts of Foggia. The hotel he directed me to was just shy of Lucera, a forty-minute ride down a dual carriageway; I wound the cadence up and saw my AVS nudge to 17.1. After a late start and a day of dilatory tourism, my parents pulled into the car park just in front of me. We’d contrived a finish from that famous fable: ‘The Tortoise and the Other Two Tortoises’.
* * *
GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 5
(Avellino–Bari, 328.7km)
Giuseppe AZZINI 77:22:00
Alfonso CALZOLARI +6
Clemente CANEPARI +2:47:30
Timothy MOORE +40:41:30
Stage starters: 23
Stage finishers: 21
CHAPTER 19
THE MISADVENTURE OF F. H. Grubb set an unfortunate precedent for his countrymen. After Freddie’s capitulation in the 1914 Giro’s opening stage, it would be more than fifty years before another Brit dared enter the Giro, and Vin Denson’s experiences in 1966 failed to open the floodgates. ‘People were chucking their leftovers at us from the balconies,’ Denson recalled, his punishment for joining a group of foreigners chasing down the national favourite, Gianni Motta. ‘Tomatoes, spaghetti, anything. When I walked into the hotel that night, someone dumped a full dustbin on me. Bastards!’
Heroically, Denson won the following stage: something no other Br
itish rider would manage for twenty-one years. That rider was Scotland’s Robert Millar, who in the 1987 Giro completed a full emulation of Denson’s experience when he found himself in the compost crossfire. A week before winning the penultimate stage – securing himself the King of the Mountains title and second place overall – Millar nobly placed himself and his bike between the Giro’s perennially combustible roadside patriots and Stephen Roche. The Irishman, having rashly taken the race lead from an Italian teammate, was the target of a rolling food-fight that saw both him and his Scottish defender pelted with vegetables and ‘some kind of grain’, drenched by oral expulsions of red wine and – most compellingly – slapped in the face with a raw steak. More traditional shoves and punches accompanied the buffet punishment, and after the post-stage press conference, Roche’s deposed teammate Roberto Visentini was fined three million lire for threatening to knock him out. ‘The behaviour of the people was bad,’ recalled Roche, with the indulgent understatement afforded by eventual victory. (Roche went on to claim that year’s Tour de France and the world road-race championship, a treble shared only with Eddy Merckx. Visentini never won another race.)
Robert Millar’s achievement hardly got the Brit-ball rolling: another twenty-one years had elapsed before Mark Cavendish brought home a stage win. In fairness, Cavendish has since claimed more Giro stages than anyone else, and in recent years David Millar, Lord Wiggo and Alex Dowsett have doubled the tally of British stage winners. But no compatriot has come even close to matching Millar’s podium finish: the best any British rider has managed since was Charlie Wegelius, who came home twenty-ninth overall in 2010. The Giro is horribly, uniquely gruelling, and soft-cheeked, milksop Britain has yet to produce a glutton primed for three weeks of punishment in all its forms: the endless climbs, the blizzards, the flobbed wine and steak-slaps.