Gironimo! Page 25
Bloody, bowed and plastered with leftovers, Vin Denson hung on to finish the 1966 Giro in fortieth place – a feat that ranks him alongside Lord Wiggo in the all-time British top five. Riding in a humbler professional age, Denson received his modest wages only at the end of the season. By then he was always flat broke, reduced to sustaining himself on training rides with stolen carrots yanked straight out of the field. Vin would have understood what the ever-ravenous, salami-swiping desperadoes of 1914 endured, and by the time the sun went down so did I.
‘Let’s be honest, no cyclist wins on bread and water.’ Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil’s famously oblique reference to doping was later adapted by the Lance Armstrong generation, in pitying reference to those sorry no-hopers who rode clean: pane e agua, in the translation appropriate to Spain’s durable status as dopemeisters general. Anyway, that day I purified these cynical maxims and rode 101km to Campobasso on nothing but H2O and dough: seven requisitioned breakfast rolls and bidon after bidon of village pump-water.
Twenty-one riders had rolled out of Bari back in 1914; only twelve would make it to the stage finish at L’Aquila. Dear old Mario Marangoni was first to fall by the wayside, soon followed by his fellow privateer isolato Michele Robotti, who shattered a wheel rim in a crash just past Foggia. Ahead lay a day of brutal reckoning for the amateurs, one survived by just two isolati and a single aspiranto: the miracle of teenage pluck that was Umberto Ripamonti, the youngest rider in the race, who had entered at the last minute simply because he fancied an adventure and happened to live near the Milan start line.
The pros hardly giggled their way to L’Aquila. Giovanni Gerbi gave up just past Lucera, suffering from ‘a swollen and turgid right leg’. As this affliction hadn’t prevented him from meting out a sound kicking a few hours earlier, I preferred to imagine Gerbi being terminally demoralised by the looming sight of the terrain I was now ascending.
When the turbine-topped hills hoved into view I’d felt no fear or loathing. Indeed, when the moment came I stood on the pedals with something like enthusiasm, or at the very least relief to have left that accursed wind-faced flatness behind. Towing a heavy cloud of sweaty wool stench, I hauled myself up the tilted slopes of hot scrub, arriving presently at a big hole full of headlights and engine roar. A sign outside identified this as Wolf Tunnel, which at a declared length of 1,372m was well beyond my nervous system’s shrivelled subterranean capability. With the nonchalance afforded by a merciful absence of saddlebag, I shouldered the Hirondelle and strode up the hill over the hole.
This interesting decision deposited me, an hour later, by a service track linking the wind turbines that marched along the hilltops in both directions. My legs glistened with perspiration and bloody bramble scratches; embedded burrs, furzes and other pointy plant-parts mingled with melting chips of tar accumulated from a newly-resurfaced road. The sat-nav was treating me to its Screen of Blankest Disapproval: You’ve really done it this time, goggle-boy.
Midway through my steepening and ever-blinder scramble, I had stumbled heavily out of some head-high brambles and almost fallen on top of a gummy, nut-brown rustic, scrattling away at a small patch of maize and melons. Everything about his appearance and environment suggested he had been living there undisturbed for months, for years, for ever: at the edge of his little clearing stood a corrugated-roof shed he evidently called home, with two vests drying on the back of a stool outside its door, alongside a tin bucket piled with old pots and plates. I staggered to my feet fully prepared to be furiously grunted at in some incomprehensible dialect, or maybe eaten. Instead, he interrupted his labours only to aim me a lugubrious nod. I think this meant, ‘You are about to enter Molise, young man, Italy’s loneliest and emptiest region, a forgotten land where the afternoon cyclist always goes hungry. Next time, buy a melon off me.’
I topped the hill, hit an approximation of tarmac and settled into many hours of undernourished undulation. The biggest enemy, not for the first time in my journey, was overbearing isolation: Molise’s populace, never more than modest, has shrunk by nearly a third since the Fifties, and it showed. Barren hillsides rolled into every houseless valley, and the only other road-users were school buses delivering children to far-flung homes. Following the established pattern, every one of these vehicles tried very hard to sever my left ear with its right wing mirror as it sped by. Harassed and taunted by his passengers, a road-blocking resentment to motorists and an object of outright derision for the drivers of heavier and more masculine conveyances, the school-bus driver’s lot is not a happy one. In all honesty I hardly begrudged their murderous glee at finally getting a chance to take it out on someone further down the road-going food-chain.
This time I narrowly beat my parents to our nominated rendezvous in Campobasso, a town that owed its startling unloveliness to a prolonged disagreement between Canadian and German troops in 1943. My father had presciently chosen a hotel out in the hills, though it lay some way beyond the off-duty distance I was prepared to cycle on an empty stomach. There was only one thing for it. Reducing the Hirondelle to the dimensions of a Fiat Punto’s boot was a challenge my parents confidently decreed unfeasible, so they watched with some interest as the bike more or less fell to bits in my hands. Quite how it had thus far failed to do so of its own accord while in violent motion remained a mystery.
In the morning my parents returned me to the outskirts of Campobasso. An aptly morose drizzle speckled the tarmac as I put the Hirondelle back together in a lay-by, before an inquisitive audience of yellow-jacketed road-workers. One came up and asked if I was heading for Naples. I told him I wasn’t. That’s good, he said, miming one of the shifty antiquarian bicycle thieves I had thereby avoided. L’Aquila? Not so good: I watched his right hand impersonate the Loch Ness monster in motion.
As a farewell present my father summoned his latent powers of mechanical improvisation, stabilising the bidon rack with a length of anti-pigeon spiking he had obscurely salvaged in Matera, then pinging out my bothersome right-hand cotter pin with three taps of the big wrench. We surveyed it in wonder: a tormented stub of rusty gouges, embedded with the flattened remnants of those wire-wrapped nails Paul had wedged round it a thousand kilometres before. It looked more like some crude Iron Age artefact than a vital component from the most successful machine in history. The pin was forced back into its burrow along with a bracing pair of pigeon spikes; the anvil-carrier saddlebag strapped on. Having handed my parents a now superfluous map of southern Italy I embraced them, then briskly pedalled away before I could disgrace myself in a manner inconsistent with my age and mission.
Alfonso Calzolari was already twenty minutes behind the leaders at Isernia, but then he’d been fending off attacks before the stage had even begun. Dozing in his Bari hotel room on the rest day, Calzolari woke to find a sinister stranger bent over his bed.
‘Want to make fifteen thousand lire?’ the shadow whispered. ‘Just finish second in this race.’
Again this could only have been the work of Bianchi, the standout Dick Dastardlys in this hardcore wacky race. They were by a distance the wealthiest team in the Giro, and as the nation’s dominant bicycle manufacturer had the most to gain from the promotional windfall of victory. Their rider Giuseppe Azzini now held the lead by a sliver, but insurance never hurts.
The inducement proposed to the bleary Fonso was five times the prize for winning the Giro, but he resisted grubby temptation and its attendant opportunity to take the remainder of this appalling challenge rather less seriously. Recounting the story to Paolo Facchinetti in an old-people’s home fifty-eight years later, Calzolari vividly described his furious pride as he bundled the interloper out of the hotel-room door. ‘I am winning this race for my hometown Bologna, not losing it for money!’
Afterwards he did what Italians do: he went and told a monk. ‘Fifteen thousand lire’s a packet, you melon,’ the holy man forgot to say as he pressed a lucky crucifix into Fonso’s hand. ‘Calzolari could not yet know how vital this gif
t would be,’ wrote Paolo. Mapping the SS17’s Parkinsonian progress over lunch in an Isernia bar, I understood why: between me and L’Aquila lay 150km of writhing mountain road, with another 150 afterwards.
The valico del Macerone was lofty enough to merit one of those ‘pass open/closed’ signs, and a name-check in Paolo’s roll-call of stage-six infamy. It was 684m and I pissed it. That smug little face in the selfie I took at the summit sign says: What mountain? Its white-lipped counterpart taken ninety minutes later atop the passo del Rionero says: Oh, this one. Proceeding to 1,052m – the highest I’d been since the day after Rome – had required extensive emulation of 1914 methods, as described in Paolo’s account of the Rionero climb: ‘With the riders now suffering a crisis of exertion, most walked on foot.’
Recrimination took hold during a foolhardy descent. That’s it, I thought, crashing bitterly through potholes as I overtook a dawdling Fiat Panda: no more pushing. It was a question of pride. Or would have been if I had any. In fact, this determination to go less slowly up mountains was closely related to my new policy of going much too fast down them: whatever it took to better the average race speed of Mario Marangoni.
With my expression set to Hungover Withnail, I somehow kept both legs over the crossbar and rotating; by the time I reached the ski-centric village of Roccaraso, a sharp and nippy mountain twilight was setting in. The sat-nav told me I’d managed 100km in the day – just – and was now up at 1,256m, a post-Alpine high. However, it also told me that my average speed had dropped by 0.1kmh. Such are the margins at the bleeding edge of gladiatorial contest: it was enough to downgrade my evening from celebration to wake.
CHAPTER 20
I WOKE AT dawn with stomach cramp and the shivers. In bleary alarm I feared a dose of bidon poisoning; imagine my relief to discover it was nothing more than malnutrition and first-stage hypothermia.
Both were my due as Roccaraso’s only guest. The hotelier had quite understandably elected not to turn on the heating for my sole benefit, especially as he’d only charged me €25 for a room, and the lone waiter/chef at the one open restaurant had been able to offer nothing more than two lamb cutlets and a grilled courgette. ‘Carboidrati?’ I’d wheedled, drawing deep from those roadside-litter vocabulary lessons; after a helpless shrug he returned with a three-inch baguette knob-end. I burned that off relocating my hotel amongst the snowboard rental shops and shuttered chalets in Roccoraso’s funereal, ambitiously pitched streets.
I did what I could to address this deficit in the pine-clad breakfast room, just me and a table of plastic-sheathed, long-life comestibles. As ever these were dominated by the plastic-wrapped, long-life, jam-filled brioche that was such an unfortunate fixture of my Italian mornings: sickly gel entombed in claggy wool, like biting into a dead Clanger. I downed four between practised sighs, gazing out beyond the window-boxed geraniums. A fox trotted across a disused railway viaduct below the town; above it, muscular pinnacles and a cold, grey sky. In the typically demoralising manner of mountain stages, I would be going down before I went back up. All the way down: the map promised a forthcoming descent of some magnitude, all squiggled hairpins and those double-chevrons of sternest gradient.
As my route also passed through expanses of foodless nothing, I filled my front jersey pouch from the brioche pile – my brain and legs might be grateful later, even if my mouth wouldn’t be. Bent over my saddlebag by the reception desk, this swag disgorged itself en masse across the lino before the proprietor’s disappointed eyes.
‘Carboidrati,’ I mumbled, gathering it all up and making the slowest quick getaway in history.
Eight o’clock: I’d never have been on the road this early if my parents had still been here. For most of the previous day I’d been trying to find upsides to their departure, offsetting the downsides of a return to crappy hotels and muttering, solitary madness. One thing I certainly wouldn’t miss was my nightly failure to evolve from hard-bitten endurance athlete to cheekily lovable youngest son. In fact, it had become clear during our time together that after-hours I was entirely unfit for public consumption, and should for the benefit of society be left in some dark corner with a wet towel over my head, hooked up to a drip of slurried wine and pizza. Nor would I be rueing the absence of my mother’s standard day-end greeting, which managed to cram embarrassment and disheartening intimations of mortality into five brief words: ‘Timbers darling, you’re not dead!’ And how very crushing it always was, having once more flogged myself halfway to that death, to learn that their hire car had covered the same daily distance in a carefree hour. However irrelevant, this disparity never failed to cast a great shadow of pointlessness over my whole endeavour.
I even managed to extract a positive from the reappearance of my saddlebag, now adding its considerable heft to the momentum I was building in the early stages of the promised descent. Is this a tunnel coming up? Swoooosh! So it was. Sweeeesh! There goes another. The map had promised many unavoidable black holes, and I’d started the day with my little head torch lashed round the bidon rack. A wise move: I shot past a roadside warning of inoperative interior lighting in all tunnels ahead.
The road was broad and smooth; I let it come to me. Out of the next tunnel a dramatic Imax-scale preview of my immediate future opened up. I was tearing around the rim of a gigantic, sheer-sided bowl of grey and green, connected to the very distant valley floor by a wandering tarmac stripe that periodically launched itself across an eternity of dead air with some prodigious viaduct. The short word that now passed through my gritted teeth was the last coherent sound I would issue for fifteen minutes and as many kilometres.
The Hirondelle had, by accident or design (OK, accident), been looking after itself very well of late. Other than supervising my father’s farewell remedial work, I had for many days felt no need to disturb Number 7’s slickly run regime of self-maintenance. When things fell off (sometimes a brake block; at least once a day one of those caliper-return springs) I put them back on, but those mornings of preventative and precautionary tightening and tinkering lay in the distant past.
I think you can guess where this is leading: that’s right, a golden eagle now swoops down and flies away with my scalp in its talons. Either that or my front wheel develops a petrifying lateral shimmy above 40kmh, when I’m no longer in a position to go below 40kmh.
One moment I sensed a certain wobbly vagueness beneath my clenched fists; the next the handlebars were a juddery blur. A Vulcan death grip on the brake levers merely delayed the attainment of awful, cheek-rippling speed, and suddenly the road didn’t seem quite so broad, or so smooth. I entered the most horrifically exposed viaduct on the wrong side of the white line, and literally screamed out of it with arcs of verge-gravel flying from under my tilted wheels. This was it, the big wipeout, the coconut clonk of skull on asphalt, the little roadside epitaph: ‘He died doing what he loved most – hospital morphine.’
In the middle of the longest, darkest tunnel the head torch bounced round and shone its beam directly into my eyes. It hardly mattered: instead of contributing usefully to the emergency, my senses were now just blaring like klaxons. Soon they began to shut down. The roar of frozen wind faded to a muffled, womb-like whoosh, my vision magically purged itself of those ghastly peripheral voids, and I only noticed that some sort of dragonfly had spread itself terminally across my Adam’s apple three hours later, when one of its wings fell into my lunch.
By the final bends I was letting the road steer the bike for me, submitting to its banks and cambers like a corpse thrown down the Cresta Run. It took me a while to notice the SS17 had pulled itself straight and was now trundling along the valley floor. A petrol station with an attached bar appeared and I pulled over. It was a struggle to make myself understood to the young barmaid, and not just because wind-chill and post-traumatic stress were causing my jaw to shiver along with my limbs. She seemed like a nice girl, who was simply reluctant to accept that hers was a world where men might demand brandy at 9.40 a.m. And do so again at 9
.42.
Even half-cut and whimpering, it didn’t take me long to find out what was up with Number 7’s front wheel. The nuts holding the front axle to its hub were finger-loose, a daring set-up for an 800m drop. I spannered them tight, forced two dead Clangers between my protesting lips and freewheeled away down the valley. Through Sulmona, where Calzolari signed in at the control half an hour behind the frontrunners but twelve minutes ahead of race leader Giuseppe Azzini, then into Popoli, where I garnished my panino with dragonfly wings.
You could describe the 48 remaining kilometres of the Giro’s sixth stage as incident-packed, in the same way you could describe Hitler as naughty. It all kicked off on the Svolte, a vicious eminence that hosts an annual motoring hill climb – I rode over its chequered start line in Popoli’s outskirts. Halfway up this ascent, a red car overtook the group containing Calzolari, his teammate Canepari and Carlo ‘The ’Tache’ Durando. What happened next was encapsulated by a headline on the front page of the following day’s Gazzetta dello Sport: ‘Drama and intrigue at the Giro’.
The Gazzetta’s report revealed that official complaints against the Calzolari group had been lodged by two teams, Bianchi (no, really) and Globo, alleging that the mysterious red car had towed the trio up a section of the Svolte. More detailed, and much more serious, allegations were published in Il Resto del Carlino – a paper printed in Calzolari’s hometown Bologna, would you believe. The Svolte Three hadn’t just enjoyed a quick tug, as it were, but had climbed inside the car and been driven all the way up the climb.
(By way of a tension-sapping interlude, let us take a moment to enjoy the charming history of Il Resto del Carlino. Founded in 1885, its name means ‘the change from a Carlino’, this being the smallest denomination of a papal currency that was then legal tender in Bologna. Unable to offer change to customers who paid with a Carlino, shopkeepers would instead offer a sheet of local news. The paper remains in print today, one of the most venerable in Italy.)