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  Clinging to a vehicle’s door pillar is the oldest trick in the book (How to Cheat in Professional Cycling, vols 1–412). First trialled in the inaugural 1903 Tour de France, it still thrives today: I was lucky enough to spend a day in a team car at the 2004 Tour, and witnessed the practice at stirring close quarters. As an act of mercy for riders in distress, it’s broadly tolerated: it’s a fair bet that almost everyone in the 1914 field held on to bits of passing car at some point on their way up Sestriere, though only three were penalised. (The unfortunate rider our car towed along the 2004 route for a good 5km was grovelling miserably in no man’s land, having been spat out the back of a long breakaway. It was his first and only Tour.)

  But in scale and import, the allegations carried in Il Resto del Carlino were of a rather taller order. Calzolari was well aware of his predicament: if the race jury agreed that a rider six seconds off the lead had tackled a decisive swathe of the Giro d’Italia in the back seat of a car, he would be instantly disqualified (‘and made to pay back all the bonus money I’d won so far’, as he later told Paolo). In truth, Fonso and friends already knew they had some explaining to do. The next car to overhaul them on the Svolte was driven by a race official, who caught the three riders and the mystery red motor in a compromising position.

  A century of sporting precedent teaches us that those accused of cheating plump for one of three initial responses: denial, bluster or blustering denial. Having been witnessed by an official, Calzolari and Co. couldn’t quite go the full Armstrong, but they did what they could. A bit of collusion would have helped, though, as their tales were severely compromised by a conspicuous lack of consistency.

  Clemente Canepari, Calzolari’s lieutenant, spoke first to the jury. In his version, the trio had literally just that very second grabbed on to the red car – ‘we held on to it for no more than 100 metres’ – when the official caught them. ‘Obviously we let go then, because we didn’t want to be disqualified.’ So who drove the mystery motor? Canepari’s extraordinary response must have made for a very awkward team dinner that night: ‘Oh, some friend of Alfonso’s.’

  Calzolari’s riposte was a triumph of bare-faced self-exoneration. ‘I’m riding up the climb with the others when this red car goes past. One of the passengers tells us to grab on, and the other riders do just that. “Shame on you!” I shout at them, at which point the driver swerves and pins me against the wall. It was then that the official’s car came past.’ It might have looked to that official as if Calzolari was taking a tow along with the others, but nothing – nothing – could have been further from the truth. The driver? Never seen him before in my life. By way of a final flourish, Alfonso reported that the repellent dishonesty of his fellow riders – teammate Canepari amongst them – had upset him so much he ‘cried like a baby’.

  Asked for his side of the story, ’Tache Durando jumped over a wall and ran away. (Just a theory, but he looks the type.)

  I suppose Calzolari’s shamelessly implausible tale should have put me off him. It certainly encouraged a more sceptical assessment of other self-reported incidents, notably the sinister stranger’s bribe and its haughty rejection. But as a man whose love of professional cycling has survived the rolling scandals of the last two decades, I’ve learned to cut my heroes an awful lot of slack (I don’t hate Lance Armstrong because he was a drugs cheat, but because he’s just so thoroughly unpleasant).

  Yes, Calzolari cheated and told a gigantic and ridiculous lie about it. Yet in the circumstances I could easily forgive him. For one, he’d just been inexplicably landed in it by his own teammate. (Neither Paolo nor I could imagine Calzolari persuading some car-owning chum to drive all the way from Bologna to tow him up a hill. I’ve no idea why Canepari said what he did, but wonder if he was just a bit dim and naïve, and thought the jury might think he was really cool if he told them his mate’s mate had a red car.)

  More compellingly, in a no-holds-barred contest that had already lobbed its moral compass down a well, Calzolari was a man more sinned against than sinning. The entire Svolte episode, right down to the convenient appearance of the official’s car, carries the haddocky whiff of a brazen stitch-up. It is Paolo’s belief that Bianchi was once more the éminence grise, plotting the entrapment to secure Fonso’s disqualification, and by default victory for its man Giuseppe Azzini.

  The six-second advantage Azzini held at the start of the stage looked rather tiny when set beside the time penalty now imposed on Calzolari and his fellow car-clingers. In one of those arcane punitive compromises that cycling authorities so effortlessly pull out, the jury found the trio guilty of ‘a serious infraction’, and decreed they should all be given the same time as the stage’s final finisher, plus – why not? – an additional minute. Calzolari’s team stared in horror at the published stage rankings: the teenage amateur Ripamonti had rolled last into L’Aquila, 3 hours 22 minutes behind the winner, Durando’s teammate Luigi Lucotti. A penalty of over two hundred minutes seemed almost too huge to make sense of, though I like to imagine Canepari expressing gormless relief. ‘Get in! If that Marangoni character was still running we’d have been stung for, like, twelve days or something!’

  A cursory map-glance at what lay in wait for me between here and Milan suggested the Svolte – a gain of 500m in 8km – might well be the 1914 Giro’s final properly massive climb. If that explained why so many of the surviving riders tried to bunk it, then it’s also why I was determined not to. At Sestriere I’d miserably flunked my first mountain examination, metaphorically doodling nobs and swastikas all over the question paper, then screwing it into a ball and eating it. This could not and would not happen at my last.

  When the first bead of sweat trickled from temple to chin it felt like a tear, an expression of my body’s deep sadness at what I was asking it to do. For the next forty-five minutes it cried its hot pink eyes out. Ragged breaths, bidon sun-glints, the treacled passage of tarmac beneath the front wheel’s fraying grey rubber: I was locked in my own private world, until some idiot unlocked it and let four thousand flies in. Perhaps I should have imagined Calzolari being driven against one of these retaining walls, except he never had been, and in any case there was no room in a mind purged of all thought but the primitive will to pedal. In the latter stages I felt myself – indeed heard myself – possessed by that circus train in Dumbo, steaming effortfully towards the crest of a giant hill. ‘I-think-I-can, I think I can, I . . . think . . . I . . . can . . .’ This commentary went rather off message when at last the hill-climb’s chequerboard finish passed beneath me. ‘I thought I could, I thought I fucking could, stick that up your fucking cartoon funnel!’

  The run-in to L’Aquila was undemanding, a straight road up a gently tilted plateau. Race leader Azzini inched over the Svolte half an hour behind Calzolari and in a bit of a state – a reporter described his ‘pitiful, feverish appearance, his teeth chattering though it wasn’t cold’. Poor Azzini wasn’t to know that his rival would shortly be hit with a swingeing time penalty – so swingeing that the Bianchi rider could probably have walked to L’Aquila and still kept the lead. Instead, he pedalled frailly on across the plateau, running on fumes and a stubborn desperation to limit his losses.

  Lucotti’s average speed in winning the stage, 22.1kmh, ranks amongst the slowest on record for any grand tour. But as an expression of the draining demands of the Bari–L’Aquila leg, this statistic was eclipsed by the unfolding fate of Giuseppe Azzini. When Ripamonti crossed the line just before midnight, the race leader had yet to appear. Nor had he when the papers went to press. ‘At the time of writing, nothing is known of Giuseppe Azzini’s whereabouts,’ noted the Gazzetta dello Sport in a poignant postscript to its stage report. Journalists and officials drove up and down the plateau all through the night. ‘We wandered in vain through the surrounding countryside,’ wrote one reporter the day after, ‘searching every village and unnecessarily awakening many locals.’

  At 10 a.m., Alfredo Cavara – the same journalist who’d alm
ost run Calzolari over when he crawled out of a muddy ditch on the previous stage – stuck his head into a ramshackle barn and saw a man slumped in the straw, hugging a bike. He had his scoop, and the headline spooled through his mind: ‘Locals wakened unnecessarily in search for missing cyclist.’

  Shivering and semi-conscious, Azzini had lain there for twelve hours. The barn’s location was an eloquent indicator of his condition: it lay halfway up a mountainside, miles off the route. ‘He had spent the night there burning with fever, without help or human comfort,’ wrote Cavara. Azzini was rushed to hospital in L’Aquila, where he quickly rallied – so quickly, that by the time the riders started the next stage he was already on a train home. In truth, the Bianchi rider would hardly have wished to linger. I have a feeling he might have found himself rather haunted by recollections of the 1913 Giro, a race he had thrown away while in the lead on the penultimate stage. You will simply never guess how, so here it comes: he stumbled into a barn and fell asleep.

  Broncho-pneumonia, said the papers, dutifully accepting Azzini’s own diagnosis. There were rumours that Azzini had been found clutching an empty brandy bottle, but cycling’s rich heritage of mystery meltdowns invites us to explore the shadier end of the substance spectrum. In his introduction, Paolo pertinently quotes a pre-Giro report in La Stampa Sportiva: ‘Certain riders are in the habit of drugging themselves, but do so without measure or caution. Hence their erratic performances: brief periods of utter brilliance, sudden collapses, the inevitable withdrawals.’ You could hardly improve upon this as an encapsulation of Azzini’s last week at the Giro. Astonishing performances in the two preceding stages – he averaged 29kmh from Rome to Avellino, the fastest of the race by some margin – had catapulted him from a distant sixth to the top of the general classification. Then that addled freak-out with the stage finish almost in sight.

  Paolo seems in little doubt that dope, la dinamite, was Azzini’s undoing, almost certainly in the form of strychnine. Strange as it is to imagine intelligent grown men dosing themselves up with what we primarily think of as a murder-enhancing drug, the amphetamine-like boost of strychnine in small doses made it the pick-me-up of choice in those merrily unregulated early days of endurance sport. The winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, Thomas J. Hicks, was kept topped up all the way around the St Louis course with the precise cocktail of stimulants that went into cyclo-surrealist Albert Jarry’s fictional Perpetual Motion Food. ‘I injected him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine,’ boasted Hicks’s trainer afterwards, ‘and made him drink a large glass brimming with brandy. Towards the end I gave him another shot to get him to the finish.’ Hicks collapsed shortly after and never ran again. (He won gold after the original winner was disqualified for taking a lift in a car – come on, pioneering sport cheats, where’s the imagination?)

  Paolo Facchinetti blames the same drug for Dorando Pietri’s stumbling indignity on the 1908 marathon finishing straight. ‘A granule of strychnine taken 4km from the end of a race makes you a flying machine,’ he writes. ‘Taken at 5km, it makes you a vegetable.’ Azzini’s barn lay 18km from the finish.

  Was Fonso on the naughty sauce? Hard to believe otherwise. Paolo trots out the ageless line that ‘only a superman could manage those terrible, enormous stages without “help”’. Dope was then legal and almost universal; dosing yourself along that fine line between flying machine and sprout was considered a skill, much like taking a descent fast, but not too fast. In any event, with his only rival now dramatically removed from the race, Calzolari could probably have ridden to Milan on bread and water and still won. Having woken up on the rest day at L’Aquila thinking he’d blown it, he went to bed savouring an extraordinary truth: with the field culled to twelve riders and Azzini staring dully out of a train window, even with that penalty Fonso now held a two-hour lead.

  In sympathy with Giuseppe Azzini, my own ride to L’Aquila unravelled messily at the death. An awful lot of roads were closed, and the sat-nav’s alternative routes led me an unmerry dance through far-flung, dog-ruled suburbs. It started raining, hugely, and when at last I found my way up to the hill-topping old town the sky was as dark as my mood, and my arse as damp as my spirits. And what an unsettling city it was, deserted and unlit, half the houses boarded up and entire streets barred off with scaffold and gantries. Every dusty shop door was either chained shut or crowbarred open, offering a shadowy glimpse of its ransacked interior. Signs everywhere warned of rat infestation. L’Aquila means The Eagle; it had flown.

  The only noise that wasn’t rain drew me to the cathedral square. In the corner of this grand but utterly desolate civic space, a solitary bar was playing the radio at thunderous, distorting volume through a monumental outside speaker. A morose accordion ballad boomed raggedly out across the acreage of wet and empty cobbles; a yellowy light glowed from the bar’s uncustomered interior. The door was locked and I propped the Hirondelle against it, looking out at the square through a curtain of awning drips and feeling like the subject of an Impressionist painting, Le Peloton Traqique.

  A fresh sound suddenly caught my attention, the rumble of heavyweight internal combustion. I squinted through the rain and saw a troop carrier disgorging its helmeted occupants by the cathedral’s white steps. My knuckles whitened around the bars: I prepared to be frogmarched into quarantine, hosed down with antidote or riddled with silver-tipped bullets. What in the name of Jeremy D. Heck was going down in this place?

  ‘Is like this since 2009,’ said the receptionist, as her hotel’s lift juddered us down to the underground garage. It had taken me half an hour to find somewhere to sleep, and she was the first unarmed person I’d met. ‘Everybody from here now stay in some new houses many kilometres from L’Aquila.’ She shook her head as the doors opened. ‘They are so bad places, small room like, ah, penitenziario.’ I nodded sympathetically at this sad but unenlightening tale, while locking the Hirondelle to the handle of a fire extinguisher.

  ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘Why is that?’

  A huff of Latin exasperation. ‘Il governo, is why. We wait and we wait for decision, for money, for assistenza.’

  Shamefully behind schedule, revelation came to call as I rinsed my shorts in the bidet. Since 2009 . . . L’Aquila had rung a bell, but only now could I name the mournful tune. News reports flashed through my mind: rubbled buildings, a gymnasium full of sheet-covered casualties, Silvio Berlusconi touching up a rescue worker. The town had been shattered by a catastrophic earthquake, and three years on was still picking up the pieces.

  Three hundred and eight people had died, I later learned, in the city and all along the plateau I’d crossed before it. Over thirty thousand Aquilans lost their homes; the entire old town was evacuated and remained unoccupied by order. If the authorities had been struggling to muster the cash and enthusiasm for its reconstruction, I could understand why. I later read that in the seven hundred years since it was founded, L’Aquila has suffered eleven devastating earthquakes. Three of these completely flattened the city, killing over ten thousand. Six months after the 1914 Giro passed through, a quake that brought down a couple of churches in L’Aquila did rather more damage in nearby Avezzano, the town I’d been towed through twelve days before by the cheerful Giuseppe: a dumbfounding 96 per cent of its citizens were killed.

  Outer Rome’s smouldering hillsides and the ominous cone of Vesuvius, that devastated ghost town laid out beneath my hotel window: it struck me again what a cruel and untamed place Italy can be to call home. Medieval, almost. Which perhaps explains why a month after I came home, half a dozen Italian seismologists were metaphorically strapped into ducking stools, each given six years for failing to predict the L’Aquila earthquake.

  It didn’t take too long to find somewhere to eat: the pizzeria is the apocalypse-resistant cockroach of catering. Afterwards I wandered about in the drippy dark, emoting with L’Aquila’s awful plight and failing to suppress a guilty thrill at all this dishevelled abandonment. L’Aquila apparently does pretty well out of
ruin-porn tourism, but that night my rain jacket was the only dirty mac in town. I peered saucer-eyed down shored-up ancient alleys strung with faded, wind-torn washing, and gawped at boutique-mannequins sporting the shop-soiled fashions of 2009. I nodded at soldiers and shouted at rats. I imagined how very upsetting it must have been for a boisterous and convivial Italian to be torn away from his beloved civic rituals, and am therefore very pleased to have learned that he hasn’t. Had I been there in sunny daylight, I would have seen those silent, shuttered streets crowded with well-dressed old couples and families: the former residents of downtown L’Aquila, drawn from their far-flung new homes by that irresistible urge to stroll and natter and pose en masse. What a sad but very wonderful spectacle that must be.

  * * *

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION – STAGE 6

  (Bari–L’Aquila, 428km)

  Alfonso CALZOLARI 100:28:39

  Pierino ALBINI +1:55:31

  Luigi LUCOTTI +2:04:26

  Timothy MOORE +48:23:20

  Stage starters: 21

  Stage finishers: 12

  CHAPTER 21

  I HAD EGGS for breakfast. It was about time: the 1914 riders ate almost nothing but. Raw eggs, somewhat improbably, were the energy-gels of a whole generation. As late as the 1940s, Gino Bartali was fuelling his contests with Coppi on a dozen a day. My boys set off every morning with their front pockets abulge with up to twenty eggs, whose contents were liberated throughout the stage with a practised knock against a knee or the handlebars. The white was flicked aside, the yolk swallowed, and then the best bit: pelting the journalist’s motorcade with the empty shells. ‘Such behaviour is below expectations,’ noted one po-faced, egg-faced writer in his report.