Gironimo! Page 28
IN DEFIANCE OF Silvio’s unflattering assessment of Jesi, I mustered a weary affection for this unpretentious little town, with its brick-built churches and low-key Friday-night buzz. Rather less endearing was its low-key Saturday-morning buzz: something absolutely had to be done about that tyre, but in defiance of the hotel receptionist’s promise – and indeed the opening hours posted in their windows – both of Jesi’s bike shops were closed. Just to rub it in, one of them had an inner-tube vending machine on the wall outside, offering 24-7 salvation to the stricken owners of normal bicycles.
Mumbling compound swears at the sunny tarmac, I lurched and shuddered towards the coast. It was 171km from Jesi to Lugo, where the penultimate stage ended – surely within my daily compass on flat roads. Taking stock of my physique in the shower that morning – yes, we’ve all heard that one before – I was genuinely unnerved by the enormity of my frontal thigh muscles: when I tensed them, a whole new bulge of firm tissue popped out at their fundaments, as if I’d grown an extra pair of kneecaps. Completing a single 1914 stage in three days seemed a mere bagatelle for such mighty bollards of flesh, yet this modest objective was now being slowly pulled from my grasp with every faltering, lumpy revolution.
By the time I hit the Adriatic at Senigallia, the scarred and gashed front tyre was again working its way off the wooden rim. Weekend cyclists approached with smiles of encouraging approval, which withered into concerned and sometimes disgusted frowns as my stupid wobbling plight manifested itself. I couldn’t acknowledge either response with the gesture it deserved: to raise a glove from the bucking, shimmying bars was to take my life in my hand.
‘Cicli Marocchi’. The words on the shop sign were good, the open door beneath them better, and the window display best of all: several vintage Bianchi jerseys arranged behind a restored Great War military bicycle carrying a rifle, a shovel, an acetylene lamp and – slap my moobs and call me Fonso – tubular tyres.
I didn’t even have to go inside: a young man in overalls who had evidently been watching me strode out, nodded approvingly at the Hirondelle and shook my hand. A shout over his shoulder summoned the man he called Papa to his side. After further pleasing exchanges – Papa, a full-figured man in his fifties, proudly confided that he was a veteran of three Eroicas – I rather superfluously waved a hand at my contorted, threadbare front tyre.
Both men rubbed their weekend stubble and wandered back inside, emerging long minutes later with a packet of glue and two very dusty tubular tyres. As I began to explain I was only after one, Papa drew my attention to the rear, his finger dwelling on a Sauron’s Eye of a gash that stretched a good four inches around its crown, spewing tufts of dirty fabric along the way. This hardly looked a recent phenomenon, which made my failure to notice it all the more appalling: I nearly retched with shame.
‘Molto, molto pericoloso,’ said his son gravely. Very, very dangerous. I paid and thanked them, then pallidly remounted. Papa clamped a farewell hand on my shoulder and cleared his throat. ‘For you, mister – goad lack.’
I took up station by a weather-beaten, powder-blue beach hut, setting to work before an audience of seagulls and a dozen hardy sunbathers, squeezing the last drops out of summer. The three-hour pit stop that now ensued killed off my hopes of completing the stage in three days, and would indeed have cost Alfonso Calzolari the Giro. Still, it could – should – have been worse. ‘Apply glue to tyre fabric,’ began the multilingual instructions packed inside the tube, ‘and leave to cure for a minimum of twenty-four hours.’
The front tyre slipped on a treat, like something out of an online video tutorial. There were issues of aesthetic authenticity: the tyre was far too thin for the era, and too black – my boys all rode on big, fat reds or off-whites. I had a dim sense that at some point I might give a shit about these shortcomings, but that point could wait. When I raised the handlebars aloft and watched the wheel below them spin round and free and true, my celebration sent a thousand gulls into the windy blue sky.
My engagement with the rear tyre elicited bird-bothering sounds from an uglier spectrum. In line with Papa’s suggestion, its intended substitute was a tubular that had evidently lain in some corner of the Cicli Marocchi storeroom for many years. ‘Clement Grifo NEVE’ read the label, in typography that would have looked at home on those packets of interwar spokes I’d bought all those moons ago from an unscrupulous communist plumber. Neve, as Papa had explained via an entertaining mime, meant snow. A snow tyre? A snow tyre for a bike? Still, the knobbly tread that delayed cycling’s most irresponsible lunatics from tumbling to a richly merited wintry death would also, said Papa, cope better with the weight of my saddlebag.
Everything that had gone right with the front now went wrong with the back. Most woefully, I forgot to stretch the tyre before smearing glue all over it: bad news for my hands, kit and pride; good news for the three nearest sunbathers, a group of hair-gelled young men in Speedos who had begun to take an uncharitable interest in proceedings. Pulling this ring of slippery, reluctant rubber into place involved gripping the wooden rim between my knees, and half an hour of empurpled straining in an earth-mother birthing posture, with my shorts falling down. The fitful jeers that greeted my eventual triumph were swiftly drowned out by a more strident noise: the final tug had trapped several hairs on both thighs between rim and rubber.
Blinking out tears of agonised chagrin and gasping raggedly, I set about aligning the tyre, getting it straight on the rim before the glue started to harden. Only now did I notice how very un-round the rear wheel had become of late. When I held the axle ends and span it, the rim twitched and waggled like a gyroscope entering its death throes. For days – like, dozens of them – the spoke-wrench had lain forgotten at the bottom of the tool bag; I now dug it out, squatted down and got to work. Wheelwright’s Arse had barely taken hold when I encountered a spoke that wouldn’t tighten, on account of no longer being in one piece: it had snapped clean through at the hub end. I frowned, tore it out and continued. Three spokes along: the same story. The leaden weight of that saddlebag over the back wheel, a million clattering potholes, my abysmal neglect of routine maintenance – a perfect spoke-buggering storm.
I sat heavily back against the beach hut, pressed a begrimed and sticky palm over my eyes and contemplated the full wretchedness of this discovery. Spokes could be replaced – I had brought four spares along – but doing so meant removing the freewheels from the hub, a task that demanded specialist tools and ugly brute force, neither of which I currently possessed. Cicli Marocchi had now been closed for two hours, and it would be two days before it or any other bike shop pulled up their shutters.
With a reedy hum quavering from my lips, I did what I could with the spoke wrench. Very little, it transpired: the two missing spokes were near neighbours, and no amount of twisting, turning or Speedo-clad cackling could correct the conspicuous buckle that annexed their share of the rim. It was gone three; I put the Hirondelle back together, wiped my hands on the beach hut and rode away up the esplanade, acknowledging a hindward ovation with a doffed cap and two fingers.
The coast was flat and straight and the road hugged it tight. For an hour I trundled cautiously through a nondescript straggle of defunct wig clubs and tripod-exchange superstores, circumnavigating potholes and drain covers and affording new respect to all other tarmac interruptions. Broken wheels were the principal cause of mechanical retirement in 1914, forcing four riders to quit in the last two stages alone.
A tailwind began to lean on me and little by little I built speed. It struck me that I had managed without those two spokes for a while, very possibly for an age, thundering carelessly down huge, twisty mountainsides: what, really, was the point in now crawling along such benign and innocuous roads as these? Plus, post-pit stop, the Hirondelle was an undeniably improved machine, smoother, straighter and more silent, its Keith Moon drum solo subdued to a ‘Girl from Ipanema’ shicka-shacka backbeat. And so quite soon I was fairly caning along, past the strip malls and p
etrol stations and on to the sand-scattered esplanades of the seaside proper.
Pesaro announced itself with serried ranks of empty sunloungers and a parade of blandly identical mid-rise hotels. It was gone six and the streetlights were flicking on; I pulled up by the first set of glass doors with two stars on them. A downward glance rounded off a bad day on a good note: my AVS was up to 17.3, and at some point I had built enough speed to splatter a massive bluebottle all over the frame badge. ‘Faster than life itself!’ I cried, flicking it off with an exultant whoop, then looking up to find I was being watched from behind the reception desk. Handily there was an even cheaper hotel right next door.
As a resort Pesaro seemed entirely unremarkable, a grid of cereal-box holiday residences laid out behind a yawning forecourt of sand. A long weekend there would probably feel too long, but it did the job for me that night: give me a warm sea breeze and a starry sky and I can tolerate any amount of beige concrete. I dined on the boardwalk, at an outside table with a view of the silvery wavelets below: there was a pizza ciclista on the menu, which I’d have ordered had it sounded even slightly less austere (oil, salt and rosemary – it’s a party in your mouth, with two old nuns and no booze or music). Pleasantly bloated with funner food and the joyful return of sfuso frizzante, I ambled back down a promenade full of yelping toddlers and Asian street vendors performing prodigious aerobatic feats with those sling-shot illuminated helicopter things. The place was impressively abustle for late September. Great swathes of the Italian coast are clotted with seaside towns like Pesaro, anonymous and indistinguishable, yet beloved of natives with a stubbornly traditional holiday agenda: breakfast, beach, bar, bed. Good old-fashioned, foreigner-free family fun.
It wasn’t yet 11 p.m. when I draped my kit over the hotel balcony rail to dry. In more contemporary European resorts things would have been building to a noisy, neon climax, but the street below was emptying and lights were blinking off in windows all around. It suddenly felt like Margate in the 1950s. The event I was retracing lay a century in the past, but not for the first time I felt I’d gone back halfway to meet it.
Sunday meant fewer cars and more bikes, most of them in large and noisy club pelotons who bossed the traffic, three abreast, and threw me the odd cheer. Just past Rimini, where the road turned inland, I reeled in and passed an unsteady seventy-year-old rider wearing one of those leather-sausage helmets. ‘Fantastico, fantastico!’ he croaked out after me, and when I turned to give him a smile I saw his face pucker with the conflicting emotions of bitter-sweet retrospection. I caught his gaze and felt my own features tugged in strange directions: I was his past, and he was my future.
It was a day tailor-made for the easy accumulation of distance: flat, quiet roads, a following wind and tirelessly uncaptivating scenery. The very air was drab, a skimmed-milk haze that hung listlessly around all day, absorbing orderly, bland towns into the ironed-pancake fields. As shambolic, impoverished and hatefully undulating as it had largely been, I was now rather pining for the south.
I spent most of the time contemplating my front wheel – so straight and true, a pleasure for the catatonically bored cyclist to look down on – and trying to ignore the knobbly, wobbly disorder of the rear. That kink was now scuffing the rim against the brake blocks with every rotation, and as well as looking stupid and wrong and awful, the lumpy snow tread contacted the tarmac with a slappy, swooshing noise that precisely imitated a maturing slow puncture. Could I bear to devote vast chunks of Monday attempting to rectify this under-arse disaster, or would I just recklessly crack on with my father’s favourite Italian word ringing through my head? Speriamo, let’s hope for the best. Even as I asked myself the question I knew the answer.
Lunch was a twin-panino job in a bar full of silent old men watching the Grand Prix on a telly the size of a barn door. I necked an espresso, then another, and set out to reel in the afternoon with redoubled intensity. It was a literally straightforward challenge. After all that squiggling about on mountain roads like varicose veins, I now found myself riding across a giant Etch A Sketch portcullis: long, linear avenues bordered with trees that converged towards the milky horizon. As ever on such thoroughfares, my thoughts turned to the existentialist writer Albert Camus, who became a non-existentialist when the car he was in lost an argument with a plane tree on a dead-straight, bone-dry road. I have to report that these sombre musings did not temper my conduct: I hit and maintained speeds that would have been physically and technically beyond me three weeks before, when I’d ridden across the other side of my map of Emilio-Romagna. With legs ablur, I hauled in and passed Fiat after dawdling Fiat, each of them home to a straight-faced couple in their Sunday best, the wife in no hurry to visit that aunt she’d always hated, the husband in a sulk at missing the Grand Prix.
The shell-shocked truce that drew the 1914 riders together on the road out of L’Aquila held throughout the stage. With allowances for hierarchy: when Calzolari snapped a rim, his rivals slowed while the Stucchi team sorted a replacement – but as an unattached isolato, Maggiore Albani found himself left behind after suffering the same fate. In despair he gave up, leaving Enrico Sala as the isolated isolato: Sala celebrated this achievement by being knocked off his bike by a large dog. At Pesaro just nine riders were left in the race: eight in the front group, with ’Tache Durando toiling distantly behind through his private alimentary hell. Those eight became seven with the exhausted abandonment of Giosuè Lombardi, who had earlier dropped all the way back to help his team leader Durando. ‘What are you doing here?’ muttered the whey-faced ’Tache when the two met. ‘Leave me alone and get back to the front.’ The effort of obeying this order finished Lombardi off.
Having rolled together through Pesaro at midday to a clamorous reception, throughout the afternoon this huddle of ‘glorious survivors’ was mobbed by a growing entourage of fans and well-wishers on bicycles and in cars. It was a spectacle to gladden the hard heart of race director Armando Cougnet: his field whittled to a lonely cluster of heroes by sheer gladiatorial attrition, and the public loving it. Towards the stage finish at Lugo, the crowds thickened further: this was as close as the race would come to Bologna, the leader Calzolari’s home town.
A touching sense of localism is one of the sweetest things about modern professional cycling – in fact the only one, apart from the stuffed toy that stage winners are usually given to wave about. Even an event as facelessly globalised as the Tour de France will still pause to allow a rider to roll on ahead of the peloton as it enters his home town, to wave at his friends and neighbours and give the wife and kids a peck on the cheek. Cycling has always been a parochial sport, and nowhere more so than in rivalry-riven Italy. Having pledged to win the Giro for Bologna, Calzolari was now determined to put on a show for his townspeople packing the Lugo pavements. With a kilometre left, at his instruction Clemente Canepari broke to the front to lead him out for the sprint. The finish was in sight when Canepari fell foul of those exuberant idiot-encroachers who are always over-represented in any cycling crowd. Pierino Albini was first over the line; Calzolari fourth a second later; a bloody and cussing Canepari last of the bunch, forty-two seconds back. The bunting was being taken down when ’Tache Durando – what a man – walked his bike over the line an hour and a quarter later. Adding insult to digestive injury, 6km outside town he’d burst his last permitted spare.
In the ninety-eight years since elapsed, Lugo seemed to have mislaid whatever it was that persuaded Cougnet to end the Giro’s penultimate stage there. Perhaps it never had anything, and just blagged its way onto the itinerary: I’ve just discovered that the noted swindler Charles Ponzi was born there. At any rate, every other leg of the Giro had begun and ended in a major settlement marked on my map in heavy capitals; Lugo was meekly identified in lower-case italics. Pedalling through its grid of subdued and modest streets, I found no trace of a mighty or important past, just suggestions – a slight rounding off of decorative edges, the unusual preponderance of concrete rendering – that Lu
go may have found itself in the wrong place (the front line) at the wrong time (1944). (An ironic survivor was the towering Fascist memorial to a Great War flying ace – a sinister, totalitarian but undeniably impressive limestone spire that bullied the entire main piazza into submission.) What I did find, to my slight astonishment, was an extremely appealing palazzo hotel, in whose rearward car park I now dismounted.
‘English?’
I smiled, hardly minding by this stage. The gracious receptionist said she’d watched me lock my bike up, presumably in a really English manner, on her CCTV. ‘Could I ask what brings you to Lugo?’
From what I’d seen of the town, I imagined this to be a routine and earnest question. I provided my stock answer and her eyes widened; as I embellished it she began to emit coos and gasps and other gratifying sounds of amazement and appreciation. I don’t mind admitting I was in the mood for a few slaps on the back. It had taken a long, hard week to crank my AVS up from 17.1 to 17.3; in nine breathless hours, I had just raised it by the same amount again.
‘Oh, your bici antica is famous!’ I looked over to share her view of the CCTV monitor, upon which a bald guest was fuzzily appraising the Hirondelle through the open window of his long BMW. A moment later this perma-tanned little Pablo Picasso walked past the desk and the receptionist – or rather the manageress, as I would later discover this demonstrably splendid woman to be – hailed him in Italian. I caught snatches of her address: wood, cork, Milano a Milano. His expression throughout was of studied indifference.
‘Bici francese?’ said Pablo briskly, turning to me. I nodded: a French bike; this guy clearly knew his stuff. At some length he then held forth about his own vintage bicycle, which I gathered was a very beautiful and fully restored 1937 Benotto. ‘Tutto autentico.’ A thin smile. ‘Senza pneumatici di neve.’
Completely authentic, without snow tyres. You horrid little shit! I looked him up and down – it didn’t take long – and saw stubby legs whose pedalling days were over, a gaudy fat watch that had never timed its owner up a mountain, and two piggy eyes begging for the robust and repeated introduction of my thumbs.