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  My stride began to falter as I hunted a restaurant in old-town Italy’s classiest alleys: no wee-stink, no graffiti, the shrill ululations of a trainee soprano spilling down from some gentrified garret. It was hardly a surprise to find my feet dragging over the cobbles. The drained and vacant shuffle had been my default evening gait since that very first ride out of Milan. Indeed, it was almost a badge of honour. Reading Tyler Hamilton’s autobiography, I’d been rather taken by the commitment to listlessness that characterised a professional cyclist’s out-of-saddle existence: moving between sofas with elaborate, geriatric sloth, conserving every microjoule of energy for the next race. Obviously my hunched stumbling after hours was less about saving strength than the result of having just used it all up, but still: when I shambled, I did so with a certain weary pride.

  There was something different about this shamble, though. I tried to establish exactly what as I trudged on, pausing now and then to gaze woodenly at some terse and exorbitant bill of fare. Exhaustion, check; malnourishment, check – pallid, day-end emptiness was present in all its usual forms. But also in another form, which opened itself up to me an hour later, as I dabbed habitual red stains from around my mouth at an outside table with cathedral views.

  A successful conclusion to this endeavour – a turnout that for so long had seemed unworthy of sensible consideration – had stealthily progressed first to plausibility, and now imminence. This alone seemed grounds for slack-jawed, mind-hollowing incredulity, but there was a void within this void, a midge in the ointment. I was looking forward to going home – of course I was, and hungrily so: in recent days I had often found myself bellowing my children’s silliest nicknames across the fields. But this – the vase of sfuso frizzante beneath a floodlit cathedral, the balmy night air, the diligent savouring of pleasure earned through pain – all this I was going to miss. I sat there shaking my head because I couldn’t believe that my ancient bike and I were about to make it to the finish. And because a part of me didn’t want us to.

  CHAPTER 24

  GAZING WITH FLINTY, eve-of-accomplishment significance through my window at an unpromising morning, I looked down and spotted the Hirondelle, resting where I’d left it against the wall of the covered courtyard two floors below. Even from this range I could see it had not slept well. The previous afternoon I’d had to pump up the rear tyre, Old Snowy, a couple of times; now it sat flaccid and utterly airless. If it was a slow puncture, it had sped up.

  Throttling back the big swears, I ran through my options. I was all out of Stan’s miracle sealant, and with 164km to go, sourcing a new tubular tyre seemed like a really great way of ensuring I didn’t make it to Milan until the following day – thereby failing to complete a stage in three days, and sensing Mario Marangoni pull away for good as I pootled about Cremona’s commercial suburbs at shopping speed. Ghastliest of all, as silly as it sounds, was the realisation that an extra day would mean a farcical, portent-sapping rerun of farewell experiences. I just couldn’t bear to think this only might be the final time that I squeezed into my damp and shrunken jersey, that Savlon kissed my arse, that the shoes of Gerard Lagrost imprisoned my calloused toes. Nope, buttocks to all that: today was Milan or bust, a 164km blaze of death or glory. I got dressed with as much purposeful defiance as my outfit allowed, then stopped off en route to the breakfast room and pumped Old Snowy so taut that it pinged when I flicked it.

  One last deserted canteen, one last buffet plunder, one last maps-across-the-table navigational briefing overseen by the breakfast-telly weather generals. This was more like it: the stuff of history, one small brioche for a man and all that. Blinking something out of my eyes, with unsteady fingers I instructed the sat-nav to direct me to the Via Giovanni da Procida, Milano. Biddle-iddle-ip! ‘Distance to target: 91.3km.’

  Come again? The stirring trumpet fanfare in my head mangled itself into tuneless flatulence. I scrabbled the map back open and riffled through Paolo. Neither turned up even one of the missing 70-odd kilometres. In his perfunctory account of the last stage, Paolo didn’t mention a single town between Cremona and Milan, which the map agreed lay around 90km apart via any sensible route. I took a moment to admire the circuitous dithering contrived by the Giro organisers to join these cities in almost twice the distance. How could I make up the difference? Ride seven sides of some gigantic and spurious Lombardian hexagon? Do a few hundred laps round a hypermarket car park? The solution presented itself when I clicked through the sat-nav’s various screens, and noted that my accrued distance to date stood at 3,236km. Courtesy of sundry detours and getting lost, I had already ridden 74km further than the 1914’s Giro overall total. I sniffed, rubbed my nose with the palm of my hand and thought: Well, that’s all right then.

  The rear tyre was still firm to the touch as I prepared to leave, though it sank onto its haunches a little when the saddlebag went on, and a lot more when my bottom followed. Rain had been sprinkling the cobbles since my third brioche, and was now the wrong side of steady. A subwoofer boom of thunder rolled along the flanks of brick and marble; I pulled the brim of my cap down and weaved away through the pedestrian-zone umbrellas. If this day was to be my last, it had just got a lot shorter. But also a lot hairier, as I’d now have to thrash the crap out of my dying bike on sodden roads to have any hope of reeling in Mario Marangoni across the reduced available distance.

  When at last I left Cremona’s splashy, honking rush hour behind, I swiped rain off the sat-nav with the shred of oily suede that was my right glove, and noted that the AVS had dropped back down to 17.6. My shoulders hardly had time to sag in defeat before a familiar corrugated rumble told my bottom that the rear tyre was flat. I hadn’t quite covered 15km; I stopped and with an air of blank, automatic duty pumped it back up.

  The rain went off to someone else’s parade just before eleven. By then I’d stopped twice more to reinflate Old Snowy, which now held air for less than 10km. On the plus side, I hadn’t lost any more spokes, and the soundtrack of locomotion was enormously less painful after I opened up the rear calipers as far as they’d go: the warped rim now barely scuffed the cork pads, at the trifling cost of reducing the efficiency of my rear brakes from modest to zero. And so I bumped across the blotted, grey-scale plain in a state of reflectiveness and diminishing resignation, greeting a compendium of representative challenges with something close to fondness. A demented dog pressed up to a chain-link fence, huge lorries on a tiny road, a pothole brimmed with brown water, a headwind and a gob-full of midges: everything but the heat and the hills.

  ‘Bici antica, I like,’ cooed the young barman, bending down by the Hirondelle. ‘To where you go now?’

  I told him through a mouthful of salami panino.

  ‘Oh, Milano is no far, forty chilometri. Where you start?’

  The same answer emerged with the odd bubble of Coke.

  ‘Milano and return to Milano?’ He chuckled chidingly. ‘But is a so small viaggio!’

  My grip tightened around the can tilted into my mouth, then relaxed. I drained it and placed the empty on my little round table, beside a half-drunk litre of fizzy water.

  ‘I know,’ I said, peering up at the re-darkening sky, ‘but that’s an old bike and I’m an old man.’

  He responded with many small sounds of affable objection, and as I downed the water we shared a companionable silence, looking out past his awning as the sky unloaded again and the lunchtime citizenry of Sant’Angelo Lodigiano scurried for cover. Then I paid, pumped the rear fit to bust, put my cap on and for purely theatrical effect hooked the arms of my goggles over my ears, turning the wet world blue.

  ‘Eh, old style!’

  To give this winning response the send-off it deserved I caned away into the rain, shooting past the scabby grandeur of yet another rundown, magnificent nowhere. Stealing a glance at the sat-nav as I sent an arc of standing water against a bus shelter, I saw that my AVS had just gone back up to 17.7. Given the conditions and the state of my bicycle, my reaction to this didn’t
so much tempt fate, as grab fate’s bottom while flicking her enormous boyfriend repeatedly on the nose. And Moore’s gone! He’s got the hammer right down and he’s absolutely flying along these roads! It’s crazy and it’s doomed, Phil, but by fuck it’s tenting my pants out!

  *

  Ninety-eight and a bit years before, down a road I could sadly but guess at, eight cyclists pedalled steadily towards the end of the most punishing race of their lives, or of anyone else’s. The merciless attacks and chicanery were over now: it was after 4 p.m., and they’d been riding in a tight group since the midnight start in Lugo. The sky, at last, was clear and the roads, for once, were good, but still the shattered survivors would be denied a gentle run-in. From morning onwards the roadside crowds began to build in noise and numbers, and once again the little peloton found itself choking through the dust raised by a thousand bellowing idiots in cars and on bikes. Pierino Albini, on his way to second place overall, took commendably direct action: those who got in his face had their hats snatched off and flung in the ditch, and if that didn’t do the trick, a forearm smash to the jaw sent the owner the same way. Leaning out of their Fiat Tipo Zeros, the race organisers eventually subdued the crowds in a manner I think we’d all like to see rolled out on the oaf-lined Alpine climbs of today: with horse whips.

  The riders hit Milan just before 5 p.m., followed now by cars carrying the fêted fallen – come, in Paolo Facchinetti’s words, ‘to applaud the bravery of comrades who had the luck and courage to survive this deadly race’. Ganna, winner of the inaugural Giro; future campionissimo Girardengo; Bordin, hapless protagonist of that record breakaway on the longest stage in history; Gerbi, wine-loving scourge of the excisemen. All the big-name victims but Giuseppe Azzini, understandably reluctant to see a rival claim the victory that his farm-based nap habit had once again deprived him of. (Perhaps he’d also got wind of Bianchi’s petulant response to their humiliation: along with every one of his teammates, Azzini was to be sacked with immediate effect. He later rode again, but with little success. In 1925, ravaged by years of over-exertion, strychnine and crushing disappointment, Azzini succumbed to tuberculosis: aged just thirty-four, he went to sleep in that big barn in the sky.)

  Roared along by huge crowds, the riders wearily wound up the pace for the showpiece final sprint, a lap of the open-air Velodromo Sempione, just a block from the boulevard they’d started out from sixteen days and 3,162km previously. Having punched his way through Lombardy, an invigorated Albini crossed the line first with the others at his wheel, all awarded the same time in the traditional manner. But cheering acclaim died in the spectators’ throats as one by one, the eight riders hobbled onto the presentation stage. ’Tache Durando and his teammate Luigi Lucotti had to be held upright. Unhealed wounds from their terrible crashes on the previous stage had left Clemente Canepari and Ottavio Pratesi almost unrecognisable. The winner was a grime-etched skeleton: the hearty, boater-wearing Stucchi executives flanking Calzolari in the victory photo might have just found him crawling out of a collapsed mineshaft. Every rider was similarly emaciated, their cheeks and brows wizened, their eyes dark and deep: the faces of old men. No one could believe that Umberto Ripamonti, the local hero and solitary surviving amateur, had yet to turn twenty. Ripamonti came home a distant last, almost seventeen hours behind Calzolari’s aggregate time of 135 hours 17’ 56”, but his achievement was perhaps the most heroic: fixing his own bike, finding his own food and lodgings, entirely self-motivated and self-sufficient from start to finish. (It took a lot out of him: Ripamonti never won a race and rode only one more Giro, retiring halfway through the 1924 edition.)

  The tiny clutch of survivors and their shocking condition sparked an immediate scandal. The 1914 Giro, everyone now saw, had been in every respect a race too far: the stages too long, the route too cruel, the conditions too relentlessly brutal. ‘An event that seeks to destroy its competitors has no place in sport,’ wrote one commentator. ‘The organisers have no right to call this inhuman spectacle a success.’ The only paper to do so was the Gazzetta dello Sport, which of course happened to own the Giro. Having dutifully praised the robust reliability of the bicycles and tyres supplied by the principal sponsors, and the daring genius of cheerily unrepentant race director Armando Cougnet, the Gazzetta’s final report built to a rousing martial climax: ‘An army left Milan; only a brave patrol has returned. A handful of men who held fast against unimaginable hardship and stood undaunted in the breach.’

  Hollow as it may have sounded at the time, three weeks later this paean to military attrition began to seem the very pinnacle of poor taste. On 9 June, Alfonso Calzolari was waving his way through the thronged streets of Bologna in an open car. On 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand made the mistake of doing the same in Sarajevo. The four-year global conflict catalysed by his consequent assassination cut down almost a whole generation of young European men. Lucien Petit-Breton, who had abandoned the 1914 Giro with such impressive fury at the foot of Sestriere, was one of three Tour de France winners killed on the Western Front. A good number of the Italian pros from the 1914 Giro, amongst them Albini and Azzini, fought in the Alps; Carlo Oriani, one of Azzini’s most faithful Bianchi lieutenants, didn’t return. A hefty swathe of the amateur entrants would have shared his fate, and I’d often wondered about my Hirondelle’s first owner: as a Frenchman of fighting age, he stood a 30 per cent chance of never coming home to his shiny new pride and joy.

  When the Giro was resurrected in 1919, the ghastly suffering of brave young men had rather lost its appeal as a spectator sport. Never again would professional cyclists be compelled to set out at midnight on twenty-hour rides. The stages in the first post-war Giro were on average 100km shorter – seven of them won by Girardengo, in an unparalleled display of dominance. The campionissimo claimed victory in the colours of Stucchi, stoutly assisted by Alfonso Calzolari, who was running third when he retired on stage seven.

  Fonso, who had endured a rather easier war in the catering corps (‘Eggs again, boys – get ’em while they’re raw!’), never raced with much distinction thereafter. Fearsome saddle sores wrote off the rest of 1919, and early in 1920 a car ran over his left hand. He failed to finish that year’s Giro, and didn’t bother again. In fact his palmares, as we professionals like to style our career achievements, show that he never won another race. The 1914 Giro wasn’t just his finest hour, it was pretty much his only hour. But what an hour it was.

  And what an hour I was having. Five kilometres of lunatic pedal mashing, a brutal roadside workout with the pump, then five more. My legs glowed with pain and my biceps burned: it began to feel like some punishing new endurance sport, the pumpathlon. The sustained violence breached my bottom bracket’s final defences. Something gave in the left-hand crank as I powered up a long bridge across a motorway intersection, and from then on both pedals skipped two beats each. Beneath my whirring feet swelled the painful tones of Thompson’s Final Symphony, a drawn-out rending shriek, like the Eiffel Tower having one of its legs sawn off. I had a sudden vision of the most nobly tragic finale in sporting history, when Derek Redmond’s hamstring snapped in the 400m at the 1992 Olympics, and his father ran onto the track, helped him up and walked his crippled, weeping son over the line. The rear wheel was now bending like a bamboo Beckham: one more broken spoke and I’d be dad to the Hirondelle’s Derek. Come in, Number 7, your time is up.

  Farms gave way to the distribution centres and deckchair sex workers of Italy’s urban hinterland. The rain stopped but I kept my high-vis jacket on: I was closing in on the world’s largest concentration of Italian drivers, and getting crushed to death at this stage would be a serious frustration. As the arterial traffic thickened I was forced into a sliver of hard shoulder, rutted as a cattle-grid and bestrewn with cat-sized rodent stiffs that – bwolp! – couldn’t always be avoided.

  The ever-lairier motorists, the grating creaks and wobbles, those breathless pump-stops and that overarching commitment to maximum speed . . . it was difficult to
conduct the pensive review that my proximity to the finish seemed to demand. All I could summon was a parallel with my last day at school, and the kindred feeling that a riddance long dreamed of was about to leave me numb and a little regretful, more demob-sad than happy. Where now were all the bad times? Well, there was Sestriere. Both up it and down. Choc-Vom Hill, obviously. School buses. Sickly breakfasts with a damp gusset. And with that a great shoal of endured miseries bobbed to the surface: broiled madness in Chianti, the Potenza Kidney Misfortune, Bari’s death-dog, double-brandy mountain, prune-faced assassins at the wheel of a thousand Fiat Pandas. A litany of despair and bedragglement, from that first afternoon with half a saddle up my jacksie to the throat-coating Lombardian midge plague.

  Buildings grew taller and the pavements filled. I stopped for a final bout of roadside hyper-inflation, snatching the chance to offload superfluous weight, like a pro hurling his bidons into the crowd before the final bunch sprint. Into the bin with that box of bicarb, four half-carved prosecco corks, the beastly Savlon and a tube of travel wash – erstwhile cornerstones of my life, all suddenly redundant. I emptied my little bottle of oil through the filler flap on the bottom bracket and ditched the two shredded, punctured old tyres I’d kept lashed to the saddlebag for some obscure emergency that wouldn’t be happening now. Then I dashed into a Spar for one last lilac bar of Milka Extra Cacao, and dashed out with two plus a bottle of cheap fizz: a whimsical, weighty one-man podium kit. We were going to make it. My decrepit velocipede and I were actually going to make it. Bollocks to all those old farts in bike shops who said the Hirondelle would never get me here. Bollocks to me for secretly agreeing with them.

  Cramming eight squares into a brown-ringed maw, I considered my slavish dependence on this afternoon delight. Strange to recall that in the course of normal daily life I never eat chocolate, on account of not really liking it – my mouth would henceforth be a stranger to 45 per cent cocoa solids. And with that, my coated tongue sparked off a Proustian reverie, the highlights showreel of an abnormal daily life so nearly at an end. That first refreshment stop just outside Milan, looking around at the bell-towers and waddling old widows and understanding at once that I might happily see out my days in almost every town I would pass through, particularly if a vacancy came up at the pharmacist’s. The aromatic splendour of valleys wreathed in rosemary and wood-smoke. The motherly kindness of grocers and waitresses and hoteliers; the infectious party mood of so many balmy civic nights. The pizzas – oh, the pizzas, bubbling to crispy yet tender perfection in my mind’s oven. The mood-enhancing Italian landscape in all its three-season majesty, those invigorating and bewildering snow-to-sand metamorphoses between dawn and dusk. The precious gratification of bridging these different worlds under my own steam, the woozy evenings spent reliving implausible daily accomplishments through a hotel window, on the screen of a digital camera, in the heavy folds of those beautifully antiquated Touring Editore maps. And all those little old men on their pampered road bikes, rolling over the plains and scuttling up the mountains. Those phantom Fonsos, those me-to-bes.