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THE EARLY YEARS

Cougnet and co. were on to something. Luigi Ganna may have been the Giro’s first champion, but it was clear in the summer of 1909 that the race was the real star, and that the Gazzetta dello Sport, as its master, was the biggest winner. Publishing every other day, when the riders rested, the pink paper had seen a huge swell in readership as nascent tifosi nationwide – this Italian term for sports fans comes from the Greek typhos, from the fever – were bitten by the cycling bug and eager to devour all the gory details of the previous day’s racing. A young footballer, recently retired, by the name of Emilio Colombo was hired as the paper’s full-time editor and charged with following every stage of the race personally in order to provide as much coverage and colour as possible – not all of it strictly factual – to feed the public’s seemingly insatiable hunger for the race.

The first Giro’s success emboldened the organisers, so the following spring’s edition was duly increased from eight to ten stages, covering just under 3,000 kilometres. That made the average stage length slightly shorter than the inaugural edition, but six of the ten were still over 320 kilometres, and the first day’s route was a gruelling 388 kilometres from Milan to Udine, a small city northeast of Venice not far from the modern border with Slovenia.

Of the 101 starters who began the race on 18 May, 16 failed to reach the opening day’s end and only 20 would make it back to Milan three weeks later. But though these early Giri were certainly wars of attrition rather than tests of outright speed, it’s still impressive that the winner covered the route in a little over 13 hours, averaging almost 30 kilometres per hour. The opening honours of the second edition went to the Milanese Ernesto Azzini, a hulk of a rider who would later that summer become the first Italian winner of a stage at the Tour de France before retiring into anonymity a decade later and dying of tuberculosis aged just 38. Right behind him that day in Udine was another native of Milan, the 27-year-old Carlo Galetti, who was about to become the Giro’s first dominant force.

Italian sports journalists have always loved nicknames, the weirder the better, and while it’s not something that’s restricted to cycling – football’s Roberto Baggio was known as ‘Il Divin Codino’, the Divine Ponytail – over the years it has become a common part of the sport. These days we have Vincenzo Nibali, the Shark of the Strait, named for the sea beside his native Messina; and Fabio Aru, called the Knight of the Four Moors, in reference to the Sardinian flag. The early Giri were all about Galetti, ‘Il Scoiattolo dei Navigli’, the Squirrel of the Canals, a moniker presumably inspired by his riding style and by the canals that criss-crossed the neighbourhood in Milan from which he came. Unlike the determined-looking Ganna, who wore a strong parting in his hair and had an athletic build, or Gerbi, whose deep-set eyes and tightly cropped hair gave him a sinister look, Galetti’s thick-set frame and balding pate gave him the genial look of agreeable middle age. But then appearances, as everyone knows, can be deceiving. He’d been a printer before becoming a cyclist, and reports of the time describe an exactitude in his riding that reflected the demands of his previous profession. The former typesetter had taken his narrow loss in the 1909 Giro quite badly, and spent the intervening 12 months preparing for the next event with dogged determination.

The single-mindedness of his character was to serve Galetti well in the coming weeks, as dozens of riders retired from the race. Ganna, the defending champion, was out of contention after the first day due to a costly flat tyre that left him in 21st place. He focused on stage wins, taking three, and though Galetti was ostensibly also a rival, the pair teamed up with Eberardo Pavesi to make sure that the foreigners, and in particular Lucien Petit-Breton, did not have an easy time of it on Italian soil. He was a past winner of Milano–Sanremo, Paris–Tours, Paris–Brussels and a two-time champion of the Tour de France, and one of the sport’s first stars, but because of the points system the Frenchman was already hopelessly behind by the third stage, with 15 to Galetti’s five. Taking the hint, Petit-Breton promptly packed his bags and set course for his home in Brittany before the start of the fourth stage to Naples. By the end of that day, the second-placed Pierino Albini had also abandoned, meaning that, barring disaster, the Giro was won with five stages still to go. Galetti, Pavesi and Ganna greedily divided up the remaining victories, with the Squirrel comfortably ending up atop the podium back in Milan with a commanding lead of 28 points to 46 and 51, respectively.

The first five editions of the race were run on a points system, with the lowest aggregate score taking the general classification, just like the Tour de France. A stage win earned one point, second place two, and so on, until 50th place, after which point any miserable soul who rolled in would be awarded 51 points and left alone to consider their vocation. This was an understandable simplification, given the rudimentary technology of the day and the difficulty in keeping accurate timings for a disparate group of raggedy cyclists over huge distances, and on the whole it was fair enough. But it’s impossible not to feel some sympathy for poor old Giovanni Rossignoli, who would have won the Giro twice had a stopwatch been used instead of the placings.

Galetti’s second triumph began in Rome. Cougnet had decided to give the Giro a more southern feel for 1911, with the start and finish both held in Rome, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of King Victor Emmanuel II’s declaration of the Italian state. The route headed north from the capital to Florence, Genoa and the Ligurian coast, before skirting through Piemonte to Turin and on to Lombardy and Milan, from where it headed south to Bologna, Ancona, Abruzzo and Bari, looping up through Naples on its way back to the Eternal City.

Rossignoli gallantly fought the reigning champion in the opening stages and even held the lead for the first five days before Galetti took control. Petit-Breton, back over the border for more punishment, was also in the mix, becoming the first foreigner to lead the Giro’s general classification when he snuck up on the duelling Italian duo to snatch the GC on stage nine to Sulmona, deep in the Apennines. The French star’s luck wouldn’t hold, however, and a crash forced him to retire on stage 11, cruelly just two points off Galetti at the top of the leader board. For the second year in a row, the Milan native was all conquering. And for the second time in three years, Rossignoli was robbed by wicked fate. He finished the first edition almost 37 minutes ahead of Ganna in terms of total elapsed time, and in 1911 he was 34 minutes clear of Galetti. Never let it be said that bike racing used to be fair.

In 1912, politics intervened when Italy went to war. Giuseppe Garibaldi and the nation’s other Patres Patriae were united by a belief in self-determination and Italian nationalism, but the Red Shirts were always more of a revolutionary guard than an imperial army. There were others, however, who once in power would embrace the idea of empire quite zealously, and, by the turn of the twentieth century, and largely under the influence of the bellicose two-time prime minister Francesco Crispi (the Sicilian once compared himself to Mount Etna in a speech to the Italian parliament), the still juvenile nation had set itself on a course to war. Crispi had been a friend and confidant of Garibaldi and even more radical republicans like Giuseppe Mazzini, but over time he abandoned most of his liberal ideals in favour of national expansion and centralised control. For this reason, and several others, many see Crispi as the precursor to Benito Mussolini a few decades later.

War – and empire building – was seen as a viable method by which to create nationalist sentiment among the country’s mostly isolated and uninterested population. Upon its inception, Italy, according to the English historian Denis Mack Smith, had a ground army boasting more troops on the peninsula than Britain had deployed across its vast empire, some 400,000 souls, and by the turn of the century the government spent more on its enormous navy than it did on education, sanitation and public works combined. What it did not have were enemies. The continent’s principle powers all considered their southern neighbour to be a bit of a nuisance and an embarrassing ally but other than that they gave Italy little or no thought. Despite its size and its funding, the Italian military had proven itself to be a poor fight force very early on in its career – the 1866 Battle of Lissa saw the vastly outnumbered Austrian Empire defeat the Italians in the Adriatic, off the coast of modern-day Croatia – and the country was never genuinely considered a credible colonial power by its peers. As the German statesman Otto von Bismarck sardonically put it, Italy had a great appetite, but very poor teeth. It was a hunger that had to be satiated, however, and with tensions high across Europe, Italy decided to test its mettle in the area by invading Ottoman-controlled Libya on 29 September 1911. In isolation, the Tripolitanian War was of little consequence, but in the larger European context it proved to be a decisive moment in the continent’s lurch to conflict. Technology played a huge part – the Genovese pilot Giulio Gavotti had the dubious honour of being the first man to use an aerial bomb in anger – and the world was given a frightening glimpse of the horrors of modern warfare, but the campaign also proved significant because, encouraged by the relatively easy manner in which the Italians defeated the Turks, nationalists in the Balkans set into motion events that would eventually lead to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo and the outbreak of the First World War.

Sensing an appetite for patriotism, and perhaps with a mind to endear himself to those in power, Cougnet, now the sole owner of the Gazzetta dello Sport, decided to try something that could potentially add some loyalist lustre to his marquee event. The Bersaglieri are an eccentricity of the Italian military, famous for their wide-brimmed hats, decorated with the long black plumage of the capercaillie bird, and for the distinctive way in which they march, at a rapid trot, to trumpeters. It is a high-mobility unit, and as such, at the outbreak of war, many cyclists found themselves conscripted. Cougnet’s idea was to allow regiments to compete in the 1912 Giro as teams of four riders, with the results of the best three riders on each squad accounting for the final overall classification, which would be awarded to the best group rather than individual. It was, in theory, an interesting idea, but it had to be quickly abandoned when almost anyone serving in the army who could ride a bicycle proffered a palmarès that would have given the likes of Ganna and Galetti pause for thought. The Giro might have been tough in those days, but it was better than an African trench. Relativity is a wonderful thing.

In the end, the race organisation settled for one symbolic team from the Bersaglieri, led by a young Carlo Oriani, with the rest of the squads made up of trade teams under the banners of the various bike manufacturers. Riding for Atala-Dunlop, Carlo Galetti set about defending his title alongside Giovanni Micheletto, and his friends and sometimes rivals, Eberardo Pavesi and Luigi Ganna. It was to be a short Giro – 2,443 kilometres over nine stages, starting in Milan and finishing in Bergamo and going no further south than Rome – and one with a small peloton. Of the 56 riders who started, just 26 finished. Atala won comfortably, with three stage wins, and had it been run as an individual event, the title would have been Galetti’s. It was not an experiment that the Gazzetta ever chose to repeat.

Oriani and the rest of the Italian army were demobilised by the end of the summer, and the 23-year-old returned quickly to Milan and to his bicycle. Born in a suburb north of Milan on the road to Monza, he was a bricklayer by trade, but also a committed and talented racer, with the kind of squat build and brawny legs that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern sprint. In fact, just a week after returning to the Bel Paese, it was with a sprint that he proved just how good he was, beating allcomers to win the Giro di Lombardia in a thrilling finish. Having come fifth in the inaugural Giro, but, crucially, first in the category for independent riders who raced without a team, he was now ready to have a proper go at Italy’s most prestigious event.

The 1913 Giro featured a peloton made up exclusively of Italians, and began with a 341-kilometre slog from Milan to Genoa, which was won by the Piemontese Giuseppe Santhià. He was still leading after stage four, the race having worked itself down south, when he lost the lead to Eberardo Pavesi on a horrific stage to Bari that was marred by terrible road conditions and ended up taking some riders as long as 20 hours. The next day’s stage finished in Campobasso, a hilltop town in the Molise region that would become an important fixture in the Giro’s future sojourns down south, and was won by a young Costante Girardengo, a name to remember. Pavesi retained the GC lead, but Oriani, yet to win a stage but never far from the action, was sitting pretty in second. Stage seven spelled disaster for Pavesi, the victim of a crash, who dropped out of the running for general classification after finishing 18th, relinquishing the lead temporarily to Giuseppe Azzini who would, the next day, pass it on to Oriani. Azzini made the blunder of all blunders on stage eight, stopping to get some food in a restaurant only to fall asleep after his meal from pure exhaustion, but Oriani’s win was probably more the result of some astute tactical thinking on his part. He’d been consistently good without ever needing to be brilliant, and as the modern era of racing has proven time and again, that’s the surest strategy for anyone looking for glory. He was the first rider to ever win a grand tour without taking a stage victory.

The bricklayer was a popular champion. Known for his gregarious personality and a very healthy appetite – his nickname was ‘El Pucia’, a phrase in dialect relating to the way in which he’d mop up every last bit of sauce from his plate with a piece of bread – reports of the day recall Oriani’s screaming fans in Milan singing, ‘Che crepa la vacca, ma che ’riva el Pucia’, a phrase in the local dialect that somewhat defies translation but means roughly, ‘Let the cow die, as long as el Pucia wins.’ Strong stuff coming from a gang of farmers. He retired from the race the following year midway through and would never get the chance to race again. El Pucia rejoined the Bersaglieri at the outbreak of war later in 1914, serving bravely on the front with Austria for three years, when tragedy struck.

Caught in the middle of an assault by the Habsburg troops during the Battle of Caporetto, Oriani narrowly avoided capture by using his rudimentary Bersaglieri bicycle to retreat. During his escape, the young soldier discovered one of his compatriots drowning in the icy waters of the Tagliamento river and quickly dived in to save him. In doing so, he sealed his own fate. Still 12 years before the discovery of penicillin, the basic medicine of the day was incapable of saving the winner of the fifth Giro d’Italia from pneumonia. In an attempt to see if a warmer climate might save him, he was transferred to a hospital in Caserta, just north of Naples, but it was no use. On 3 December 1917, Oriani died, with his young wife by his bedside, a month after his 29th birthday.