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ALFREDO BINDA: IL GRANDE ANTIPATICO

Before Coppi, before Bartali, there was Binda. Costante Girardengo might have been Italy’s first Campionissimo, the champion of champions, but Binda was cycling’s first cannibal, decades before the Belgian Eddy Merckx would earn that famous sobriquet by ravaging every race and rider that he came up against. Binda was a rider of unparalleled ability, of such unique talent that he dominated almost every race he entered. In 14 years as a professional, he won the Giro five times, four Italian national titles, four editions of the Giro di Lombardia, three World Championships, two Milano–Sanremo titles and a plethora of other events, including two stages of the Tour de France, in the year that the Gazzetta dello Sport paid him not to ride the Giro. His record of 41 stage wins stood for 70 years, until Mario Cipollini went one better in 2003. Binda’s rule was not a benign hegemony. His dominance became so overbearing that his detractors called him Il Dittatore, the Dictator. Carlo Bergoglio, a journalist for the Turin-based magazine, Guerin Sportivo, was an admirer but jokingly dubbed him ‘Il Grande Antipatico’, an epithet that could be loosely translated as ‘The Great Unlikeable’. To his rivals, his presence made their failure an almost foregone conclusion. To the fans, that made the racing boring, which meant that to organisers, Binda’s virtuosity was also an inherent vice. His mere appearance at the start threatened to damage, even destroy, the race. And so they paid him to stay home.

Born in August 1902 in Cittiglio, just above Lake Maggiore in the province of Varese, about 60 kilometres northwest of Milan, he emigrated as a teenager in order to ease the burden on his parents (he was the tenth of 14 children), going to live with an uncle in Nice, where he began riding in his spare time while apprenticed as a plasterer. But when he took up racing in the autumn of 1921, it was immediately clear that Binda was special. He was the complete package: powerful on the flats, imperious in the mountains, said to be blessed with a seemingly effortless pedal stroke and an easy elegance under pressure. The French rider René Vietto famously remarked that if Binda started the race with a glass of milk on his back, it would still be full at the finish-line. Renowned as a snappy dresser, and something of a ladies man, the grace that Binda displayed on the bike was said to have been mirrored by a gentlemanly demeanour when off it. But not all aspects of his lifestyle were quite so refined. For one, he was famous for being quite lazy when he wasn’t racing, often sleeping until noon, something that would have seemed absurd to Italy’s peasantry and proletariat, used as they were to toiling from sun-up to sundown. He was also a regular smoker, and said to sometimes fill his bidons with more than just water.

You might think that a rider like that would be hugely popular, but the Italian public were slow to take to Binda. He was too good for his own good. He’d started winning as soon as he turned professional, and by the time he was 20 he was regularly beating the best riders from both France and Italy. As just one example of how dominant he was in his pomp, cycling lore has it that ‘Il Trombettiere di Cittiglio’ – another of his nicknames, for he was an accomplished trumpeter in his spare time – was able to shower and take the train home to Varese before the last rider crossed the finish line of the 1926 Giro di Lombardia, a race he won from second-placed Antonio Negrini by almost 30 minutes. Cycling has always thrived on rivalry – there’s little point in a race if you know the outcome at the start, after all – and from the second he made his debut for the legendary Legnano team until his retirement almost a decade and a half later, Binda lacked a consistent challenger. His first Giro came in 1925, when the first Campionissimo, Costante Girardengo, was already in decline, and though Learco Guerra occasionally got one over on him, the latter’s only Giro title came in 1934, the year a 32-year-old Binda retired midway through.

From the beginning, it was clear that Binda was bad for business. Appearing in the famous green jersey of the Legnano team, the little-known Binda would make an immediate and lasting impression on the Italian public in the 1925 Giro. The 13th edition, some 3,520 kilometres spread out over 12 stages, was supposed to be a straight battle between Legnano’s Giovanni Brunero and Girardengo, riding for Wolsit alongside Gaetano Belloni. Between them, that trio had won five of the last six Giri. One of them would probably have taken the 1924 edition, too, had it not been for the fact that none of them had taken part. The sport’s biggest names were beginning to get a sense of their own worth by that time, and so demanded that their teams pay them to take part, regardless of results. The teams, in turn, called for the race organisation to foot the bill, and a standoff ensued that allowed Giuseppe Enrici, an American-born Italian citizen, to win the biggest race of his career against a weak peloton of journeymen and chancers, lured onto their bicycles by the Gazzetta’s panicked promise of room and board for the duration of the race.

Pietro Linari, a teammate of Brunero and Binda, took the honours on 1925’s first stage, after 278 kilometres of racing from Milan to Turin, but all of the major favourites finished right behind him. Stage two headed towards the coast in Liguria, finishing in Arenzano, 30 kilometres west of Genoa along the Costa Azzurra. The win went to Girardengo, but both Brunero and Binda, his young gregario (the Italian term for a support rider within a team), finished on the same time, with the Trombettiere ahead of his leader in the classification. The 315 kilometres to Pisa on stage three cost Brunero more than four minutes, but they couldn’t separate Girardengo and his young rival, Binda, who both finished on the same time as the day’s winner, Girardengo’s teammate, Pierino Bestetti. The following stage was almost 14 hours long, but still they were neck and neck, and after more than 1,200 kilometres and 45 hours of racing, the duo began stage five to Naples joint top of the general classification.

As the race headed south, the plot thickened. Rumour had it that Gaetano Belloni was a little upset with his friend Girardengo. The Campionissimo had worked hard to help earn Bestetti the win with little regard to Belloni’s travails. He’d lost 16 minutes that day to bad form or bad fortune, and at least part of the blame, as far as Belloni was concerned, lay with his colleagues from Wolsit. For a rider of his stature – he’d already won the Giro in 1920, Milano–Sanremo twice and two of an eventual three titles at the Giro di Lombardia – this was a slight that couldn’t be ignored. And so, when the opportunity presented itself, Belloni took his revenge, working with Binda to attack Girardengo when he flatted on the way from Rome to Naples. Belloni’s treachery was rewarded with the stage win, but it was his 22-year-old accomplice who profited most, finishing the day with a lead of five-and-a-half minutes over Girardengo, whose hopes of a third Giro title had been dealt a deadly blow.

The gap would not have seemed fatal at the time – Enrici had won by almost an hour the year before – but for the rest of the Giro, the crowd favourite Girardengo just couldn’t shake Binda from his wheel. He bounced back from his disaster in Naples with a win two stages later in Benevento, but the race leader rolled in just 28 seconds behind. Brunero won stage eight to Sulmona, but Girardengo and Binda were just behind him, the hitherto king of Italian roads stalked mercilessly by his fresh-faced heir apparent. The next three stage victories went to the Campionissimo, but Binda never failed to finish immediately after, refusing to cede so much as a second, and by the time the peloton rolled out of Verona on stage 12, bound for Milan, there must have been an air of deflated resignation to the Wolsit team, even as Belloni took the final stage win. Their superstar, nine times the Italian national champion, twice the Giro d’Italia winner and the dominant force at races the length and breadth of the peninsula for more than half a decade, had been bested by a kid. Little did they know that the kid was just getting started.

The following year, a bad crash on the first stage put Binda out of contention for the general classification, but he laboured on in the service of Brunero, who would become the first man to officially win the event three times, Carlo Galetti having succeeded twice under his own name in 1910 and 1911, and again the following year, when the race was run as a team event. After initially wanting to retire, the defending champion ignored the fact that he was 40 minutes down on the leaders and set about proving himself to be the strongest rider in the field, winning six stages, guiding his teammate to the title and eventually finishing second, 15 minutes adrift of Brunero but an impressive 40 minutes ahead of the third-placed Arturo Bresciani. Costante Girardengo, having lead until stage six, retired the following day with an injury. Time was catching up with the Campionissimo, and while he’d race on with some success for another nine years, the man who had once been the pride of a nation would never win another stage at the Giro d’Italia.

Binda’s victory the following year was, in a word, vicious. The race covered 15 stages and more than 3,758 kilometres, and while 258 riders started in Milan, only one of them mattered. The 24-year-old led the general classification from day one and triumphed in all but three stages, and while the organisers had decided to introduce a time bonus of a minute for every stage victory, they didn’t really matter, because even without them he’d have finished more than a quarter of an hour ahead of his fellow Legnano rider, Brunero. It was a tyrannical display of superiority, and the perfect illustration of why champions need challengers. He won sprints and he won in the mountains. Only once did he surrender time on the three stages that he didn’t win, when he gave up a minute and 50 seconds to Arturo Bresciani on the 215-kilometre route from Pescara to Pesaro on stage 11. The baying crowds in Rome had seen him cross the line more than eight minutes ahead of Brunero, and the following day in Naples he entertained the tifosi right after winning the sprint by grabbing a trumpet and joining a band on the roadside, just to prove how little the victory had affected him. He’d top off the season by winning the UCI’s inaugural World Championships at the Nürburgring in Germany, beating the runner-up Girardengo by seven minutes.

The 16th Giro d’Italia wasn’t quite so despotic, but it wasn’t far off, and perhaps the most interesting thing that one could say about it was that, at 298, it holds the record for the largest ever number of starters. Domenico Piemontesi, who’d won bronze in Germany behind Binda and Girardengo, took control of the race early and managed five stage wins, but never regained control of the general classification after haemorrhaging more than 13 minutes to Binda on stage four. After 12 stages and 3,044 kilometres of racing, the Trumpeter finished 18 minutes and 13 seconds ahead of Giuseppe Pancera two weeks later in Milan, having mopped up five stage victories along the way. His younger brother Albino won the other. He played trombone.

By 1929, race fans were fed up. The 17th edition featured a smaller field, just 166, of more talented riders and had a relatively short average length of 209 kilometres for its 14 stages, but the changes mattered not a jot. There were no time bonuses, but Binda finished almost four minutes ahead of Domenico Piemontesi in the general classification and set a record for eight successive stage victories that has never been bettered. It would actually have been nine, had the judges not disqualified the first four across the line on stage 13, after a messy sprint was deemed to be in violation of the rules. Taking to the podium in the Arena Civica, a neoclassical stadium at the centre of Milan’s Parco Sempione, Binda was booed for his brilliance. There was no doubt that he was what the Italians call Fuoriclasse, beyond classification, but after Giro victory number four, the public was largely beyond caring.

What happened next is improbably shady, even by the grubby standards of professional cycling. In a desperate bid to liven things up, Armando Cougnet and the rest of the race’s organisers had an idea. They had to convince Binda to stay at home.

Nowadays, it’s rarely confirmed but generally accepted as commonplace that race organisers will offer the sport’s biggest names undisclosed appearance fees to take to the start-line. Events like the one-day Classics, the Tour, and the Giro are their own draw, but for smaller stage races and one-day competitions, a household name or two can be the distinction between failure and success. And so palms are crossed with silver. In 1930, Binda was bribed to do the opposite. They wanted him as far away from the action as possible. The Gazzetta dello Sport paid him the equivalent of the winner’s purse to skip the Giro and try his hand at the Tour de France. That means that he earned 22,500 lire without so much as pinning on a race number or turning a crank, and given professional cycling’s proudly avaricious nature, that coup must surely rank as the greatest success in the history of the sport.

In Binda’s absence, 115 riders took to the start with the best chance they’d had in years of actually winning something. For the first time in the event’s history, it started in the south – way south – in Messina, on the island of Sicily, where it spent three days before returning to the mainland. It was a year of firsts at the Giro, because an up-and-coming star by the name of Learco Guerra won the first of his career’s 31 stages while Luigi Marchisio became the race’s youngest ever GC champion, just a month after his 21st birthday. Unfortunately, that triumph was to prove the zenith of Marchisio’s career, but the organisers and the fans weren’t to know that. Along with Guerra and Luigi Giacobbe, who finished second aged 23, the future of the competition looked bright. Binda’s dominance might not be so absolute in future.

After failing as a footballer, Guerra turned to cycling relatively late in life, turning professional in 1928. By the 1930 Giro, he was 28 and already recognised as one of the country’s most talented cyclists, and though he never really became the ‘anti-Binda’ that so many race fans dreamed of, he was one of the few who could hold a candle to Cittiglio’s Campionissimo. He joined Binda that summer in France as part of a star-studded Italian national team and enjoyed a better race than his captain, finishing second to the French favourite André Leducq and winning three stages. He even held the Maillot Jaune for a week.

Binda, for his part, failed to live up to his billing but nevertheless went home a very happy man. Such was his fame that he’d convinced Henri Desgrange, the Tour’s founder, to break one of his cardinal rules. He paid Binda a start fee. With his teammate Guerra in yellow, the four-time Giro champion was sitting comfortably in third when he crashed on the seventh stage, losing an hour to his rivals in the general classification. Three days later, he abandoned the race in the Pyrenees. At the time, his departure puzzled both his opponents and the press, because despite the accident he’d bounced back in typically vigorous fashion by winning the following two stages. Years later, he would reveal that the real reason he’d returned to Italy was that the Gazzetta hadn’t paid up and he was getting worried about the welfare of his non-appearance fee. Retiring from that Tour was, he admitted, the one great regret in a lifetime of satisfactions.

Both 1931 and 1932 were disappointments for the erstwhile unbeatable Trombettiere. Resplendent in the rainbow stripes of the World Champion’s jersey, Binda was welcomed back to the 19th edition of the Giro and started in scintillating form, winning twice and leading the general classification until a bad crash in the capital on stage six forced him to retire with a back injury. Though he was not without his supporters, Binda’s departure delighted many of the more colourful tifosi, who had been whipped into a rage several days previously when Cougnet took an executive decision to award a tight sprint finish between Guerra and Binda to the latter. Photo evidence would later prove the director right, but when it was posted for all to see in a shop window in downtown Pescara, where the stage had finished, the offending storefront was duly vandalised and the picture torn to shreds. In some ways, it’s comforting to know that the refusal of the sport’s partisan fans to let evidence get in the way of a resentful frenzy isn’t a modern manifestation.

The following year, Binda struggled for form all spring and while he started the 20th Giro as Legnano’s captain, he graciously slipped into a supporting role for Antonio Pesenti when Pesenti savaged the peloton with an explosive attack on the seventh stage. The pair were technically on different teams, but with the same man writing the cheques, so Binda was able to help Pesenti hold on to the pink jersey until the finish and go home relatively satisfied with an uninspiring, but professional, performance. And before anyone could write the season off as a disaster, he headed south to Rome for the World Championships, where he comfortably beat his compatriot Remo Bertoni to take his third rainbow jersey. It’s a record matched only by Spain’s Óscar Freire and the Belgians Rik Van Steenbergen and Eddy Merckx.

Binda was back at the Giro with his rainbow jersey in 1933 for his swansong. The 21st edition was arguably the first ‘modern’ Corsa Rosa, with 17 stages averaging a humane 197 kilometres each. It was also the first time that the race featured an individual time trial, and a specific prize for the best climber, the Gran Premio della Montagna, these days commonly abbreviated to GPM. No prizes for guessing who benefited the most from these innovations: Binda was more than a minute faster than second-placed Joseph Demuysère in the TT and the first to all four of the GPM summits. By this stage, the Giro was attracting a stellar crowd of foreign racers, but the main duel was between the ageing Binda and the hungry, more popular Guerra. The two were neck and neck, trading blows like prize-fighters, until the boxing analogy came a little too close to reality on stage six in Rome. Racing for the line, the duo were battling for position when Guerra crashed trying to overtake his rival. Guerra was furious, but the jury ruled that it had been a tree, and not his adversary’s arm, that caused the fall. In almost the exact same spot where Binda’s 1931 Giro had come undone, Guerra’s quest for the 1932 Maglia Rosa ended. Binda, without his only genuine antagonist to interrupt him, was free to solo to a record fifth title, winning five of the remaining stages and the last of his career on the finale to Milan. Decades later, the brilliant journalist Gianni Brera, whose name now officially adorns the same stadium in downtown Milan where boos once rang out for Binda, wrote of the great champion: ‘For me, Alfredo was the greatest product of Italian cycling. Even though I have the soul of a Coppi fan, I must make room for rationale.’ But he hadn’t finished yet. Like any self-respecting musician, the Trumpeter would be back in the limelight for an encore, reinventing himself as a conductor to a new band of prodigiously talented performers. Some of his best work was still to come.