9
THE SHERIFF AND THE RIFLE SHOT
Francesco Moser and Giuseppe Saronni are like l’acqua e il fuoco, water and fire. If one said snow was white, before he had a chance to finish his sentence the other would be shaking his head and furiously declaring that it was black as the night. That’s assuming, of course, that you could get them to agree to be in the same room together in the first place. Because even now, three decades after they last raced one another, the animosity continues, and you get the sense that they derive a unique and perverse pleasure from taking shots at one another. To many tifosi, their rivalry epitomised an important divide in Italy’s society. Moser, the perfect expression of the country’s gritty, agrarian backwaters; Saronni, a son of Lombardy’s wealthy industrial heartland.
Francesco was born in 1951 in Palù di Giovo, a small town that overlooks Trento in the foothills of the Dolomites. One of 11 children, as a boy he’d accompany his father to watch the Giro whenever it passed, and grew up steeped in cycling culture because not one, not two, but three of his older brothers, Diego, Aldo and Enzo, were professionals. Aldo and Enzo both wore the Maglia Rosa for two days in their careers, the former in 1958 and again in 1971, and the latter in 1964. This area is the kind of place that lives and breathes cycling, and more recently it has given us Gilberto Simoni, Giro champion in 2001 and 2003, and Diego’s son Moreno, winner of the 2013 edition of the Strade Bianche. They’re a tough, competitive family, and while Enzo died in a farming accident aged 67, Aldo, now in his eighties, can still be found tending to the grapes in the vineyards of the family estate. In 1973, the year Francesco made his debut as a professional, all four where involved with the Filotex team: three as riders and Enzo as a directeur sportif. Aldo was 39, some 18 years older than the fresh-faced Francesco. His first bike, aged five, was a gift from Aldo, and after that, in the great tradition of so many siblings, it was hand-me-downs. Some were so big that he’d ride them sitting on the top tube, up and down the steep, seven-kilometre stretch to the schoolhouse, rain or shine. Moser started racing relatively late, aged 18, because of familial duty in the fields, but when he won the Trentino Regional Championships in July 1969, there was no looking back. Equipped with a motor that was as powerful as his pedalling stroke was elegant, Lo sceriffo, the Sheriff, as he’d come to be known, embarked on a professional career that would culminate with an incredible 273 wins, including three Paris–Roubaix titles, victory at Milano–Sanremo and the World Championships, and two wins at the Giro di Lombardia, not to mention countless other one-day road races and a slew of track events. He also won the 1984 Giro d’Italia, the same year that he set a new Hour Record. In celebration of that achievement, his vineyard produces a sparkling wine called 51,151, the number of metres covered at the Agustín Melgar Olympic Velodrome in Mexico City.
Saronni discovered an aptitude for racing much earlier. Born in Novara but raised in Buscate, on the outskirts of Milan, his first bike was bought from Felice Branca, once a mechanic for Learco Guerra and Charly Gaul. He made the podium in his first race, at the 1970 Giochi della gioventù, a youth athletics competition organised by the Italian Olympic Committee. He was 12. Destined for great things early on, Saronni was nicknamed Il Balin, local dialect for ‘The Baby’. As a teenager he raced on the road, cyclocross, and track, and as an 18-year-old, competed at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal as part of Italy’s team pursuit squad. The following season he turned professional, with a special dispensation from the federation allowing him to do so before he turned 20. In his first outing as a pro, he finished second at the Trofeo Laigueglia in Liguria, hot on the wheel of the reigning world champion, Freddy Maertens. Five weeks later he took the first of 173 professional victories with full honours at the Trofeo Pantalica, what was then an important early-season race based around Syracuse in Sicily. Moser was third, and a rivalry was born. Somewhat ironically, the Sheriff still claims that he only lost that race after being blocked by a police motorcycle. He also claims to have knocked the driver off the road. Saronni, meanwhile, maintains that it wouldn’t have mattered a jot. Moser was by that time an established champion, he’d worn the Tour’s yellow jersey in 1975 and the Maglia Rosa at the 1976 Giro, where he also took the points classification with three stage wins. But it was obvious that he’d have to keep an eye on the newcomer.
The contrasts between the pair made for easy factionalism among the tifosi, too. For instance, in 1978, Moser won the first of three Paris–Roubaix titles, soloing home almost two minutes ahead of the great Belgian classics specialist, Roger De Vlaeminck, in a day characterised by brutal weather. Moser looked like a force of nature, more than a match for his adversaries and the elements, cutting a slice through the rain and gliding over the wicked cobbles of northern France, resplendent in the world champion’s rainbow jersey. Saronni finished the day alone, miserable, and wrapped up in the back of a team car. Three years later, while Moser was celebrating his hat-trick of back-to-back wins, a feat that only one other rider, Octave Lapize, had managed since L’enfer du Nord began in 1896, Saronni was busy complaining to the press. Never one to mince his words, he told the inquisitive journalists that Paris–Roubaix was a glorified cyclocross race that had no business on the road calendar, something that did not endear him to race fans in northern Europe or the partisan Moser faithful back in his homeland. Saronni was a powerful sprinter and, in the right conditions, an effective race winner, as his palmarès would attest. But in the eyes of some, he was soft. Worse still, some accused him of being a wheel-sucker.
In a purely competitive sense, what was to come was nothing compared to the paradigm of Bartali and Coppi, but the pair’s obvious antipathy towards one another captivated the collective consciousness of cycling fans up and down the peninsula. Abroad, it was seen as parochial and largely inconsequential, probably because neither rider had any interest in the Tour de France. But at home it sold a lot of newspapers because journalists could bet on getting a great quote from whoever lost – or from the pair of them whenever their squabbling allowed someone else to steal the win. To pick just one of many classic exchanges, a race report in the Corriere della Sera from March 1979 records a surprise victory for Giovanni Battaglin at the Trofeo Pantalica. With Moser and Saronni both happier to lose than risk the other winning, Battaglin slipped off and beat Moser’s domestique Palmiro Masciarelli easily at the line. ‘I had Masciarelli in front of me, why the hell should I damn myself to catch the leaders?’ fumed Moser at the finish. ‘There was nothing to do. I didn’t pull because I had no reason to. Saronni didn’t pull because he didn’t want to favour me. It’s a terrible story that has to end.’ Saronni saw it differently: ‘As long as Moser refuses to quit riding this way, I won’t win, but neither will he. When he decides to cop on, it will be a beautiful day.’
A few months after that disagreement, the two of them would go head to head at the 62nd edition of the Giro. Its 3,301-kilometre route was one of several from Vincenzo Torriani that had a markedly different character to classic Giri. Seven of the previous nine editions had gone to foreigners, and impartial observers noted with interest that the race director’s new penchant for sprint stages, important time trials and generous time bonuses coincided neatly with the rising fortunes of two popular Italians who struggled in the mountains. Torriani first created a Moser-friendly route in 1977, only to see the Sheriff robbed by the Belgian Michel Pollentier, nowadays most famous for pulling out of the 1978 Tour in ignominy, while wearing the leader’s jersey, after a doctor discovered a condom filled with urine concealed under his armpit during a doping test. The following year was won by the Belgian Johan de Muynck, who mounted a surprise attack on stage three while the favourites marked one another, and then held on to his slender lead for the remaining three weeks. Moser was third, and Saronni, in his Giro debut, a credible fifth, with three stage wins.
The following year, 1979, they would be helped by Torriani, who laid out a parcours that was the flattest in the modern era and included five time trials. Newcomers to the sport might find this somewhat distasteful, but all three of the grand tours have a long history of creating courses to favour certain champions and, for the sake of the sport’s grass-roots popularity, it’s often been politically and financially expedient to consider a certain competitor’s strengths when plotting out the parcours. Indeed, when the route was announced that March, the Turin daily La Stampa applauded Torriani for finally protecting Italy’s champions, proclaiming in the headline that, ‘This Giro is made to measure for Moser and Saronni’, and pointing out that the Tour had been cut for Jacques Anquetil ‘like a suit’, and posing the question, ‘If you have a champion, why not protect him?’ No doubt plenty of the tifosi wholeheartedly agreed.
Saronni was in scintillating form that May, with a stage win at Tirreno–Adriatico and two stages and the overall classification at the Tour de Romandie to his name. Not to be outdone, Moser had won the prologue at Tirreno–Adriatico and been victorious at Gent–Wevelgem and Paris–Roubaix. The race began with a prologue in Florence, and Moser was the first man in pink. His young rival was just three seconds behind. The race steered south, with sprint finishes in Perugia and then Castel Gandolfo, a small town in the hills south of Rome famous for being home to the pope’s summer residence, with neither rider able to shake the other. Stage three’s 31-kilometre time trial from Caserta to Naples was long enough to allow Moser’s superior skills against the clock to shine, but despite averaging almost 50 kph, he could only prise 26 seconds from the determined Saronni. The following day, a difficult if not exactly epic mountain stage on rolling roads to Potenza in Italy’s deep south, saw the pair’s main rival, two-time Tour champ Bernard Thévenet, inexplicably losing seven minutes to the stage winner, Claudio Bortolotto. Moser and Saronni, glued together, came in half a minute behind first place, with the difference in the general classification fixed stubbornly at 22 seconds. But something would have to give.
Stage eight provided a much-needed shake up. It was an uphill time trial, from Rimini on the Adriatic coast, to the microstate of San Marino, nestled in the Apennine Mountains, and Saronni used it to make a resounding statement. The 21-year-old rampaged home 32 seconds ahead of the towering, powerful Norwegian star Knut Knudsen in second. Moser, in fourth, was a shocking minute and 24 seconds off the pace, and out of the Maglia Rosa, 62 seconds adrift in the general classification, behind the young pretender to his throne. The gap increased on stage 10 to Portovenere, when another imperious TT from the man in the Maglia Rosa added 38 seconds to his lead. Ostensibly more of a bunch sprinter than a rider for long solo efforts, Saronni was beating Moser at his own game, and as the race finally headed for some high mountains, he was about to prove himself superior on the route’s steeper slopes, too.
With a final 45-kilometre time trial to Milan planned for the last stage, the Giro was not yet beyond Moser, but his grasp on Saronni was starting to look tenuous. The younger of the two men had stolen another precious six seconds on stage 16 to Pieve di Cadore, and as the peloton prepared for the only rest day of that year’s event, it was obvious that whoever was going to win the 1979 Giro would have to be perfect in the next two mountainous days as well as the closing TT. Corriere della Sera billed it as: ‘I tre giorni della verità.’ The three days of truth.
Stage 17 featured both the Falzarego and the Pordoi early on, but the two classic Dolomite climbs came well before the finish, which ended in a bunch sprint. Maybe he was the strongest that day, or perhaps none of his rivals wanted to vex him, but it was the home-town hero Moser who crossed the line first, to rapturous applause from his legions of fans in Trento. Prestige for the locals’ favourite, then, but no profit: Saronni finished right behind him and kept his lead at a minute and 45 seconds. The following day’s route tackled the Passo Tonale and the Passo dell’Aprica, but once again, their premature positioning on the parcours allowed the rouleurs to catch the climbers well before the stage’s business end. Neither protagonist was at the very front that day, but Saronni did manage to purloin more valuable time on Moser, albeit just three seconds separating the two after 250 kilometres and the final climb to the finish in Barzio. There was no hope for the Sheriff. At his best, he was certainly capable of overturning a deficit of less than two minutes in a 45-kilometre time trial – he’d beaten Il Balin by two minutes and 12 seconds at the previous year’s Giro over the same distance – but by the end of the 62nd Giro, after a long classics campaign in the spring, he was some way from his finest form. And Saronni was in irresistible shape. He romped home to another stage win, his fourth of the Giro, beating a young Roberto Visentini by 15 seconds and Moser by six more. That last victory meant that he beat Moser 275 to 257 in the points competition but, more importantly, with a cushion of two minutes and nine seconds, the Maglia Rosa was his, making him the race’s youngest champion since Fausto Coppi.
Not content with dominance in the Tour and the Vuelta a España, Bernard Hinault joined the party in 1980. So too did Giovanni Battaglin, who had missed 1979 when his half of the Inoxpran squad came down with conjunctivitis. Wladimiro Panizza, a loyal gregario to Felice Gimondi turned grand tour rider in his own right, was also among the favourites, in what looked, on paper, to be an intriguing Giro. The 22 stages covered 4,025 kilometres, several mountain-top finishes and – not counting the short opening prologue in Genoa that didn’t count towards the general classification – almost 90 kilometres of time trialling. It was a route that favoured the most complete athlete: it wouldn’t be enough to distance rivals in the mountains, or a safe bet to annihilate them in the time trial. The winner was going to have to be good for three weeks straight. The big names all came with big results. Hinault, the most dominant rider of the age, was hot from victory at the Tour de Romandie and a Herculean performance at that spring’s Liège–Bastogne–Liège. In what was arguably the most dramatic edition of the sport’s oldest Monument, only 21 of the 174 starters finished, and the Le Blaireau, French for The Badger, crossed the line with almost 10 minutes’ advantage over second place – and frostbite in two fingers that would cause lifelong damage. Moser, the reigning world champion, had been dominant at Tirreno–Adriatico and became the first man to win three editions of Paris–Roubaix consecutively. And Saronni? The first thing he did after triumphing at La Flèche Wallonne was to tell the huddled reporters: ‘I have to thank Moser for this. His victory in Roubaix stimulated me.’ Compliments don’t come much more obviously backhanded than that.
Moser, as was his wont, won the opening prologue ahead of Knut Knudsen and Hinault, but no one could match Saronni in the opening three road stages. All three finished in bunch sprints, and all three went to the previous year’s winner, still only 22, and seemingly getting better with each passing season. The Sheriff and the Badger were never far behind, however, and so Moser stayed in pink until stage five, when a wet time trial to Pisa surprised everyone, first because it was won by the relatively unknown Jørgen Marcussen, at the Giro in support of Battaglin, and second because the runner-up, Hinault, managed to put a minute into Moser and almost two into the obviously exhausted Saronni. The Frenchman looked like having the Giro sewn up already, until a breakaway on Tuscany’s tallest mountain, Monte Amiata, saw a group slip away while the three big favourites all marked one another. That bunch included the day’s winner, Silvano Contini, but crucially it also included Roberto Visentini, who had started the day fifth in the GC, a minute and 20 seconds behind Hinault, only to finish it two minutes and 58 seconds ahead of the Frenchman in the overall standings. With such a commanding lead over the sport’s pre-eminent rider, there was some talk of an Italian coalition to keep Hinault away from the podium but, given the antipathy between Moser and Saronni, that was never likely. And so, with the home contingent divided, the Badger kept his head down, and bided his time. Beppe Saronni got back to winning ways on stage 13, coming first in a sprint finish in Barletta, on the peninsula’s southern Adriatic coast. By then, however, he was out of the running in the GC. Moser lay in 10th, almost four minutes off the pace, and Hinault in seventh, just two seconds shy of three minutes behind Visentini. But 24 hours later, it would be a different story.
Hinault’s attack on stage 14 showed just how good – and how vicious – the Badger could be. He laid waste to all but one rider, the aforementioned Panizza, on a gruelling day in the Apennines, finishing at the ski resort in Roccaraso. The Renault team’s gambit was to launch Hinault’s strongest domestique, Jean-René Bernaudeau, in an early attack. Bernaudeau was making his debut at the Giro, but had obvious grand tour pedigree, having finished fifth at the 1979 Tour. In short, he was too good to let go alone, and so the peloton chased like dogs, while Bernaudeau’s captain, ensconced comfortably in the bunch, got a free ride. The mountains that make up Italy’s spine are not as imposing as the Alps or the Dolomites, but they can be brutally steep, and by the penultimate climb to Rionero Sannitico, deep into the interior on the border between Molise and Abruzzo, all but the most gifted of riders were scattered in Hinault’s wake. Moser and Saronni fought bravely to hold on, but neither were climbers, and by the finish the Badger had distanced them comfortably. The young Visentini was as capricious and fragile as he was talented, and not for the last time in a career that promised so much he suffered a total mental and physical breakdown, losing more than six minutes. The 35-year-old Panizza, the man who still holds the record for the greatest number of appearances at the Giro, with 18 starts and 16 finishes, was the new race leader. He was from a family of communists, and had been named after Vladimir Lenin: a proud red, now in pink after toiling so long in the service of others.
The following days took the peloton north, along a flat parcours that kept the general classification fastened in a deadlock. Giovanni Battaglin moved himself into the podium places with a daring solo ride on stage 18 that caught everyone by surprise, but it was the stage two days later, from Cles to Sondrio, over the Passo delle Palade and up the north face of the Passo dello Stelvio, that would ultimately decide the 1980 Giro d’Italia. It had been planned perfectly by Renault’s directeur sportif par excellence, Cyrille Guimard. As a rider he’d been a contemporary of Eddy Merckx, a match for anyone in the mountains on his day, but it was as a DS that he truly shone, and many believe him to be the best of all time. After the Palade, Guimard dispatched three of his riders, including Bernaudeau, as part of a break, which was foolishly let go by the Italians. Before the start of the Stelvio they led by more than six minutes and, although they were caught as soon as the gradient increased, Bernaudeau had escaped solo and was now waiting up the road for Hinault, who could taste blood. The Badger exploded from the bunch with an almost inconceivably aggressive lunge, leaving everyone but Battaglin, Panizza and Bianchi’s Tommy Prim for dust. Once the four were free, there was another attack from Hinault. This time, he was too much for Prim and Battaglin, but Panizza, still in the Maglia Rosa and no doubt aware that this would be the defining moment of an otherwise modest career, clung on for dear life, and for posterity. But he could only do so much, and his sober talents were no match for the superhuman Hinault, at the zenith of his powers and determined to win the Giro. One more kick, and he was gone, winding his way up Italy’s most famous climb alone, in search of his loyal lieutenant and what now was certain victory. Unusually for a Stelvio stage, the finish was still almost 90 kilometres away, but the French duo put on a masterclass in team time trialling and hammered away incessantly until they reached Sondrio, almost five minutes ahead of the chasing pack. For Bernaudeau, there was the reward of a prestigious stage win; and for his captain, a place in the record books. With a lead of more than three minutes in the general classification, the penultimate day’s 50-kilometre TT was a mere formality: Hinault was the equal of anyone against the clock, and it mattered little to him that Saronni took his seventh stage win. The following day in Milan, Le Blaireau from Yffiniac in Brittany became only the second Frenchman, after Jacques Anquetil, to win the Giro. He was, too, only the fourth to have won all three grand tours, and the first to do so at his first attempt.
Moser pulled out of the 1980 Giro quietly, with three stages to go, citing fever. And he didn’t fair much better the following year, finishing more than half an hour behind the winner, Giovanni Battaglin, who triumphed in spite of another course seemingly tailored to everyone’s favourite duelling duo. Torriani had constructed a parcours that favoured time trials and sprint stage wins, and though there were some difficult mountains, it was obvious to everyone just who was expected to benefit from the generous bonuses awarded to the top-placed finishers on each stage. So eager were the organisers to please Moser and Saronni, that when a scrap broke out between the two after the judges couldn’t decide whether the Trentino star had finished second or third behind Saronni on stage five, they shared the GC podium until things calmed down. The time bonuses were such that the difference would affect whether Moser or Saronni was in pink, and so, with the press and the cameras of Italy’s national broadcaster watching, both were awarded a pink jersey while the race commissaires made up their minds. Eventually, Moser was given the benefit of the doubt and the overnight lead, but he had to hand it over to his rival the next day, when Saronni took another stage win and, with it, more precious bonus time. At that early stage of the race, Torriani’s convenient gratuities were adding up, rewarding Saronni to the tune of 90 seconds – had it been based purely on time elapsed, the 1979 Giro champion would have sat in a far more humble ninth position overall, regardless of his three stage wins. Pity poor Battaglin, having to compete with that. There was such anxiety about bias in favour of Moser and Saronni, in fact, that Davide Boifava, the Inoxpran directeur sportif, was afraid of outright cheating in the final time trial to Verona and threatened to follow Saronni with a video camera to make sure that he played by the rules and received no helping hands.
Hinault was back across the Alps, hungry as ever, to take his second Giro title in 1982. Neither Moser nor Saronni made the top five, but while Moser had a relatively quiet season by his standards, Saronni, now in his mid-20s, was prolific, taking the Tour de Suisse, Tirreno–Adriatico, the Giro del Trentino, Milano–Torino, and the Giro di Lombardia. He also donned the famous rainbow jersey that September in Goodwood, England, in what was one of the most famous World Championships in the modern era. Saronni won that day with a breathtaking sprint against two of the world’s best riders, America’s Greg LeMond and Ireland’s Sean Kelly. So impressive was his final burst that it earned him the nickname ‘The Goodwood Rifle Shot’.
Saronni, for a time, could do no wrong, and started the following year with success at Milano–Sanremo. For the 1983 edition of the Giro, the flat course favouritism and lavish time bonuses were present as ever in the 3,920-kilometre route, with only one of the 22 stages a genuinely difficult, mountainous test. The unpredictable Roberto Visentini, so often Saronni’s sparring partner in their amateur days, was an accomplished time trialist, too, and so could not be discounted, but it was Beppe and Francesco who were expected to dominate. As it turned out, the usually imperious Moser, turning 32 a couple of weeks after the Giro’s finish, was out of sorts and out of contention. For the whole season, in fact, he won almost nothing. Having been so commanding against the clock, it seemed as if time was finally getting its own back. Saronni raced to victory in the fastest Giro ever. No one could match him in the sprints, and in the mountains he consistently held his own. There were rumours – and some vocal protest from within the peloton – that his preferential treatment from the organisers was allowed to go so far that a blind eye was turned when he jumped the start in a time trial, but that was probably borne out of resentment rather than any hard evidence. Visentini, ever wronged, was among the protesters, bemoaning too the fact that his total elapsed time had been less than that of the winner.
Before retiring from that race, Moser made a point of congratulating his adversary. It looks like a final act of conciliatory benevolence from a man, seven years his senior, who Saronni had, in a perverse way, always admired, when all was said and done. He used to say that beating the Sheriff meant more than race victories, and as his old foe revealed to him that he was going to retire that season, it looked as if Saronni, twice champion, had got the better of him in their Giro grudge. Beppe admitted to being moved by the gesture, which must have made Moser’s renaissance six months later all the more infuriating.
In January 1984, Francesco set a new Hour Record in Mexico City. Twice. His first effort bested Merckx’s 1972 distance by almost a kilometre and a half, and a few days later he added another 300 metres for good measure. Embracing aerodynamic developments, he used disc wheels and a dramatically squat bike that tucked the rider low over the front wheel, cutting through the air like a rapier. With the help of Francesco Conconi, a pioneer in the field of sports science from the University of Ferrara, Moser was a rider reborn. The Hour Record was followed by victory at Milano–Sanremo, a race that had been an agonising absence on his palmarès. The 67th Giro d’Italia couldn’t come soon enough.
Hoping for one last showdown between Saronni and the Sheriff, Torriani laid out a flat parcours, including a whopping 140 kilometres of individual time trials as well as a 60-kilometre team event, in order to favour his two compatriots over the rising star of French cycling, Laurent Fignon, who was debuting in the Giro with the Renault team, having won the Tour at his first attempt the previous summer. His failure to repeat the feat in Italy has been the subject of Italo-Franco tension among race fans ever since. Griping about the organiser’s prerogative to design routes as he sees fit is a pointless enterprise because, as has been mentioned, they all do it. The Dolomite stages weren’t quite taxing enough to allow the Renault rider to land a lethal blow, but c’est la vie. Fignon, however, maintained that Torriani’s nepotism went much further. As the race entered the mountains, Moser was in pink but there was still an opportunity for Visentini and Fignon to take control, because there was still the not inconsequential matter of the Passo dello Stelvio on stage 18. The day before, however, panic had set in for the climbers as rumours spread. The pass was blocked with snow, and Torriani was going to cut it from the stage. The Giro director himself claimed that he wanted it to go ahead, but that the region’s road workers, whose job it would be to clear the snow, had said it was impossible. The French magazine Vélo infamously disagreed, publishing pictures of the pass clear of snow and open to the public. Whatever the truth may have been, for the Giro’s purposes it was abandoned, so instead, the peloton climbed the more sedate Tonale and Palade climbs and Moser was able to finish just five seconds behind the day’s winner, Bruno Leali. Visentini, a teammate of Leali at Carrera, retired from the race in disgust and later claimed to have crushed his bike in a vice before sending it to Davide Boifava, his director, in a bin bag. Cyrille Guimard, now in charge of Fignon, was outraged too, claiming that fans had pushed Moser up the climb and had been allowed to draft team cars without punishment, while his own rider was penalised for taking food from support staff outside the designated feed zone. With more mountains to come, Fignon kept fighting, and narrowed the lead, but just couldn’t shake Italy’s grizzled champion, snug in the Maglia Rosa and entrenched in the group every day. With a little over a minute separating the pair, stage 20 was a wildcard. It was a loop of the Campolongo, Pordoi, Sella and Gardena climbs in the Dolomites in Alta Badia, but the up-and-down nature of such a circuit suited Fignon, the climber. In theory, however, it also gave Moser, famous for his descending skills, almost as much to be happy about. In the end, a gutsy move on the Pordoi left everyone flat-footed, and the Frenchman arrived at the finish in Arabba two minutes and 19 seconds ahead of the race leader. He kept the Maglia Rosa the following day, too, but on the final day’s racing, a 42-kilometre time trial that finished in Verona, Moser had the last word.
Tens of thousands lined the roads to see the defining moment of a career that had captured the country’s imagination for the best part of a decade. Downtown Verona was heaving with fans, as their champion shot through the city’s main square, Piazza Bra, and into its iconic Roman amphitheatre, emerging from the shadows of its arches to cross the line, exhausted. It was a bewildering display – just shy of 51 kph on open roads, faster even than his first attempt at the Hour Record, which had been on a track, at altitude. There were still several minutes to wait, but as the screams and songs of delirious tifosi filled the air with an atmosphere reminiscent of a heated football stadium, the writing was on the wall for Fignon. No one was going to better that. ‘It was something that I wasn’t expecting,’ said Moser, after the podium, ‘and something that few people still believed could happen.’ As the dust settled, there were those who still refused to believe it could happen, either. Because while in Italy it was seen as a romantic, resounding victory for an almost universally loved rider at the end of his career, abroad, the polemics continued. The French press cried foul play in the mountains, and for the rest of his life, Fignon would maintain that the RAI television helicopter had ridden behind Moser so as to push him along, but above the Frenchman, to bury him beneath its downdraft. In Moser’s defence, however, the arguments against him conveniently forget to mention the fact that had Fignon – still only 23 and not yet the finished article – not imploded on stage five’s climb to the Blockhaus in Abruzzo, the result would have been very different. Fignon’s attack that day had looked like a thing of beauty, but turned out to be youthful folly, when, suffering from hunger, he broke down before the summit and in the space of a few kilometres lost almost a minute and a half to Moser. This, from a rider who would beat the great Hinault by more than 10 minutes a month later at the Tour. With a cooler head, the Giro would have been his regardless of the Stelvio or the dubious helicopter conspiracy.
Moser had his Giro. It was the end of his career, though, part swansong from a fading hero, part offering from the organisation in honour of a champion and his battalion of tifosi. Saronni, who turned 27 that year and with two Giri victories already under his belt, should have had enough left in him to play a leading role into the next decade, but after his win in 1983, it was as if an incredible hunger had been permanently sated. Or rather, in the eyes of many fans, as if, while not having lost his appetite for victory, over time, the work and the sacrifice involved had become unpalatable. He enjoyed the off-season, and the fame, and from the outside at least, seemed to possess little of the obstinate, proletarian work ethic that drove riders like Hinault or Moser. His career limped on for another seven years, until at the 1990 Milano–Torino, the bells tolled, some two seasons after a champagne cork had last popped in his honour. It would be callous, and more than a little disingenuous, to say that a racer with almost 200 victories to his name never fulfilled his true potential, but it must have been a sad thing to watch his talents peter out slowly. Getting dropped on descents, without a decent win in years, was no way for a two-time Giro champion to leave the stage.
At the height of his abilities, Il Balin had been Italy’s best hope against Le Blaireau, but there was no question that Hinault was the better rider. Aside from his five Tours de France and two victories at the Vuelta, the Frenchman had a perfect record at the Giro: three starts and three wins. The pair didn’t get along too well, either, and Hinault was an unapologetic Moserista. Speaking in 1983 to the late Italian journalist Fulvio Astori, who told him that Saronni, cocky as ever, thought that the Frenchman disliked him because it was so hard for him to win races compared to the Italian, who simply had to wait for a sprint, the patron of the peloton responded simply: ‘And who beat him in a sprint at La Flèche Wallonne? Hinault, I think. I also think that Hinault is quicker than him in the mountains. Moser is more likeable, more approachable and more open. If he needs anything, my door is always open, and whenever I’ve needed anything, I’ve been his guest in Palù. It would be nice to have the same relationship with Saronni, but he’s a lot more difficult. It’s not that I have anything against him, he just has a certain type of character…’
Perhaps without Moser, Saronni lacked inspiration. The pair had vexed one another for 10 months of the year, every year, and it must have been something to know that the fans, the press, the country, was both divided and delighted by the polar opposition. Unlike so many sporting rivalries before and since, it had been sincere and true to life, on and off the bike. It was a clash of backgrounds, styles and characters, a fundamental incompatibility.
They raced together, once, in a two-man time trial called the Trofeo Baracchi, in 1979. They couldn’t even bring themselves to warm up at the same time, and met just before the start instead. Seeing the funny side of it now, Saronni jokes that Moser dragged him around the course at an inhuman speed on purpose, that he couldn’t sit down afterwards, that he was destroyed, and that his teammate would have preferred to cross the line alone, and lose. Moser jokes that Saronni was so small, even when he pulled on the front, that it was Moser who took the wind.
It was a duality that stimulated them both, and while Moser and Saronni couldn’t stand one another’s company, it was a conflict ultimately based on mutual esteem. Both riders would have been far too proud to enter into a feud with anyone they thought little of. Saronni, the efficient finisher, grew up in awe of the older rider’s spirit, the force of will and determination that he translated into dashing attacks and dramatic victories. Moser, the expressive soloist, must have envied Saronni’s speed, his youth, and the fact that the wins seemed to come so much more easily to him. If they’d spent less time fighting one another and more time racing, both would have almost certainly won more, but where’s the fun in that? Their enmity is a gift that keeps on giving, even as the one they used to call The Baby approaches his 60th birthday. When the Gazzetta dello Sport’s eloquent correspondent Marco Pastonesi caught up with them both, separately of course, in 2015, Moser was still kicking up a fuss about the time that Saronni had been so bold as to boast that he could beat him in slippers. Pastonesi relayed the offence to Saronni, who countered, sharp as ever: ‘I didn’t say slippers. I said tennis shoes.’