15

THEN AND NOW

These days, the Gazzetta dello Sport is part of the RCS Media-Group, an international publishing conglomerate based in Milan that owns titles around the world, most notably the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most widely read newspaper, and El Mundo and Marca, two of the dailies in Spain. The company’s headquarters is tucked away on a quiet street in the northeastern suburbs of Lombardy’s capital, a leafy area known as Crescenzago, one of many small towns that have been absorbed into the city’s perpetual sprawl over the last century. The road is named after the group’s founder, Angelo Rizzoli, who made his fortune with his eponymous publishing company, and RCS’s large, low-rise block of buildings stands in the centre, between the thoroughfare and the Lambro river. Inside the complex, the courtyard is ornamented with several large pillars displaying a selection of the Gazzetta’s most iconic covers, from the lurid green of the paper’s first edition to Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro holding the World Cup aloft in 2006, and the jubilant yellow celebration of ‘Roi Nibali’ after his 2014 Tour de France victory. All colourful towers of heady summer memories against the sodden grey of an autumn afternoon in Milan.

In a first-floor office overlooking the square, Mauro Vegni is busy putting the final touches to the presentation of the 100th edition of the Giro d’Italia, surrounded by mementos from a lifetime in cycling, including a replica of the race’s iconic Trofeo senza fine. Born in 1959 outside Siena, Vegni grew up in Rome. After university, he began a career in cycling that would eventually lead him to his current position as the director of Italy’s most important race, only the sixth in its 108-year history. Originally, he’d been a footballer, with little interest in bike racing, but by twist of fate, his affections shifted thanks to the suggestion of a very influential neighbour in the Italian capital.

‘Franco Mealli lived nearby,’ says Vegni. ‘He was a Roman who organised several races, including the Tirreno–Adriatico, the Giro del Lazio, he was one of the biggest in Italy after the Gazzetta. He convinced me to forget about football and took me with him to see some races, and with that, I started following cycling out of curiosity.

‘While I was at university, I gave him a hand whenever I could. That was the end of the 1970s, beginning of the 1980s, and later he made me a proposal to work in the cycling world. So in February ’83 I formally joined his company, working full-time on the cycling calendar. I gained experience working at various national championships on the track and on the road, at the Tirreno–Adriatico and a lot of other stage races too, like the Giro di Puglia, the Giro della Provincia di Reggio Calabria, the Giro dell’Umbria. We did the amateur Giro d’Italia as well.’

Unfortunately, the legacy of organisers like Mealli has been somewhat neglected by the sport’s followers today, but once upon a time he and others like him were cornerstones of the sport in the provinces. Cycling was in his blood – his uncle Adelino raced against Gino Bartali and both his brothers, Marcello and Bruno, were professional riders – but Franco chose a different route, towards organisation and roles in large events like the 1955 World Championships, held in Frascati, in the hills south of Rome, and the capital’s 1960 Olympics. By the 1970s Mealli had built up an impressive portfolio of beautiful races across central and southern Italy, many of which are, sadly, no longer with us. So significant was he, in fact, that people often referred to him as the ‘Torriani of the south’, in reference to the long-serving Giro director of the time. He remained passionate about cycling until his death in 1997, when La Repubblica lamented the passing of ‘l’ultimo alfiere di un ciclismo antico’, the last standard-bearer of old cycling. His influence on Vegni was a lasting one, but eventually both he and his protégée realised that the sport had undergone seismic change and that Mauro’s future lay elsewhere.

‘In 1994, I was the director of the UCI World Championships in Agrigento, Sicily. RCS came to that Worlds to see if it would be possible for me to join their organisation.

‘By that stage at the start of the 1990s, Mealli was having health problems and I didn’t really want to continue on my own. There was too much to do, too much at risk, all the hours focused on publicity, the payments, you don’t know how much … So, in the end, after talking to Mealli, I took the decision that if the Gazzetta was interested, it was better if I went there. They also wanted to acquire all of our races, but to do that they needed someone else in organisation and support, because it basically doubled the amount of race days that they had, so Carmine Castellano had asked them to take me. From ’95, I was there. Castellano was in charge and I stood in for him when needed, but I wasn’t there to “tagliare l’erba sotto i piedi a nessuno”.’ (In Italian, to cut the grass beneath someone’s feet means to force someone to move or to cause them problems.) ‘The idea was that he was a mentor, and that over time I might replace him when he retired.’

Both the pace and the scale of change seen by Vegni, or indeed anyone working in cycling over the last few decades, has been striking. For better and for worse, the way in which the sport is organised hardly resembles even the era of Francesco Moser and Giuseppe Saronni, and has nothing to connect it to the era of Fausto Coppi, other than a journalist’s occasional cliché and the nostalgic concoctions of marketing managers. But while Mealli might have been the last standard-bearer of the country’s cycling golden era, his understudy seems attached to elements of the past, even as he plans for the future, and whenever the subject of the sport’s transformation comes up, he seems intent that while the developments made have largely been good things, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

‘Like everything in life,’ he says, ‘over time there are always changes. Cycling, once upon a time, lived on passion and voluntary help, but today, if you want to do it properly you need to act like a business. The sport has changed substantially in that regard. There’s a great desire from sponsors for an event like the Giro d’Italia, in terms of the images, television etc. And technically, on an instrumental level, everything has changed, there has been a revolution in terms of the bikes, the clothing, everything. In terms of security, too. In the old days, if you watch the footage, the riders arrived at the finish surrounded by crowds, with maybe two or three policemen to manage the fans. Now, there have to be barriers, fencing, controls … there’s an incredible amount of attention paid. And rightly so, because for the riders accidents can happen at any time.

‘There’s been an extreme change too in terms of human relationships. Years ago, with a telephone call you could make deals and create events. Now there are contracts, lawyers and legal departments, accountants. But the whole world has changed, and cycling, as such, had to change too.

‘If I think of cycling back in the 1970s, it seems almost prehistoric compared to today. It’s natural, but if you asked me what I missed about back then, I’d say the human aspect. The values. I miss that a bit. For the rest of it, change is normal and I’ve been a part of it. But yes, I miss the older values in every context, from the racing, but also in relationships behind the scenes. Back then, when you talked to a manager in a team, if he said yes, it was yes. Today, it’s never yes. One moment they’ll tell you that they’re coming with a champion, the next minute he’s sick. That used to never happen. In the concept of a person’s word, there was a lot more respect.

‘When we talk about change in Italian cycling, we can talk about revolutions and we can talk about digressions. To give you an example, without wanting to criticise anyone, up to the 1990s, we were at the peak of cycling. We had more teams than anyone, we organised more than anyone and we had more champions than anyone. And we still had track cycling, maybe not at the same level, but still among the best. In the last few years we’ve seen a bit of a renaissance, but there was a hole of 10 dark years in between. Today, we have Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru, which compensates a lot, but we don’t have top classics riders. There seems to be some revival, on the track as well, but we’re a long way from where we were.

‘I don’t think it would be difficult to return to that level. It’s not as if the other countries are better or worse than us. Now there are more countries involved, especially from the English-speaking world. Back in the day, it would have been one of the highlights of the year to see an Australian rider for example and you’d never expect them to win a race. Now, the anglo-phone world has been able to develop champions, and cycling has been globalised. And with that, there are now a lot of riders with different experiences.

‘We Italians, for example, are more like purists for the road bike and for road racing, but these days lots of guys come from mountain bikes or something else and they’ve proven themselves to have the quality. The whole world has opened up. If you look at the knowledge in cycling now, like rider diet – it used to be sandwiches in the morning that had been made by the masseurs the night before.’

Perhaps the only concern with all of this change is its effect on the sport’s financial sustainability. Cycling has a long, inglorious history of operating in an unstructured, often hand-to-mouth, manner, but in an era of ever-increasing professionalism, the uncertainty that plagues so many of the sport’s events and its teams can no longer be ignored. A few decades ago, teams got by on a relative shoestring. The main costs were rider contracts, with small staff and a few vehicles to support them at races. Now, most of the World Tour’s big teams could fill a hotel parking lot with their fleets of buses, mechanic’s trucks and team cars. Most have a dedicated chef, who increasingly want to have mobile kitchens to ensure that they can provide the best possible nourishment to the riders during gruelling stage races, where backwater accommodation often comes with limited cooking facilities and questionable levels of hygiene. Team Sky, famously, even has a van full of washing machines and driers. To a layperson, these might seem like small, inconsequential details in the context of professional sport, but for all of the glitz and glamour that comes across on TV at something like a grand tour, it remains very much a sport of modest resources.

Back in 1982, the Giro’s future hung in the balance. A financial crisis at Rizzoli pulled the rug out from under Vincenzo Torriani, who was trying to run the event with just four full-time employees. The 65-year-old had been at the helm since the 1940s and was, according to his peers, a genius of invention and of race organisation, but thanks to the sport’s shaky economic footing, he found himself in charge of a sinking ship in the twilight of his career. With less than two months to go, the route for the race had not yet been announced, and the future looked bleak. Torriani initially put up the money himself, and it took a miracle of diplomacy to get RAI, the national broadcaster, to commit to the event without there being a main sponsor or money from the event’s owners, before a stroke of luck brought Coca-Cola on board, as they were launching a new drink in Italy at the time. That might seem like a quaint story from the past, about a passionate race director somehow pulling the event out of a seemingly terminal nosedive, but the same menacing spectre still looms large in a sport that in some ways is less financially secure than ever. There is more money, sure, and a much bigger audience, but the costs have snowballed, too.

‘From my point of view, cycling has created a lot of new costs, but it hasn’t been able to make the pie any bigger. In terms of expense, it’s not at the level of football, but it’s not like it was 20 years ago either. And there’s a difference, an important imbalance with sponsors, because with some exceptions, if they invest in a team, they do it for a specific amount of time. Most of them for four or five years, there have only been four or five names who’ve backed a team for 20 years.

‘Compared with football, the major difference is that it’s more stable. The team structure is stronger, and the sponsor is a client. With cycling, the team is a client. OK, they might be registered companies, but the reality is that without that sponsor, they don’t exist. I think we need to reduce some of the costs because if they don’t have decent revenue, the costs can kill a team.

‘As for Italy, we need to invest more in the sport, but that’s not to criticise the Federation, that’s a business too with a balance sheet and a requirement not to be in the red. If you look at something like a track programme, running all year, with a covered track and everything that goes with it, it costs a lot. I don’t know how much the others spend, but obviously the economic problems here in recent years have affected that ability.

‘It would be important to invest, but to do that you need resources. Trying to manage the events and employees, and it’s not as if there are a lot of revenue streams for something like a national federation. You might find a big sponsor for the national team jersey, but after that? What is someone going to do, sponsor the press conference? But how much would it cost to do everything that a federation has to, on the track and the road, with youngsters, with all the coaches. I don’t know any of the figures involved, but it would make you tired just thinking about it.

‘Here in Italy, it’s been 10 or 15 years of financial difficulty for the country, so everyone feels that. The Giro and our other races continue to attract interest, but it’s hard work. So even if we’re doing well, it’s a lot more difficult than it used to be. The needs of companies change; when there isn’t money, the first thing they cut is marketing. But we’ve come out of it well and there’s hope that we can continue to improve.’

Developments have been positive since the turn of the last decade. In a broader sense, the sport has finally come to terms with the doping scandals and flagrant dereliction of the rules that dogged it during the 1990s and into the new millennium. And closer to home, the Giro seems to have rediscovered its form after several years in the doldrums. Gone are the inhumane stages that many hold at least partially accountable for the proliferation of performance-enhancing drugs, the senselessly long transfers between stage finishes and the following day’s start and, for the most part, the race closures that hurt the sport’s appeal at a more local level. Reversing the trend of a decade ago, RCS are now reinvigorating storied old events and creating new races such as the Strade Bianche spring classic that has captured the imagination of riders and fans alike. A calendar full of events might not directly affect the Giro d’Italia, which, after a century has become something of a national institution, but they are invaluable in terms of creating interest among the wider public, framing the annual spectacle and giving a new generation of tifosi something to engage with from February to October.

‘A great Giro needs to be a synthesis of all of the disciplines,’ offers the director, as the conversation turns to the race’s rediscovered humanity. ‘There needs to be the right mix, so I will never think of doing 15 mountain stages. It would be easy for me to design a race from Sicily to the Dolomites, up through the Apennines, only in the mountains. But there need to be sprints, time trials, and the mountains, with climbs that are sufficient to bring out the best rider.

‘One of the things I’ve tried to do in recent years is to give the Giro a more human scale. Shorter transfers, for example, more attention to the riders, so that they don’t race 130 kilometres and then spend the night driving 200 kilometres. Extremism doesn’t do anyone any good.’

Another kind of extremism threatened to cripple cycling in the past 20 years: the use of performance-enhancing drugs. And while Vegni, like any sensible veteran of professional sport, stops short of saying that it’s totally clean, he is hopeful for the future in terms of ensuring competition on a level playing field.

‘They were dark years, to tell you the truth, not just because you couldn’t trust the performances or the results, they were dark years because cycling passed every limit. Not only sporting boundaries, but also every limit that the human physique could bear. It arrived at the point where people were risking their lives.

‘It was a battle. Now, with more knowledge, a new generation of riders, much stronger testing, it’s shown that it’s no longer so easy to avoid controls. It’s become more difficult, you can’t just get drugs from anywhere. They’re still there, in my opinion, but the use is more and more limited. It’s not possible any more to have a big performance development, like 20 years ago.

‘Maybe in 20 years we’ll be saying another thing, but I think that the controls we have today were born thanks to that period. That era taught us that what we were doing was inadequate. There needed to be scientific research, too, to understand what we were dealing with. Maybe it’s still not 100 per cent, but I believe we’ve already done a lot. We have surprise testing, controls outside of races, the biological passport – all of these things are strong deterrents. Beforehand, they took the blood and urine from the winner and that was it.

‘There are different interpretations, but doping was born in those years [the 1990s]. We’re talking about cycling here, but those drugs fuelled a lot of other types of athletes too. That’s important to say.

‘If you look at the number of controls and the number of positive findings, you’d see that cycling is not the “top” sport of dopers. We do a lot of tests, and in percentage terms it’s obvious that you’re going to find one. If you only did two tests and they were both doped, that’s another story. That’s not to say we’re better than anyone else, we’ve had our own iniquities, but now everyone is aware that we’re doing something different and people are starting to believe again.’

At this point, he returns to financial insecurity, which Vegni believes is both at the root of the sport’s recent problems, and the main threat to its immediate future.

‘There’s always one idiot on duty,’ he says to the possibility of someone doping today. ‘That’s human nature, but it’s also because the system doesn’t guarantee anything. I’ve always said that, if a new rider had the possibility of a contract of at least two years, it would give them the chance to adapt to a new environment and then to express themselves, perhaps there wouldn’t be the need to demonstrate something immediately.

‘Today, they give them a six-month trial contract, and if it doesn’t go well, they send you home. Imagine the work that the kid has to go through to arrive to that point, and just like that, they can burn all his hopes. That’s another aspect of the problem.

‘I can understand the teams as well, the contracts cost money, so we’re back to the old discussion of the pie. If I have a budget that allows me to give two kids contracts for two years, I’d do it, but the problem is that I don’t have the money, so I have to save, and the perception is that if the young guy doesn’t go well right away, he’s not worth it. But maybe he just didn’t settle right away and so he stumbled.’

Another regrettable change – and surely a thorn in the paw of any race director – is the way in which modern riders approach the race calendar. Gone are the days when someone like Bernard Hinault would go swashbuckling his way across the continent from early spring until late autumn, as adept at laying waste to the opposition in the muddy, early-season classics as he was at trouncing everyone in the mountains of a grand tour. And in Vegni’s eyes, at least, it seems as if most of the current crop are failing to live up to their billing.

‘I can only speak of the riders I’ve seen,’ he says, talking of favourites. ‘The Eddy Merckx I knew was at the end of his career. I started working in this world in 1976, which if I’m right was the last Giro that Felice Gimondi won … I struggle with the dates! I wouldn’t want to talk about them, it’s better to talk about what I’ve seen, from Francesco Moser’s generation, Roger De Vlaeminck and all those guys.

‘I think that there’s probably been one emblematic rider for every decade. And every decade represents a different kind of cycling, so to say who the best was would be impossible.

‘The riders who you have to mention: Miguel Indurain, Bernard Hinault, and for all that he could have been you couldn’t leave out Pantani. Of the last decade, I think the best rider has been Alberto Contador. These were all riders who could win everything, but more than that, they were good men, polite and sincere.

‘Of course, I’ve had much more contact with Alberto, and for me he’s an exceptional rider, a serious person who whenever he said, “Mauro, I’m not coming,” he didn’t come and when he said, “Mauro, I’ll be there,” he came even when the team didn’t want him to.

‘Someone who’s on the right road today, for me, is Vincenzo Nibali. He has demonstrated that he can win everywhere – the Giro, the Vuelta, the Tour – one of only six to do it. And he’s won Lombardia! Every year, at Milano–Sanremo he attacks on the Poggio, OK, he doesn’t win, but he’s there. From February to October, he races. I think if you ask me in 10 years, he’ll be on the list.

‘I don’t have any others to add. Forget about that guy who won seven Tours! There was too little humanity in that for me. I’m talking about the programming, let’s not talk about what he did or didn’t have, just in terms of the racing, a champion needs to demonstrate that he can win everywhere. You can’t just have one object a year and aim for that and win that. OK, so you’re strong there, but in the arch of a year, what kind of a performance is that?

‘Even in Vincenzo’s bad year, 2015, he tried everywhere – and then he finished the year winning Lombardia, a Monument, which is no small achievement. That’s a champion. That’s why I rate Hinault and Contador, because everywhere they went they showed that they were really strong, real racers.

‘Riders who basically do one race a year don’t excite me. Hinault won the Worlds, won classics, we’re not even talking about the same thing any more. And now, someone wins only one event, and we’re supposed to put them in the same category as someone like that? A great rider can’t finish his career without winning a Giro, or at least trying to. Or vice versa, not to speak only about the others, if an Italian is supposed to be strong, but he only wins the Giro and never the Tour? They need to compete in all of the races at the top level. And I have my doubts about anyone who doesn’t.

‘As for when people ask me, “Who are you bringing to the Giro?” I need patience to respond. Whoever doesn’t come to the Giro is missing out, it’s not the Giro that is losing. It’s the Giro that makes champions, the Tour that makes champions, not the other way around.’

One thing that hasn’t changed since before Vegni’s time is also, perhaps, the most distinctive trait of the sport in the twenty-first century, and one that gives him plenty of cause for optimism as the Giro approaches its 100th edition. Bike racing, for all its problems and its myriad flaws, remains a sport of the people, and even now, in an ever-more micro-managed environment, its greatest dramas continue to play out on open roads, inches from the fans, without a ticket or a turnstile in sight. As long as the Giro stays true to that principle, it will have a place in the hearts of Italians, and of race fans around the world.

‘Cycling, even in the darkest moments, had the fortitude to hold on to the public,’ muses Vegni, our conversation drawing to a close. ‘Its capacity to be close to its fans has been the sport’s greatest strength. Some people might say that it’s a sport for old people, a sport of sweat and of mud, not something attractive, that it has just become the new golf … For me, in those moments, cycling still has the power to overcome those crises and the impasses, only because of its ability to keep its protagonists close to the people.

‘The riders who stop to talk to kids and to sign autographs, the way that people can go to the start and put their hand on the back of someone like Vincenzo Nibali. That’s what makes this sport special. Tell me another sport that has that, where the public, the real public, not a selected few or those who pay, has the opportunity to shake hands, talk, take a selfie with a star.

‘Cycling isn’t the biggest sport in the world, but it is one of the most important, and we’re talking about the very best athletes. What other sport gives you that possibility? It doesn’t call you to the stadium; it comes to you. And it doesn’t just show you athletes, it shows you so much of the country, that would otherwise be difficult to come to know. These are great values that no one can take away. That is cycling’s great virtue.’