SALITA FAMOSA

PASSO DELLO STELVIO, TRENTINO-ALTO ADIGE

With two stages left of the 1953 Giro d’Italia, the race for the Maglia Rosa was over. Even Fausto Coppi thought so. Switzerland’s Hugo Koblet, the Giro champion three years previously and one of the few men who could hold a candle to the Campionissimo, had been in pink since the eighth stage and looked unbeatable. Coppi’s Bianchi team had thrown all they had at him, but Koblet still led by a couple of minutes.

But even as Coppi resigned himself to second, those closest to him weren’t ready to give up. According to this tale’s most popular telling, his loyal gregario, Ettore Milano, took it upon himself to do some detective work. As Koblet signed autographs and posed for pictures, Milano asked if he might have one taken with the champion for himself, asking him to remove his sunglasses under the pretext that he’d be more recognisable in the photograph. The Swiss amiably obliged, and unwittingly reignited Coppi’s challenge, because underneath the dark shades lurked darker eyes. He hadn’t slept. He was vulnerable. The 36th edition of the Giro was not as lost as it had seemed. Milano wasted no time in delivering the fruits of his espionage back to his captain.

Enter the Stelvio. Stage 20 from Bolzano in Alto Adige to Bormio in Lombardy was short for those days – a mere 125 kilometres – but its brevity was fooling no one. The route involved a new climb, more than 24 kilometres long, with 1,808 metres of altitude gain. A great unknown, but potentially the perfect grandstand for Italy’s grandest talent.

The Bianchi team started to turn the screw early, like picadors wearing down a bull for the expectant matador. In the foothills and the lower slopes around Trafoi, Coppi’s lieutenants tore away at the race leader’s resolve until eventually, struggling with the Stelvio, his incessant rivals, and perhaps the weight of expectation, Koblet cracked. Wavering in a bend, he lost a bike length. Then two. Coppi took flight, some 11 kilometres from the top, wringing everything he could out of his body and his bike, churning a 46 x 23 gear and grinding his opponent into pieces. After a hair-raising descent into Bormio, during which he crashed, the Italian won the stage by almost three and a half minutes, enough to finish the following afternoon’s final ride to Milan with an 89-second lead over the Swiss to take Giro number five – a victory that his countrymen would call ‘Coppi’s fifth symphony’.

Witnesses on the mountain that day, observing the stricken, desolate Koblet being escorted up the final kilometres by two police motorcycles, likened it to a funeral procession. Even the victor would later say that the effort had almost killed him. In its debut appearance, the Stelvio had left an indelible mark on the race and on the race’s most iconic champion. And as a mark of respect to that transcendent performance, to this day we still refer to the Giro’s highest point as the ‘Cima Coppi’ – the Coppi Peak.

Built in just five years and opened in 1825, the Passo dello Stelvio is perhaps the closest a road engineer will ever come to genuinely artistic expression. Carlo Donegani, a native of Brescia, was employed by the Austrian crown to connect its newly acquired province of Lombardy to the rest of the Habsburg Empire. The Italian’s solution was a 49-kilometre tour de force connecting the Valtellina valley with the Val Venosta.

From its more recognisable, picturesque side, the SS38 climbs from Ponte di Stelvio at an average gradient of around 7.5 per cent, maxing out at just over 9 per cent, two thirds of the way up. Donegani used 48 tight hairpins to conquer the mountain’s eastern face, in a feat of genius that somehow manages to combine the potential of human ingenuity with the raw power of nature, and in doing so, elevate and honour them both.

The Bormio side is not to be scoffed at either, with gradients above 12 per cent in places along the 21.9-kilometre escalation that gains 1,560 metres in total. The Giro has tackled this face on several occasions, but it is more famous and feared as a descent, not least because of its five tunnels. That dive into total darkness is a real test of nerve at speed – especially for those frozen, esurient riders ravaged by the climb and desperate for the deliverance from misery that only the finish line below can offer.

Usurped as Europe’s highest mountain pass by the Col d’Iseran in 1937, Donegani’s serpentine masterpiece remains cycling’s most iconic climb and though the aforementioned French road might be 12 metres higher, when it comes to unpredictable drama, Stelvio is still the sport’s absolute pinnacle.

It’s also something of a gamble. Because of the Giro’s springtime spot on the calendar, the unpredictability of the climate at such altitude makes the Stelvio’s inclusion a risky proposition, which probably explains why it’s been used rather sparingly. In total, it has appeared 10 times in the race, but had to be stricken from the route because of extreme weather in 1967, 1984, 1988 and 2013.

Precarious as it might be, however, it remains an integral part of Giro history and cycling lore. As the Italians would say, vale la pena – it’s worth the pain – because it rarely fails to produce drama. José Manuel Fuente courageously fought off the despotic Eddy Merckx here in 1972, and Bernard Hinault regained the Maglia Rosa from Wladimiro Panizza in 1980 with an impressive display of his own abilities and his team’s superiority.

It has sometimes been the undoing of champions too, not least in 2005 when Ivan Basso fell foul to sickness and to the climb’s unforgiving nature to lose a devastating 42 minutes and all hope of victory. After starting the 88th edition of the race as one of the favourites, the future two-time winner would eventually finish in Milan 27 places behind that year’s victor, Paolo Savoldelli, all because of one bad day. And that’s the charm. The Stelvio is more than a mountain, it’s a protean monument of unpredictability, and whenever the race reaches its precipitous slopes, it treats spectators the world over to something that is all too rare these days: the simple pleasure of not being able to work out what will happen next.