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An Evolving Race Makes Its Mark (1909–13)

The first Giro d’Italia got underway at the unlikely hour of 2.53 a.m. on the morning of Thursday 13 May 1909 just outside the Gazzetta dello Sport offices on Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The brutally early partenza (depart) was to maximise the hours of daylight en route with an expected finish in Bologna 397km down the road sometime that evening, hopefully before night fell. It was an extremely tough introduction and would immediately sort the wheat from the chaff but actually Cougnet and his organisational team had generally reined themselves in. It was important that this inaugural Giro be seen to hit the ground running. Immediate comparisons would be made with the now established Tour de France and it was vital that the Giro should not fall at the first hurdle. It was also important that Gazzetta covered everything that moved – every storyline, every development in the Classifica Generale (General Classification, or GC) and with that in mind the newspaper now started publishing every other day.

So Cougnet kept the race comparatively short with eight stages totalling 2,445km – the shortest ever Giro – as the race largely described a clockwise route around northern and central Italy and taking in Bologna, Chieti, Naples (the southernmost point), Rome, Florence, Genoa and Turin before returning to Milan on 30 May. At least two, sometimes three, rest days had been allocated between stages which immediately established the commercial value of being a start or finish town with racers, camp followers and media requiring accommodation throughout. The roads were poor, especially in the countryside away from the big cities and towns, and it was undeniably arduous, but in this first edition at least it didn’t appear the Giro’s aim to ‘break’ all the riders as was always the case at the Tour when Desgrange was in charge. Come the big day 127 riders went to the start line, the vast majority hugely inexperienced adventurers more than anything.

In keeping with the Tour de France at this time the GC was to be decided on a points system with riders being awarded one point for a stage win and two for second place and so on down to last place. The rider with lowest total of points at the end of the eight stages would be the overall winner and although it seems antiquated now it was in reaction to the infamous 1904 Tour de France when wholescale cheating – by riders and fans – made the calculating of accumulated time for each rider problematical. On the subject of cheating, the Giro was immediately able to profit from the hard-earned experience of the Tour by insisting that every rider be photographed at the start line of each stage, to ensure that the rider arriving at the finish was one and the same. The Giro also introduced regular mid-race checkpoints – normally at some remote spot – where riders had to sign in and produce their photo identification, again to ensure that they were completing the full course.

As the riders gathered at the Gazzetta offices the day before the race to register and receive their race numbers, their bikes were stamped with their own names and this la punzonatura ceremony became part of the Giro tradition with a big crowd gathering to support their favourites. The Gazzetta offices physically became race headquarters, mission control and for the duration of the race updates would be posted in the windows of the offices with crowds gathering around for the latest information ahead of publication of the latest standings in the paper the following day.

Professional teams entered and their riders enjoyed the assistance a team-mate can provide during the race itself and the back-up of knowing that there would be a mechanic to tend their bikes and that a hotel room, no matter how modest, awaited at the end of a stage. However, the majority of riders at this stage were plucky ‘independents’ – isolati – who were totally on their own, on and off the bike. Many were either unemployed or poor rural workers and accommodation was random to say the least with many a rider taking refuge in a friendly farmer’s haybarn. Every rider who completed the Giro was guaranteed 300 lire, more than enough to feed a family for three to four months, so, apart from the big-name cyclists, the peloton also consisted of those who simply looked on the race as a job of work, a source of much-needed income.

The 1909 race was a very Italian affair but five overseas riders made it to the start line, including two former winners of the Tour de France. Other French riders had wanted to enter such as Maurice Brocco, Emile Georget and Jean-Baptiste Dortignacq from the Alcyon team but pressure was put on that trio to race instead at the Tour of Belgium, a much more fruitful market for the team sponsors. Of the French riders who did compete the star turns were the dashing and ever-popular Lucien Petit-Breton – French-born but raised in Argentina – who won the Tour de France in both 1907 and 1908, and Louis Trousselier, who had won the Tour in 1905. For Petit-Breton his first Giro was a painful experience, having to abandon at the end of stage one after a nasty crash earlier in the day in which he dislocated his shoulder as he descended near Lake Garda – reportedly while eating a piece of chicken to refuel ahead of the first serious climb of the Giro. It was disappointing for rider and organisers alike but the presence of such a big hitter at the launch of the inaugural Giro had helped immensely. Trousselier was very competitive in the early stages but was badly hampered on stage four when nails thrown on the road by the Italian fans caused him to puncture, and he was beset by further punctures and crashes on the following stage after which he abandoned.

There was enough competitive racing in Italy prior to the 1909 Giro for there to be a clear form guide and one or two riders stood out. Luigi Ganna, the so-called ‘King of Mud’ who was known for his strength in difficult conditions, rode for the Atala-Dunlop team, and had won Milan–San Remo earlier in the year. He started as the clear favourite and lived up to that billing by eventually winning the GC. Carlo Galetti, twice a winner of the Giro di Sicilia, was also tipped to go well and didn’t disappoint either with a hard-earned second place.

Before that there was a deliciously predictable incident with three riders, who had obviously been reading accounts of various ruses on the Tour de France, being withdrawn from the GC contest after being found catching a train during stage two. Vincenzo Granata, Andrea Provinciali and Guglielmo Lodesani had all been spotted boarding the train at Ancona with their bikes, but although Provinciali chose to head for home in disgrace the others continued to race for stage honours and prize money, the organisers seeing no need to disqualify them from the race altogether.

Giovanni Rossignoli, a powerful rider from Pavia in Lombardy, produced a strong performance to win stage three into Naples but generally lacked a sprint finish which counted heavily against him in a race decided by such a Points system, and he eventually finished third. It is interesting to note, however, that he would have won the 1909 Giro by 37 minutes if accumulated time had been the criteria used. Of course Ganna and Galetti might have ridden very differently had time been the deciding factor but nothing should disguise what a strong effort Rossignoli put in day after day. He was the iron man of the peloton.

There was some fun and games on those final stages. On stage seven an unruly crowd at the finish in Turin persuaded Cougnet to finish the stage six kilometres down the road in Beinasco which caused a deal of confusion and ill feeling. Then, on the final day, with an estimated crowd of 30,000 at the finish, there was more chaos when a police horseman fell in the press of the crowd with the knock-on effect of causing a crash in the bunch. There had already been a good deal of drama with the leader Ganna flatting twice in the final 70km. On the second occasion he seemed unlikely to catch the leading group but the organisers salvaged a potentially awkward situation by closing a set of railway barriers to halt the lead group until the race leader had regained contact. Ganna was a worthy winner, though, and grateful recipient of the 5,325 lire first prize which went a long way towards financing the bike manufacturing company he had always dreamed of owning. His bikes and sponsored teams were to feature prominently in future Giri although his own riding days were far from finished at this stage. In the early days of his cycling career he had still worked as a stonemason, attributing his exceptional fitness to daily 100km round trips to work on various jobs. As he stepped up onto the podium to receive his winner’s garland, Cougnet, ever the journalist, asked the new champion how it felt. Mi brucia tanto il cu’ he answered in language borrowed from the building sites he had once worked on. My arse is on fire!

Cougnet smiled broadly. Not just the first Giro winner but a first great quote. The Giro was up and running and so was Gazzetta dello Sport.

Galetti emerges as the Giro’s first big star

By any criteria the inaugural Giro in 1909 was a huge success with big crowds at all the starts and finishes and it had an immediate impact on the fortunes of Gazzetta. In fact, to a very real extent the race and the paper became one entity, each massively dependent on the other, and it is rather amusing at this safe distance to observe the musical chairs and internal politics that kicked off as those most intimately concerned fought for control of what clearly had the potential to become a cash cow, although in these early editions it was far from that. The admirable Tullo Morgagni, that human ball of energy whose alert thinking, flurry of telegrams and hurriedly arranged meetings had played such an important role in the Giro’s birth, didn’t even see the year out as he was replaced by a new sports editor, Emilio Colombo. Morgagni was history. The fight to take credit for, and control of, a success story was underway. Yet again there is a parallel here with the Tour de France where Desgrange, admittedly a man of huge talent and drive in his own right, was quick to take all the plaudits for himself and bask in the power and glory after the inaugural 1903 Tour when in fact his chief cycling correspondent, Géo Lefèvre, was the true architect of the race.

At Gazzetta the new sports editor Colombo had no intention of being tied to the office chair and insisted on following the Tour personally and producing his own rather lame byline reports. Meanwhile, in 1911 Cougnet bought out Costamagna as the owner of Gazzetta although he in turn quickly sold to a publishing house Sonzogno who augmented the Gazzetta board with two hard-nosed businessmen in Arturo Mercanti and Edgardo Longoni. Costamagna, meanwhile, did not disappear from the scene and, rather like Colombo, insisted on accompanying the Tour and filing voluminous high-profile reports under his own cod byline ‘Magno’. Costamagna had a very decent if occasionally florid turn of phrase and you suspect he enjoyed his annual three-week tour of Italy enormously, writing about a sport he clearly loved and individuals he admired immensely.

At this distance it’s difficult to keep track of Gazzetta’s internal politics, but the two main players were Colombo, the hands-on ‘front of house’ sports editor who wants to take full credit for the glory of the Giro, and the cycling fanatic and workaholic fixer and chief cycling correspondent Cougnet who not only ensures the race happens but rules it with a rod of iron. In their own ways they were a formidable team and the race, indeed the national institution, that developed on their watch is their legacy.

These early days were a stressful, dynamic and experimental time as the Giro’s founding fathers sought to nurture this embryonic event – and of course to maximise its commercial value and transform it into a guaranteed source of income. Partly, though, it was also their highly tuned journalistic instincts which motivated the movers and shakers at Gazzetta to always try and top the last ‘story’ – whether it be the previous year’s Giro or indeed the Tour de France which they continued to monitor closely. There was an explosion of ideas coming out of Gazzetta’s cycling think-tank, some of which hit the bullseye while others died quietly, never to be mentioned again.

Some were obvious. When the dust had settled the 1909 Giro was considered perhaps a little ‘soft’ in comparison to the Tour so steps were quickly taken to rectify that. The 1910 Giro was increased from eight to ten stages with a total distance of 2,987km and this appeared to have an immediate effect with only 20 of the 101 starters making it back to Milan. Meanwhile, in 1911 another two stages were added to make the Giro a 12-stage race of some 3,358km which resulted in a similar rate of attrition. In two years the race distance increased by 910km. The 1911 Giro was also the first time a really high Alpine climb was included, with the peloton breaking through the 2000m barrier on the climb to Sestriere on the French border on stage five.

So far so good: all very logical and progressive; nor were there any arguments with the decision to award 51 points to every rider who finished lower than 50th which saved the organisers the trouble of laboriously counting everybody in hours after the race had finished, with the circus looking to pack up and move on. But then came 1912, an appalling wrong turn from which the race had to hastily extract itself the following year. It was a humble minion – the paper’s horse-racing correspondent – who seemed to be identified as the villain rather than those much bigger names who ran the race and accepted the accolades when it was universally praised. What the Giro actually did in 1912 was to try and respond to the massive contradiction that has always hung over Grand Tour racing. These races are ‘won’ by individuals who take all the glory, honour and prize money and stand atop the podium alone, yet everybody within the sport accepts the eternal truth that Grand Tours are won by teams.

So, in the pioneering spirit that existed at the time, the 1912 Giro attempted to address this by making it a team race. The race would be won by a collective not a single individual. Together they would stand on top of the winner’s podium. A noble thought with much merit but emotionally counter-intuitive. When the public witnesses a single rider crossing the line triumphantly in splendid isolation, they instinctively attribute victory to that individual. In that defining moment appreciation of their mates who have busted a gut along the way to make such a victory possible is suspended, a process much accelerated by Gazzetta’s own lionisation of the individual and his story.

In 1912 you could only enter the Giro as a member of a team with the organisers stipulating they were looking for four-man teams, although ultimately they relaxed that a little and allowed teams of three. Initially there had also been the hope that the many cyclists who had been recruited into the bike divisions of the Italian Army – the Bersaglieri – would be released to form regimental teams but this idea did not find favour with the military authorities who in the end consented to just one composite team of soldier-cyclists to compete. Nor was the new team scoring system always easy to follow with a team being awarded four points if they produced the stage winner and two if they placed two riders in the top ten. Additionally, all teams that finished each stage with a full complement – the same number of riders they started the day with – earned another point. No matter how much Gazzetta hyped the idea they failed miserably to sell it to the teams or the public. At the start just 54 riders from 14 teams took the line, this in a race that just three years earlier had seen 127 riders gather in the middle of the night at Piazzale Loreto. It was a disappointing response and even before the race got underway plans were being hatched to return the Giro to normality in 1913.

While all these changes were taking place the one constant was the enduring excellence of Carlo Galetti who, having finished runner-up in 1909, won the next two Giri and to all intents and purposes won in 1912 as well when he was manifestly the strongest rider in the Atala-Dunlop squad which won the team event. The Giro had its first superstar rider and hero. Nicknamed ‘il Scoiattolo dei Navigli’– ‘the squirrel of the canals’ – by Gazzetta, the Milanese rider was a terrific all-rounder and won the 1910 Giro in commanding style although there was the prospect of a strong French challenge early in the race before that receded in controversial style. The redoubtable Petit-Breton was back for another assault on the title while Jean-Baptiste Dortignacq and Constant Ménager were also highly rated.

Dortignacq was a streetwise veteran who had finished second in the infamous 1904 Tour and third the following year and in 1910 he was going strongly at the Giro. When he won stage two Ménager moved to second in GC and Petit-Breton third. The French invaders were putting some stick about and the Italian peloton – normally a fractured and jealous collection of riders who were conscious of proudly representing their regions and provinces as well as their employers – for once responded as one on stage three to crush the French trio. The top three Italian riders – Galetti, Ganna and Eberardo Pavesi – were allowed to escape up the road to roll over the finishing line 22 minutes ahead of the peloton. Order of sorts had been restored at the top of GC with Galetti taking a convincing win, a situation that was reinforced when his nearest rival, Petit-Breton, had to abandon through injury at the end of stage three when in second position.

The dangerous Dortignacq still looked strong and showed up well in the brutal mountainous stage four from Teramo to Naples but failed to appear at the start of stage five after becoming ill overnight and abandoning. The Frenchman was so violently sick that Italian police launched an investigation, suspecting foul play in the form of poisoning. Nothing was proved, however, and, as is the way with Grand Tours, the circus had moved on before there was proper time for reflection and possible action. The French threat, one way or another, had receded, and it was pretty plain sailing for Galetti thereafter although he had to recover from an unfortunate crash with a hay cart on the final stage into Milan to claim his first title.

In 1911 the race started and finished in Rome, a departure from the norm designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy. In a triumphant editorial emphasising the quasi-missionary and stage-building qualities of their race, Gazzetta gushed: ‘It is not only a sporting exercise that engages Italian cyclists from such a variety of regions, in a battle of dialects and personalities on the roads of the south, barely known by the rest of Italy. It is also true patriotic work of acquaintance, swiftly turning to brotherhood, greeting and smiles.’

The ever popular Petit-Breton – a big crowd favourite in Italy since winning the first Milan–San Remo in 1907 – was back for yet another tilt at the Giro and this time mounted a very strong challenge. Third time lucky perhaps? He won the mountainous stage five from Mondovi to Turin in spectacular style and continued to place so well that by the end of stage nine Petit-Breton became the first overseas rider to lead the GC. On stage ten, in a six-man break, Petit-Breton found himself outnumbered by five Bianchi riders and stood little chance but he was still second in GC behind Galetti going into the penultimate stage, a rugged 345km run from Bari to Pompeii, when he crashed and was again forced to abandon.

Petit-Breton always brought a whiff of class and panache to proceedings and was much admired by Costamagna, aka Magno, who wrote a eulogy in Gazzetta to the departing Franco-Argentinian: ‘The best of the class. A superior man of great class, a courageous and fair athlete; a perfect gentleman … this magnificent champion, truly an expression of the Latin race … his elegant silhouette, an attractive figure of a lord competing with dignity on the field of professional glory and money was saluted everywhere with true sporting enthusiasm.’

With Petit-Breton’s challenge alas coming to nothing the field was clear for Galetti although there was a flurry of excitement later on stage 11 when a herd of water buffalo charged the peloton and caused much disruption and dismay to the tired riders. Dispirited towards the end of a very long race, the riders staged a strike and decided to finish the race in Pompeii, some way short of the official finish line in Naples where a large crowd had gathered. They later promenaded into Naples and received a very boisterous reception from the unhappy crowd. The race finished without further controversy back in Rome after a routine stage 12 although it is worth noting that the rock-solid Rossignoli would have again taken GC – by some 33 minutes – had accumulated time been the criterion.

Following the aberration of the 1912 ‘Team Giro’ it was back to a more normal format in 1913 and Gazzetta had clearly not been too discouraged by its moment of madness because they continued to publish on a daily basis. Cycling was still its staple diet although football was beginning to make modest inroads. The 1913 Giro was the last to be decided by the Points system and was contested entirely by Italians with 99 mustering at the start in Milan ahead of the 341km ride to Genoa. Italy’s war with Turkey, which resulted in them annexing Libya, had garnered much international disapproval and there was an unofficial boycotting of the event during these two years. The eventual winner of the race, Carlo Oriani, was a cyclist whose career had been interrupted by army service, having finished fifth in the 1909 Giro before he joined one of the Bike Divisions of the Bersaglieri who were rapidly becoming an important component of the Italian Army.

On his return to cycling action, having served in Libya, Oriani answered a late call to ride for the army team in 1912 and won the Giro di Lombardia on 27 October 1912, nine days after he had been demobbed following the cessation of hostilities. Although he didn’t win a stage in the 1913 Giro his consistency was difficult to match and Oriani eventually finished six points ahead of Eberardo Pavesi with Giuseppe Azzini in third. Galetti, seeking a fourth Giro title in as many years, had not looked in prime form at the start and in any case was forced to abandon during stage four with a damaged ankle.

Ganna dug deep to finish fifth overall while the 1913 Giro was also notable for the first appearance of a 20-year-old Costante Girardengo who finished sixth in GC having also won the Italian championship earlier in the season. The Giro was to hear much more about the man from Novi Ligure in the coming years.

The 1913 Giro was the crowning achievement for Oriani who was, alas, one of the many professional cyclists to lose their lives in the First World War, killed at the Battle of Caporetto in fierce fighting at the Piave River on or around 10 November near Kobarid in what is now Slovenia. Oriani didn’t succumb to wounds received; rather, he died of pneumonia after spending a long time in the icy waters of the Piave. Some reports say he was forced to try and swim the river to escape German and Austro-Hungarian forces while others suggest he dived in in an attempt to save a drowning colleague. He was taken to hospital and fought bravely for his life but eventually died on 3 December 1917, soon after his wife had arrived.

Even amidst the catastrophe of the rout at Caporetto his death touched the nation, or at least the cycling fans. Rather than allow him to be buried in a mass grave in the region, Gazzetta raised the funds via donations to the newspaper for the body of its former Giro champion to be transported back home; Oriani was eventually buried in Sesto San Giovanni just south of Cinisello Balsamo where he had spent much of his childhood.