1914: The Toughest Bike Race in History?
The 1914 Giro is still considered by many to be the most gruelling and demanding bike race in history. After the 1912 debacle which nearly killed the race stone dead, and a 1913 race won by a rider who failed even to win a stage, the stakes were high. The Giro was a worthy race but it was lacking the drama and pathos of the Tour and, frankly, required a bit of a relaunch. At the 1913 Tour de France the cycling world – and the L’Equipe readership – had lapped up the story of second-placed Eugène Christophe on the Tourmalet climb and his epic ten-kilometre walk to find a blacksmith, where he was required to mend his own broken forks before continuing: the stuff of legend and still spoken of a century later. The Giro didn’t seem to be producing similarly spell-binding stories of men in extremis so the Gazzetta think-tank looked for ways to up the ante.
The 1914 Giro was to be the toughest bike race the world had ever seen. It would take the riders to the very edge of what could be achieved physically by mankind and in so doing look to fulfil Desgrange’s stated aim concerning the Tour de France: namely that it should be so tough that ideally only one rider would be able to complete it. The other big change worth noting was the overdue switch from the Points system to decide the GC winner to accumulated time. The Points system often encouraged fairly boring, tactical racing and also tended to penalise the true endurance athlete who was not fully rewarded for his virtuosity in getting away from the pack – or his main contenders – and winning by a considerable time margin. There were also, initially, plans to introduce a cut-off system after each stage to eliminate the laggards and the calculation was that the back markers should not be more than one hour per 100km behind the stage winner’s time but, as we shall see, that hurriedly had to be abandoned.
Cougnet and his team rolled out an absolute beast of a course. Nobody could accuse them of half-measures. It had been condensed to just eight stages again, five of which were to be in excess of 420km, which would necessitate midnight starts, which in turn would make sleep deprivation a major factor. The 1914 Giro came at you from all directions. The average stage length was 80km longer than in 1913 and a full 114km longer than the inaugural Giro just five years earlier. Only the 340km stage two, from Cuneo to Lucca, could objectively be described as a regular stage. The other seven all included serious mountainous territory to a greater or lesser extent. There was to be only one rest day between stages so it was also the intensity of the race which helped make the 1914 Giro go down in infamy. In terms of actual length – 3,162km – it lagged a long way behind the Tour de France of that year, which was the longest in history at 5,405km, but in degrees of difficulty it was unsurpassed. The average length of time in the saddle per stage for the winner was just under 17 hours with the eighth and last man home averaging more than 19 hours per day.
On top of this, the riders had to contend with appalling weather. A slightly later than usual start date of 24 May should have increased the chances of good weather but a cruel later winter hit northern Europe that year and the 1914 Giro was contested in conditions more akin to January and February. Stage one largely took place in a howling winter storm that blew for 36 hours and the majority of the other stages were affected by torrential, often icy, rain. Factor in primitive roads which immediately turned to mud, the woollen clothing riders wore which quickly became sodden, the spare tyres, tools and food they all had to carry and the heavy, mainly fixed-gear bikes they rode and you begin to get the picture. Just eight of the 81 riders who set out from the start crawled back to Milan a fortnight later. It was carnage. And even then there wasn’t an undisputed winner, with the need for a long-running court case before Alfonso Calzolari was officially declared the victor. Cougnet and Gazzetta couldn’t have been happier. So many stories to write about, so many tales to tell and a daily edition to fill. Where to start?
An estimated crowd of 10,000 gathered outside the Gazzetta offices just before midnight on 24 May to cheer the riders on their way. The newspaper had left nobody in any doubt as to how tough the course would be in their many preview articles and anticipation was keen, although nobody could have predicted what unfolded. A quality field had assembled, including the winners of all the previous Giri and the top ten from the year before although it was still very much an Italian race with just a handful of overseas riders contesting the issue. The ever-gallant Petit-Breton was back again in the Atala team with fellow Frenchman Paul Duboc, another tough character who had seemed set to win the 1911 Tour de France before abandoning with what some claimed was poisoning. Supporters of the leader, Gustave Garrigou, were suspected but nothing was ever proved.
Another intriguing competitor was Freddie Grubb, the first British rider to start a Grand Tour. The 26-year-old Londoner was a bit of an oddball, a single-minded, cantankerous, teetotal, non-smoking vegetarian health addict – but he had performed great deeds as an amateur. Grubb had briefly held a world record of 351 miles covered in 24 hours and his record of 5 hours 9 minutes and 41 seconds for the London–Brighton–London stood for 14 years. At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm he won a silver medal behind South Africa’s Rudolph Lewis in the 315km individual time trial – a far cry from the ITT distances of today. Grubb completed the distance in 10 hours 51 minutes and that fine ride anchored the GB team comprising himself, Leon Meredith, Charles Moss and William Hammond to a silver medal behind Sweden in the team competition. Off the back of those performances he was encouraged to quit his amateur status and race professionally on the Continent. The 1914 Giro was to be his first major professional race. And last. Sadly, he couldn’t then regain his amateur status after the 1914 Giro and so his promising racing career was over. Grubb wasn’t the only one to suffer. Also in the Atala colours were the ever-reliable Giovanni Rossignoli, Giuseppe Contesini and Gino Brizzi and the expectation was that one way or another they would make the race. Instead, to a man, they had all abandoned by the end of stage one.
By all accounts it seems the apocalyptic weather set in about two hours into the stage as the race swept out on a long loop towards the north-west in the direction of Arona on Lake Maggiore before the percorso turned south and headed for Cuneo via the mighty Sestriere climb near the French border. The tempest started with a solid 60–70mph wind howling through the Po Valley, scattering debris on the course and destroying much of the Giro signage so that a number of riders took wrong turns when they became detached from the leaders. Riding in the pitch-dark is no fun at the best of times let alone into an approaching storm, a torrential downpour that didn’t cease for 36 hours, which turned gradually into hail and sleet as the riders climbed in height. Icy rain, howling winds, the dark of night, caked in mud and already frozen to the bone, the peloton limped into Arona where many riders then punctured on nails local partisan fans had thrown on the road. The motivation behind such senseless behaviour is always difficult to comprehend but such sabotage tactics had quickly become commonplace on the Tour de France and ‘fans’ on the Giro were determined to follow suit. Their actions were well-orchestrated, indeed Gazzetta had got wind of them and offered a 1,000 lire award for tip-offs as to where and when but to no avail.
A succession of punctures was ruinous for many riders who had to stop and lost body heat as they tried to mend them in the dark with frozen hands in the rain and sleet. Habitually most riders carried two or three inner tubes but, once they had been used, unless they were a member of one of the ‘big’ teams who had a support vehicle there was virtually no way of finishing the stage. At least ten riders had abandoned before the peloton had even reached the foothills of the Sestriere climb where it was already snowing heavily ten kilometres below the summit and beyond that, should anybody successfully fight their way to the top, lay another 130km to the finish in Cuneo.
Petit-Breton was among the many riders who abandoned at the foot of the climb near Susa although few did it in such spectacular fashion. His team had been beset by mechanicals and he himself had already suffered a couple of morale-sapping punctures when he was abruptly stopped by a third. As he contemplated another repair he saw his team car approaching and ripped off his sodden, mud-caked jersey in anticipation of at least getting a clean, dry replacement. Alas for Petit-Breton the Atala team had already run out of spare kit; this was the final straw for Petit-Breton who reportedly ‘flipped’ and rode off up the road and into the storm bare-chested, howling with frustration before collapsing in a hysterical heap. Petit-Breton then repeatedly threw his bike at the team car. Magno’s ‘attractive figure of a lord competing with dignity’ had cracked good and proper. Cycling in general, and the Giro in particular, can reduce the very best to gibbering wrecks of humanity.
Atala’s team of galácticos decided to quit along with their revered leader Petit-Breton. Not one of them made it to Cuneo that evening, including Grubb. Shocked by the severity of the course and the racing, Grubb decided that road racing on the Continent was not for him although he had chosen possibly the toughest day on a bike in history to make his judgement. Disillusioned, he returned to Britain and concentrated his efforts on starting a bike shop in Brixton, south London, which eventually morphed into FHG Bikes, a significant name on the British cycling scene between the two world wars.
For those who ‘conquered’ Sestriere there was still a long ride to Cuneo and it was Angelo Gremo who eventually won the stage in a time of 17 hours 13 minutes and 55 seconds, just over 14 minutes ahead of Carlo Durando and Alfonso Calzolari who were the next arrivals, riding in together. The youthful Costante Girardengo was in fourth at 44 minutes and 20 seconds while in fifth was the 1909 winner Ganna – the King of Mud – who endured a dreadful time but battled on bravely. A kidney infection, however, forced him to abandon before the start of stage two. The reigning champion Oriani was seventh man home at 1 hour 7 minutes. Last man to arrive in Cuneo was Mario Marangoni, just 19, who was 7 hours and 14 minutes behind the stage winner. In total he was in the saddle for 24 hours and 7 minutes and Marangoni, being an isolato, had to then go and find himself some hot food and accommodation. He must have been a remarkably resilient young man, though, as he finished last in all the first five stages before abandoning on stage six.
Only 40 of the 81 starters finished in Cuneo although three of those were later disqualified for taking a tow. Harsh given the circumstances but rules are rules – except for the Giro leader who was not disqualified but, rather, incurred a 3-hour penalty when he was penalised for exactly the same offence later in the race. Of those who finished that first stage just 24 were within 4 hours of the winner’s time. Under the new regulations that Cougnet had announced the remainder of the peloton should have been eliminated there and then but the race director relented and quietly shelved that rule for the rest of the race. Only three of the aspiranti – the least experienced and totally amateur members of the peloton – survived the day and only 14 of the isolati. Cougnet was far from unhappy, though, in fact he was quietly ecstatic: ‘The retirements add prestige to the performance of the survivors and so to the race itself,’ he later wrote.
Stage two on 26 May – down to Savona and then along the Ligurian coast – was the only comparatively flat stage of the 1914 Giro although there were still steep hills and mountain passes to negotiate. Relatively speaking it was the calm after the storm although of the 37 riders who started the day a further ten were forced to abandon as the after-effects of stage one continued to be felt. It was, however, an important day in terms of the GC race because it was the day when Alfonso Calzolari, third man home on stage one, took a grip of the race, breaking decisively on Passo del Bracco and riding alone for the final 125km to record a memorable stage win, finishing 24 minutes ahead of second-placed Giuseppe Azzini with the consistent Girardengo in third. With the overnight leader Gremo being forced to abandon – his Peugeot team were already down to just one rider and the team manager issued orders to withdraw from the race – Calzolari now found himself just over 1 hour ahead of Girardengo in the overall rankings which seemed a comfortable enough position but in fact, on this race anyway, was still some way short of being a decisive margin. On the 1914 Giro when things went wrong they went catastrophically wrong.
Cycling history has not been kind to Calzolari, who has been rather dismissed as a freak winner of a freakish race, but although he never won another bike race in his life after 1914 that is not altogether fair. In 1913 he had finished fifth behind winner Odile Defraye in a high-class Milan–San Remo, riding home alongside the winner of stage one of the 1914 Giro Angelo Gremo. He also won the prestigious Giro dell’Emilia that year, finishing ahead of Giovanni Gerbi and Gremo to name just two other quality riders. Calzolari was a very decent and unusually durable rider who produced his best form when it mattered, under the most testing of conditions, while others were either found wanting or were unlucky. He placed fourth or better in six of the eight stages on the Giro. It should be added that, having been deprived of five years of his career by the First World War, he still returned to record two second places in the first two stages of the 1919 Giro and was third overall after seven stages when he was forced to abandon. But for the war, the name of Calzolari might have featured more prominently in the history of cycling.
Stage three from Lucca to Rome, the longest stage in Giro history at 430km, had loomed large ever since the route had been announced but a desperate, lone 330km break from Lauro Bordin had the effect of settling the race down, with all the main contenders happy to ride as a group for most of another 17-hour day to first contain and then catch the Bianchi rider. Bordin, from Crespino in the Veneto, had taken advantage of the race stopping at a railway barrier just 15km into the day and slipped away on what still ranks as the longest solo break that competitive cycling has ever witnessed. When Bordin was eventually caught, just under 14 hours later, the ambitious Girardengo decided to press the issue and escaped for the second of his 30 Giro stage victories. The other big names contested a bunch sprint 2 minutes back while the battling Bordin hung on well in the final couple of hours to finish tenth some 16 minutes behind the stage winner. Another brutally long day – in fact the longest stage in Grand Tour history – but the surviving riders coped much better, with just one more rider abandoning as 26 riders made it safely to Rome.
Drama on stage four
Girardengo may have been a sure-fire star of the future but he was still a young man and cracked spectacularly on the rugged Monte Bove climb near Macerata on stage four from Rome to Avellino, losing 3 hours in the process. His time would come after the First World War but in both the 1913 and 1914 Giri he had already left his calling card and started to win a fanbase.
The narrative of another long, testing day was dictated by the Bianchi rider Giuseppe Azzini who had started the day in sixth place fully 1 hour and 47 minutes behind the leader Calzolari. The man from Gazzuolo in Lombardy had nothing to lose and pressed hard while behind him it is just possible that a spot of skulduggery was afoot as the peloton, most notably the Bianchi team, looked to clip the wings of the race leader. Calzolari had to cope with a tyre mysteriously flatting while he went into the commissaries’ control tent to sign in at the Avezzano checkpoint midway through the stage, while on another occasion he picked up a second puncture when he and a number of other riders had to carry their bikes around an obstruction in the road, almost certainly down to saboteurs, and had to mingle with the tifosi. Whatever the truth of the matter, by the end of stage four Calzolari’s lead was down to just over 1 hour with Azzini beginning to mount a credible challenge.
Azzini, who had finished third overall in 1913 after leading the race at the end of stage seven, was on a roll now and went on the attack again on stage five, on what was the shortest stage of the Giro, being a piffling 329km although littered with testing ascents at Lo Scorzo, Pietrastretta, Serra dei Palmenti and Matera. It was prime territory for a break and with Calzolari only having one team-mate to lean on – Clemente Canepari, who had gone into the race as the team leader – the race was blown apart with Azzini arriving in Bari 1 hour and 3 minutes ahead of Calzolari. Suddenly, well in the space of two stages, Azzini had recouped over 1 hour and 48 minutes and by the end of stage five was the new leader in GC, 89 seconds ahead of Calzolari. On paper the race was now Azzini’s to lose. With four Bianchi colleagues still going strongly, the odds were heavily stacked in his favour but at that juncture the unseasonal weather, which had been rolling around northern Italy since the start of the race, intensified and shifted down to central Italy and contributed to another mind-boggling stage that will go down in the annals. The 428km run from Bari to L’Aquila was always going to be epic with climbs all over the place – Montecorvino, Vinchiaturo, Cinquemiglia and Poggio Picenze – but what you don’t expect to get in central Italy in June is sleet, snowstorms and freezing conditions. For the second time the 1914 Giro morphed from a race into a battle for survival and by the end of the day there were just 12 riders left standing.
Azzini, so strong and dominant in the previous two stages, had again been going well when he suffered a massive crack. With about 30km of the stage left and with the weather at its worse, Azzini simply disappeared from sight and wasn’t discovered until the next day when he was found feverish and disorientated in a farmer’s hay barn where he had sought refuge. It might just have been sheer physical exhaustion, a driven individual pushing too hard in his pursuit of victory, but the crude use of drugs, such as strychnine and cocaine to mask the pain and suffering, or drugs to induce an artificial feeling of wellbeing, was by now commonplace in the peloton. With no reliable water en route, riders were also apt to fill their two metal bidons with red wine most days and as is well known now alcohol does not always mix well with such drugs, especially when the individual is in an already weakened state.
The brave backmarker Marangoni also ground to a halt on this hellish stage which was won by Luigi Lucotti in 19 hours 20 minutes and 47 seconds, the longest-ever winning stage time in Giro history. All this drama, however, took a back seat to the row concerning the leader Calzolari who, it was claimed, had taken a tow along with Clemente Canepari and Carlo Durando on the Svolte di Popoli climb about 45km from the finish in L’Aquila. The Bianchi team lodged the complaint with the race commissaries – no surprise there – but Canepari added fuel to the fire by admitting his own guilt and claiming that the car had been driven by a friend of Calzolari. Of course Canepari might have had his own axe to grind having gone into the race as Stucchi’s number one rated rider. He would not have enjoyed the indignity of having to ride as a domestique to Calzolari.
It was all very messy and contentious. One race official claimed to have witnessed the incident but his evidence wasn’t compelling and it was the race leader under scrutiny here. If there had been no question about his guilt, logic suggested that he be thrown off the race, as was the fate of the three cheats on stage one, but Cougnet was having none of it. A compromise was put in place whereby the three riders were relegated to last place on the stage and given the same time as the last rider who finished plus 1 minute. It sounded like a devastating blow but as all those concerned were riding high in GC there was effectively no change in GC other than Calzolari now being back in the lead. And commandingly so. With the abandonment of Azzini he was now 1 hour and 56 minutes ahead of second-place Pierino Albini.
The remaining 12 riders were out on their feet by now and there appears to have been a truce of sorts for the last two stages which were both 17-hour-plus monsters that nonetheless finished in bunch sprints. Albini took line honours in both, the 429km stage into Lugo and the final 420km ride into Milan but it made absolutely no difference to the provisional GC. Calzolari was the winner in 135 hours 17 minutes and 56 seconds, which was 1 hour 57 minutes and 26 seconds ahead of Albini, with Luigi Lucotti of the Maino team third at 2 hours 4 minutes and 23 seconds. Enrico Sala was the only isolato to finish so his fifth place won that division, and one of the most remarkable rides of all was that of aspiranto Umberto Ripamonti, just 19, who was the only rider in that class to finish. He came home in eighth and last place, 17 hours 21 minutes and 8 seconds behind the winner. The previous year the precocious Ripamonti had finished 30th on his Giro debut but there is no trace of him again in the cycling world until 1925 when he suddenly appears on the Giro start list and yet again he gets to the finish safely in 32nd position. A proven stayer if nothing else.
And then the fun really began. The 1914 Giro d’Italia still wasn’t over. The Italian Cycling Federation had been monitoring events and ruled that Calzolari really should have been thrown off the race for taking a tow on the stage into L’Aquila and declared Pierino Albini the winner. There was an uncanny parallel with an early Tour de France dating back to 1904 when the French Federation disqualified 12 riders, including the first four in the provisional GC, for taking rides with taxis or trains in the most chaotic of Tours which had seen riders repeatedly attacked and injured and generally go in fear of their lives. After that race Maurice Garin, Lucien Pothier, César Garin and Hippolyte Aucouturier were all retrospectively disqualified and banned and Henri Cornet, who had finished nearly 3 hours behind Maurice Garin in the provisional standings, was declared the victor.
Untypically Desgrange accepted this without a fight. Cougnet, however, was violently opposed to the Federation interfering in what he considered to be his race and, having witnessed the entire 1914 Giro at first hand, he knew that there had definitely been a campaign of sorts within the peloton to discredit Calzolari and to prevent him from winning. The rider himself let it be known that in Bari, at the end of stage five, he had been offered double the winner’s prize money by a complete stranger to throw the race. This doesn’t altogether ring true either because Calzolari had lost the overall lead that day and was something of a long shot to regain that time – this, remember, was ahead of the dramatic snowy stage into L’Aquila. It was all very contentious with passions running high and, good newspaper man that he was, Cougnet also knew that this was a great soap opera of a story which would continue to sell newspapers during cycling’s winter months and at a time when much of his readership might otherwise be understandably preoccupied with the opening salvos of the First World War.
Cougnet instituted proceedings against the Italian Federation and in February 1915 the courts ruled that Calzolari was indeed the winner of the 1914 Giro d’Italia. The Federation, though, were in trenchant mood and appealed the decision, and still the race wasn’t won for sure until July 1915, 13 months after it had finished, when the appeal court also ruled in favour of Calzolari. By then the world was at war and the race with all its arguments and bitter polemics, and just eight finishers, a fading memory.
1914 Giro d’Italia Final Classification
1 Alfonso Calzolari (Stucchi) 135hr 17mins 56sec
2 Pierino Albini (Globo) + 01hr 57mins 26sec
3 Luigi Lucotti (Maino) + 02hr 04mins 23sec
4 Clemente Canepari (Stucchi) + 03hr 01mins 12sec
5 Enrico Sala (isolato) + 03hr 59mins 45sec
6 Carlo Durando (Maino) + 05hr 12mins 12sec
7 Ottavio Pratesi (Alcyon) + 17hr 21mins 08sec
8 Umberto Ripamonti (aspiranto) + 17hr 21mins 08sec