Costante Girardengo and the Giro’s First Golden Age (1919–25)
After the monstrosities and deprivations of the First World War sport had a major and sometimes unrecognised part to play as people’s lives got back to something resembling normality. Part balm but mostly pure escapism, sport offered an alternative universe in which you could battle and ‘fight’ an opponent and achieve honour and glory without killing a fellow member of the human race.
That was certainly the case with cycling and the Giro. For the fans and the Gazzetta readers there was the chance to immerse themselves in the drama in which the worse scenario for the combatants was a crash and a broken limb. Meanwhile, for the most talented riders the sport now offered a genuine route out of the poverty to which most were accustomed. Out of this came an explosion in sport generally and the Roaring Twenties was certainly a golden decade for the Giro, when the race really came of age. This decade spawned two of the all-time greats of Italian cycling in Costante Girardengo and Alfredo Binda and a wonderfully varied supporting cast that included a third rider, Giovanni Brunero, whom some would also bracket with that immortal duo, and Alfonsina Strada, the only woman ever to ‘complete’ a Grand Tour racing against men.
Cycling in Italy had kept its head above the water even in the war with many of the big races like Lombardy and Milan–San Remo running in some form or other, although staging a nationwide Giro in such circumstances was obviously impractical. Gazzetta was still there, both reporting and organising, and 30,000 copies of the newspaper were transported up to the battlefront every week to be distributed among front-line troops as they tried to maintain a connection with home and normality. When peace eventually came, the seventh edition of the Giro got underway on Wednesday 21 May 1919 in Milan. Cougnet, recognising that the 1914 race, for all its sensational newspaper-selling qualities, was probably a tad over the top, reined in a little by reducing the average stage length to 298km from 395km and increasing the number of stages from eight to ten.
In the immediate aftermath of the 1914 race Gazzetta had originally outlined radical plans to switch from eight to 15 stages with an average length of just over 200km for the 1915 race to further reduce the strain on riders and increase revenue from those towns and cities hosting the starts and finishes. Then war intervened and come 1919 Cougnet opted for a midway house. It was still, by most standards, a brute of a course with many of the neglected roads, or those damaged by the fighting in the north, in even worse condition than normal. Certainly the corsa rosa was tough enough for only 15 riders to complete.
The 1919 Giro was undoubtedly also significant in that it appeared to portray a united Italy so soon after the First World War; indeed, it started just 13 days after a national referendum had voted to declare an Italian Republic and elections for the first properly national assembly. In an editorial on the day the race started Gazzetta stated: ‘It is not true, it is not possible that Italians can not be united. Italians know that divided they will perish, united they will rise again. The Giro d’Italia is serving a purpose greater than the race itself. Neopoletans, Torinesi, Lombards and Laziani, Venetians and Emilians, all Italians, all regions with a single society and a single heart await the Giro as a mirror in which they can recognise each other and smile.’
At that start line on 21 May a good proportion of those competing were recently demobbed soldiers from the Bersaglieri cycling regiments that had proved so effective and resourceful. The army had let the ex-soldiers keep their bikes and many were now racing them, having stripped off the attachments used to carry machine guns and stretchers. The 1913 Giro champion Carlo Oriani, a proud member of the Bersaglieri, had been killed in action during the war and would have been known to many of the peloton while there would also have been a doffed cap to Petit-Breton, last seen hurling his bike against his team car in stage one in 1914. Petit-Breton had joined the French Army Driving Corp and was heavily involved in the famous Taxis de la Marne episode in the first days of war – in September 1914 – when every available driver and vehicle, including the Paris taxi fleet, was pressed into action to transport French troops to the First Battle of the Marne as the Germans closed on the French capital. Elsewhere he served extensively close to the front but Petit-Breton was actually 20 miles behind the lines when he was killed on 20 December 1917, reportedly swerving on the road in the middle of the night to avoid a horse and cart being driven erratically by its drunken owner.
Costante Girardengo started the 1919 Giro like a man who, at the age of 26, understandably seemed intent on making up for lost time. As a 20-year-old he had made his Giro debut back in 1913 and made his mark by winning stage six and finishing a promising sixth overall, while the following year he won the longest-ever stage, the 430km marathon from Lucca to Rome although that came at a cost and he later had to abandon. Now, though, he was in his physical pomp and about to embark on a winning streak that saw him win seven of the ten stages in 1919 when he led the Giro from start to finish, the first man to achieve that. It was after yet another stunning win, on stage eight, that the admiring Emilio Colombo christened him campionissimo, champion of champions. As Girardengo had yet to win the Giro – and actually only ever won two of the 11 Giri he contested in a lengthy career – this could perhaps be viewed as a slightly premature anointment of godlike status. Colombo, however, was never one to hold back and there is no doubting the genuine excitement Girardengo’s winning streak caused. Post-war Italy was in the mood to celebrate heroes.
Girardengo was a compulsive serial winner – he was to finish his career with 30 stage wins at the Giro – who had little interest in minor placings. It was first or nowhere as far as he was concerned, as he proved in the Italian National championship which he won on nine occasions – the first in 1913 and the last in 1925 – and Milan–San Remo which he won six times, a record to this day beaten only by Eddie Merckx. He was a genuine all-rounder. There were a couple of great wins in the mountains among that impressive haul of Giro stage wins and even flat stages in Italy can be distinctly lumpy, but for a while he was unstoppable in the bunch sprints which Cougnet was cleverly trying to encourage. A modern-day equivalent is perhaps Peter Sagan, formidable on every terrain except perhaps in the very high mountain stages.
The flamboyant nature of Girardengo’s wins in the bunch finishes partly explains his what we would now term celebrity status. Although growing massively in popularity with readers following the race from afar in Gazzetta, the stages were so long and often so remote that the only practical opportunity to ‘experience’ the race live, to be there in person and support your rider, was at the finishes. These were staged as often as possible in velodromes or stadia which also had the advantage of allowing the organisers to charge an entrance fee. Often Girardengo was the star of that show. Before and after the various stages, although by no means a matinee idol he was a snappy dresser and good with the fans. He possessed a certain charisma and x factor.
The media loved him and, of course, the photograph invariably featured most prominently after each stage was the clichéd shot of the stage winner heading the charging bunch and coming through the line, hands aloft. Not much change there. Meanwhile, from 1921 a film crew accompanied the race and although they did make heroic efforts to race ahead and take the occasional mid-race action shot up in the hills, once again the money shot was always the closing 100m or so of each stage. When the film was eventually edited and distributed around the country for fans to watch at cinemas, the winners of the bunch sprints featured time and time again. Girardengo was gold dust. The film crew knew exactly who to concentrate on as the pack charged towards the camera.
Girardengo’s virtuosity was easy to understand; no wonder he became Italy’s first superstar cyclist and one of only three Italian riders and Giro gladiators to be anointed campionissimo. Mussolini even ordered that all trains travelling through his hometown of Novi Ligure should stop at the local railway station as a mark of respect, whether they actually needed to or not. But who was this warrior on wheels, so diminutive that he sometimes looks like a jockey on a horse in photos and earned the less than flattering nickname of ‘the Novi Runt’ or faina (weasel).
As the fifth of nine children born into a poor farming family just outside Novi Ligure Girardengo had to fight his corner for both food and attention from the start. Later his father moved the family into town where he ran a bar-tabacchi. As a youth he discovered bikes by becoming a delivery boy, a common tale among early Italian cyclists, and after school he worked in a local factory before gaining employment at the Alfa-Romeo factory. As his two pre-war Giri rides demonstrated he was a precocious talent and had logged up two National championships and a Milano–Torino title before hostilities intervened. During the restricted wartime racing programme he took Milano–Torino for a second time and won his first Milan–San Remo in commanding style in 1918 with a daring 180km break, a sweet moment after the disappointment of 1915 when he was first across the line but was disqualified for taking the wrong route. It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. After that Milan–San Remo triumph Girardengo nearly died, falling ill during the Spanish flu epidemic that devastated Europe during the latter stages of the war. It was touch and go but perhaps the strength and resilience he had built up as a road cyclist saw him through. Certainly he returned as formidable as ever.
Stucchi-Dunlop gathered a mighty squadra (team) around Girardengo which included Clemente Canepari, Angelo Gremo and Ezio Corlaita. Encouraged by his formidable trainer and masseur Biagio Cavanna, Girardengo was also quite modern and monastic in his approach to training, preparation and nutrition and is even said to have abstained from sex before a big race. That said, he was a habitual chain-smoker. Girardengo’s stock couldn’t have been higher after his triumph at the 1919 Giro which he won virtually at leisure with Gaetano Belloni 51 minutes and 56 seconds adrift in second place while Belgium’s Marcel Buysse, riding for the Bianchi team, made a small piece of history in third by being the first non-Italian rider to claim a place on the podium. In the 1919 season Girardengo also won a third Italian championship, another Milano–Torino and the Giro di Lombardia as well as the Giro del Piemonte and Giro dell’Emilia. He was untouchable, different class, but cycling can humble even the great champions as Girardengo was about to discover in his next Giro appearance.
In terms of severity the 1920 Giro was right up there in second place behind the 1914 edition with only ten of the 49 riders successfully negotiating the eight stages and 3,300km of distinctly variable road conditions to make it back to Milan. And among those was the campionissimo himself. It had all gone horribly wrong on stage one from Milan to Turin when he crashed badly in the icy rain on the descent of Monte Ceneri. Not only was he badly battered and bruised, he had to repair his bike and while he was doing that Belloni and his Bianchi team had no hesitation in going on the attack, as was the norm in those days. There were no gentlemen’s agreements about not attacking the leaders or reigning champion when they crashed or suffered a mechanical; it was every man for himself. So Bianchi ploughed on and, although Giuseppe Olivieri took the stage in just over 12 hours and 13 minutes, Belloni finished with the same time and put nearly 12 minutes into Girardengo who had bravely remounted and emptied the tanks to limit the damage and finish in fifth place. It had been a huge effort, fuelled mainly by the adrenalin that a bad crash often temporarily pumps into the system, but there was a big price to pay. Bruised and sore, Girardengo was not in good shape when he lined up for the second stage in Turin city centre after a day’s rest for the 378km ride to Lucca, and from the start it was obvious that the campionissimo was suffering like a dog. The end came when he abandoned at Molassana in hilly terrain north of Genoa with fans fearing for his health and requisitioning an empty cottage nearby to lay their sick and injured champion out on a bed to recover.
It was a blow – for Girardengo obviously but for Gazzetta and their race as well – and first there had to be an inquest to extract maximum mileage out of the story. There had been suggestions that Girardengo had been angered at accusations of an illegal wheel change or that his morale had dipped after the unfortunate crash on stage one. That he lacked the stomach for the fight and that if he couldn’t finish first he wasn’t interested in finishing at all. There might just be an element of truth to the latter but it was way too early in the race surely to throw the towel in and the champion had shown plenty of spirit in trying to chase back on at the end of stage one. It was all good debating fodder for Gazzetta but there is no reason on this occasion to doubt Girardengo’s insistence that his problems were entirely physical and clear for all to see.
Without their great champion to write about and to command the narrative, the 1920 Giro became a bit scratchy and contentious. For a day or two the crowd’s ageing favourite Gerbi – ‘the Red Devil’ – was the main topic after being disqualified for taking a tow from a motorbike only to be reinstated sub judice. At the start of stage four in Rome there was a demonstration demanding that Gerbi’s original disqualification should stand but by the end of the stage to Chieti it was all academic anyway with Gerbi, perhaps shocked by the strength of feeling against him that morning, deciding to retire.
With Girardengo out of the way this was undoubtedly Belloni’s opportunity to strike and claim a big win for himself in a career in which he became labelled, rather unfairly, as the eternal second, the eterno secondo. It is true that on no fewer than 25 occasions Girardengo beat him into second place and undoubtedly theirs was a master–pupil relationship but, equally, it is true that Belloni won 43 races in his distinguished career including five Monuments – three Giri di Lombardia and two Milan–San Remo races – and finished his career with 12 stage wins in the Giro. That is hardly the palmares of an out-and-out loser. He was also a phenomenally successful Six Days racer both in Europe and the USA where he became a big star at the Madison Square Garden. So successful and lucrative was the latter that he didn’t retire until the age of 43 – who in their right mind resists such low-hanging fruit? – and was on first-name terms with all the waiters and barmen on the transatlantic liners as he moved between Italy and New York.
Angelo Gremo was of much the same mind and as the 1920 Giro progressed around Italy was the only other serious contender for GC honours. Gremo, an impressive winner of Milan–San Remo in 1919, was also a Bianchi rider but with the rest of the massively diminished peloton trailing a long way behind it became a two-man battle. At the end of stage six it was Gremo who seemed to hold the upper hand with a lead of 9 minutes and 58 seconds over Belloni but stage seven was to prove decisive, a savage 349km from Bologna to Trieste over the still war-damaged roads of the Veneto and Trieste region.
Belloni had been biding his time and was unstoppable as he launched his bid for glory mid-race. Only Ugo Agostoni – more than 4 hours behind on GC – had the heart to follow and was rewarded with a fine second place behind Belloni but Gremo suffered grievously, finishing 42 minutes behind, his GC hopes smashed. The eterno secondo, for once, was numero uno while Girardengo licked his wounds back in Novi Ligure. At some stage somebody was going to pay for this.
With his wit and willingness to accept the superiority of the people’s choice Girardengo with good grace, Belloni was a big favourite with the tifosi and his win was extremely well received. Looking at pictures of him with his wild hair, his wrestler’s physique – he had been a promising Greco-Roman wrestler before injuring a thumb in a factory accident – and jovial sunburned face you just know he would be good fun to talk to. When questioned, in 1919, about Girardengo’s perennial dominance over him he replied: ‘I will never be a campionissimo but the names of a few pretty girls will be etched on my heart.’
So the two post-war Giri to date had produced two popular winners and a wealth of stories. Cougnet and Gazzetta were happy enough but in an ideal world normal service would be resumed in 1921, which for them meant a clutch of spectacular wins by Girardengo leading to an inevitable and rapturous welcome back in Milan for the champion of champions. And for a while that appeared the most likely scenario with Girardengo embarking on one of his irresistible surges in which he claimed the first four stages of the race with sprint finishes at Merano, Bologna, Perugia and Chieti. The strong Stucchi team were able to contain the half-hearted attacks with relative ease and the peloton seemed resigned to its preordained fate. With those four wins in the bag he was obviously leading the GC at the end of stage four although Belloni, in second place overall, had kept him close company and was officially on the same time as Girardengo in the overall standings.
And then came stage five, a tough Apennine passage from Chieti to Naples, and yet another reminder that you take nothing for granted in bike races. A momentary loss of concentration, a touch of wheels, a crash and Girardengo was on the deck with a damaged bike and badly wrenched back muscles. Two seconds before he had been in the form of his life and looking unbeatable, yet now, suddenly, he was grovelling in the dust and watching those at the front of the peloton look back with some relish before they attacked with a vengeance. Eventually he effected a repair of sorts and climbed back on and tried to give chase, but this time it was utterly pointless and just outside Isernia on the Cinquemiglia Plateau, he climbed off for the second year in a row, a broken man. At which point he reportedly drew a cross in the road and said: ‘With this cross I signify that I Costante Girardengo from Novi Ligure will never again pass this point on my bicycle.’ Given his utterly exhausted and emotional state such theatrical eloquence seems doubtful and it is possible Colombo added a degree of drama to his report. An alternative version has Girardengo saying, ‘Girardengo si ferma qui’ – Girardengo stops here – which sounds much more plausible. Whatever the story, for the second year running the race would have to survive without its star attraction. Gazzetta naturally mourned Girardengo’s departure although it should be pointed out that at the start of stage five, and despite more than 50 hours of racing, there were four riders within 9 seconds of Girardengo on GC. Not even at halfway, and with some big climbs to come, the race was by no means over.
It was time for the prospective winner to make a move and again the cards appeared to be falling for Belloni who assumed the lead at the end of stage five and then increased his advantage to over 1 minute at the end of stage six, the run from Naples to Rome. But there were other exceptional riders in this race who, like Belloni the year before, were biding their time to strike. Foremost among these was the handsome, enigmatic, consistently underrated and indeed slightly tragic figure of Giovanni Brunero – the pride of the Canavese region but seemingly not held in the highest regard elsewhere.
Brunero was a natural climber despite his strong muscular build and was also powerful on flat and rolling terrain – what the Italians call a passista-scalatore, a rider good on the flat and in the mountains. His only real weakness on the road was that he possessed no sprint finish which meant that his victories were largely a result of dogged persistence. It wasn’t always exhilarating to watch and his real genius was often employed on remote mountains and passes where few were on hand to witness its devastating effect. Generally, his modus operandi made it difficult for Gazzetta’s wordsmiths to launch into purple prose and almost impossible for the film crews to capture but he was nonetheless a stunning talent. It would be safe to say he would be much more appreciated today than he was in his pomp.
By the time he arrived at the 1921 Giro Brunero was no callow youth; he was nearly 26 and had experienced much on and off the bike. He had won the Italian amateur championship two years earlier and later in 1919 turned professional for the Legnano team before winning the Giro dell’Emilia in 1920, when he beat Girardengo and Belloni. That same year he came second in the Giro di Lombardia and recorded a fifth place in Milan–San Remo. In short a major new talent was moving among the domestic Italian peloton. All this would probably have happened much earlier but Brunero spent part of the war fighting in the 5th Regiment of the Bersaglieri although his circumstances changed when both his parents died within a short space of time. Brunero reportedly stumbled on his father’s death when, getting off the train on the way home for a week’s leave, he spotted a funeral cortège. On enquiring who had died he was informed it was his father. In the wake of the death of both their parents – his mother had died not long before her husband – Brunero and his younger brother were moved away from the front and ran a small bike shop in Cirie from which he based his training and assault on the cycling world. This was a very determined man with the bit between his teeth and, like so many of the most successful riders down the years, he was being driven on by difficult circumstances in his personal and emotional life.
Brunero went to work on stage seven on the road to Livorno. He didn’t rout the field but somehow he managed to escape a select group including not only Belloni but Alfredo Sivocci, Bartolomeo Aymo, Marcel Buysse, Angelo Gremo and Federico Gay. And having made the break he rode with the strength of two men to hang on and win the stage by 2 minutes and 1 second, all the others arriving together. His audacity had earned him a 52-second lead over Belloni in GC. There were still three stages to go and the gutsy Belloni went on the attack and managed to win two of them but Brunero, with good support from his Legnano-Pirelli colleagues, tracked him masterfully and eventually took this first Giro from Belloni by 41 seconds. In third place, nearly 20 minutes behind in this two-horse race, was Brunero’s loyal helper Aymo. Italy had a new Giro champion but there appeared to be little love for the unspectacular Brunero. After the race, Colombo wrote to Brunero in rather awkward self-serving terms, realising that his newspaper probably hadn’t done full justice to Brunero and his win and was, before his withdrawal, perhaps rather too partisan in its support for Girardengo: ‘I write because my heart and my conscience compel me to, because I want you to understand my affection and my most sincere compliments … I confess that during the opening stages I wasn’t very enthusiastic. I believed that given your references to lack of form you intended to retire.’
Draw your own conclusions from that. Meanwhile, the intriguing prospect of a rematch hung in the air all winter and throughout the spring calendar and, in fairness to the Girardengo disciples, Brunero certainly needed to repeat his fine debut win in the Giro, against the man considered to be the campionissimo, before he could be accorded the same status.
The race of a thousand arguments
And so to the 1922 Giro, so cantankerous and bad-tempered that it was soon dubbed the race of mille polemiche – thousand arguments or disputes. The ill feeling had possibly started earlier in the season when Brunero walked off with Milan–San Remo after he and Girardengo were comfortably in the lead and heading for a sprint, which the campionissimo would have won as sure as night follows day, when both had been brought down by a stray spectator on the course about two kilometres from the finish. Some reports suggest it was an official. Brunero recovered quickest and although the incident itself was not captured surviving footage shows him rolling over the line in first place with a rather sheepish look on his face, while a few moments later a clearly angry and agitated Girardengo arrived home in second place. There was plenty of unfinished business between the two protagonists going into the Giro.
It all kicked off on stage one and the 326km run from Milan to Padua, quite a lumpy stage which included Colle San Eusebio and Pian delle Fugazze. Enough climbing for Brunero to immediately attack and make his mark on the race and perhaps silence some of the doubters who were still questioning the quality of his win 12 months earlier. By the time he reached the Fugazze he was alone out in front having already put 10 minutes into the main contenders, but on the descent into Riva del Garda he crashed and broke a wheel which threatened to undermine all his good work. What happened next was commonplace but under the regulations of the day illegal. Brunero waited for the chasing peloton which included his Legnano team-mate Sivocci who gave his team leader a wheel from his bike (although ‘gave’ is probably being too generous: a price will almost certainly have been agreed, even among team-mates).
There then followed a convoluted process: Alfredo Sivocci in turn ‘borrowed’ a wheel off another Legnano rider, Pietro Linari, who in turn negotiated a wheel from Franco Giorgetti. The final transaction involved Giorgetti obtaining a wheel from humble independent Ruggero Ferrario who, by a process of elimination, was the rider left with just one wheel on his bike. Ferrario carried his bike and Brunero’s broken wheel to the checkpoint at Riva del Garda, at which point race officials, who had missed the entire pantomime, became aware that something was afoot. Meanwhile, up at the front of the race Brunero had recovered from his mishap and was going like a train, eventually winning the stage from Belloni by nearly 16 minutes with an off-colour Girardengo a further 22 minutes behind. Given that the previous year’s race had been won by just 41 seconds, this already seemed an unbeatable lead and, predictably, there was uproar and much concern among the vanquished.
Girardengo’s Maino team had seen and heard what had gone on with regard to Brunero’s dodgy wheel change even if the Giro’s officials had missed it and immediately filed an official complaint, as did Belloni’s Bianchi team. The daggers were out for Brunero, who, disregarding the legality of the wheel change for a moment, had clearly crushed the other contenders on the road and was in the form of his life. Initially Cougnet threw Brunero out of the Giro but Legnano, arguing with some justification that such wheel changes were commonplace in the peloton and rarely punished, even if this was an extreme and convoluted example, lodged an appeal. If the judges zealously pursued every alleged case of borrowed or purchased wheels over the coming days and weeks it would be a very small peloton indeed that returned to Milan.
Eventually the judges reconsidered their decision and the reigning champion was allowed to stay in the race sub judice. This, however, didn’t appease Bianchi or Maino who were on the warpath and felt, probably rightly, that this was the crucial battleground of the 1922 Giro. The race was going to be decided by this decision. Big players in the world of Italian cycling with Girardengo being the ace in their pack, they put renewed pressure on the judges to seek clarification from the Italian Cycling Federation – the Unione Velocipedistica Italiana (UVI). But with the limited communications of the day, the ruling only came when the race had reached the end of stage three in Bologna, a bunch sprint won by Belloni. The UVI’s call was that Brunero should be retrospectively docked 25 minutes for his wheel change on stage one and that the stage victory and prize money be given to Belloni. The GC was recalculated accordingly that evening in Bologna, and Belloni found himself leading Girardengo by 1 minute 15 seconds, with Brunero trailing 3 minutes 5 seconds in fourth.
Belloni and Girardengo were back in the lead but Brunero was still in the race and with a number of big mountain stages to come was still very much in contention. The Bianchi and Maino teams were in no way appeased and the very real and embarrassing possibility of losing to Brunero despite his 25-minute penalty loomed large.
Taking all that into consideration they took the unprecedented decision of withdrawing from the Giro. The race leader and the man in second place were quitting and going home, along with their team riders. They opted for the moral high ground – not a summit often visited by cycling during this period – and again a friendly press and the tifosi seemed largely to support them.
But the Giro waits for no man and, despite all the arguments and chuntering in the background, the now diminished peloton was back on the start line at Pescara two days later. Although the GC race was now clearly going to be between Brunero and that relentless trier Bartolomeo Aymo, there was also the chance now for some lesser names to chase stage wins and to enjoy their day in the sun. Stage four provided immediate evidence of this with Alfredo Sivocci, Pietro Linari and Luigi Annoni providing the podium in an eight-man sprint in which Aymo and Brunero had safely attached themselves. The GC at the end of stage four looked very different from two days earlier, with just two names – Aymo and Brunero – surviving from before Maino and Bianchi had withdrawn.
It was a two-horse race and again Brunero made his decisive move on stage seven between Rome and Florence when he won convincingly to move ahead of Aymo in GC, a lead he consolidated on stage eight between Florence and Santa Margherita, when he and Luigi Annoni worked well in a long break before the former rolled over the line first. The plucky Aymo hit back with a stage win of his own in Turin but was never seriously going to challenge his team leader and Brunero wrapped the race up impressively by soloing into Milan nearly 6 minutes ahead of the pack to win his second Giro on the bounce. Still the applause was a little muted, respectful rather than rapturous for the diminished peloton. Brunero just shrugged: it was the others’ decision to withdraw from the race. You have to be in it to win it.
It was time for Girardengo to take stock. That was three Giri in a row now which, for one reason or another, he had failed to complete let alone win. He could point to bad luck and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that confront every Grand Tour cyclist. The decision to withdraw when leading in the most recent Giri, however, was entirely down to him and his team. Did he really feel so strongly about Brunero’s dodgy wheel change – something he himself would have done on a number of occasions in his career without penalty – or had he found a convenient way of sidestepping the ignominy of defeat? Something had to change and only person who could make that happen was Girardengo himself and in 1923 he demonstrated exactly why he was indeed a great champion and so revered. This was the season in which he set the record straight by winning everything, not just the Giro. Rejuvenated, he won the Italian championship (yet again), Milan–San Remo, Milano–Torino, the Giro del Veneto and the Giro della Toscana but, of course, it is his stage-winning exploits at the Giro that are remembered above all else. He was a man on a mission.
The insatiable Girardengo won eight of the ten 1923 stages on offer but although the race turned into a sprintfest and his winning margin in GC was only a remarkably slim 37 seconds, the key to his victory was winning a very hilly stage six across the Apennines from Naples to Chieti when even Brunero could not get away and had to be content finishing second with the same time. Had Brunero been able to make the break that day and win, even by just a minute or two, the whole complexion of the race might have changed but Girardengo was absolutely determined to re-establish his authority and fought off a joint effort by Brunero and his colleague Aymo to animate the race in the high hills which incorporated the climbs at Vinchiaturo, Rionero Sannitico and Fontanella. It was a deeply impressive performance especially in an area of the country that had caused him so much grief; indeed, at one point they rode past the exact spot on the Cinquemiglia Plateau where Girardengo had abandoned two years earlier, making a cross in the dusty road.
Girardengo had ridden the entire race flawlessly this year with everything working out as planned. He took the first sprint in Turin but was happy enough to cede the race lead to Aymo the following day which featured a hilly run to Genoa. Quite why Aymo, Brunero’s top domestique went for the win and not Brunero himself is not clear because this was always going to be one of the few opportunities to put time into Girardengo on a corsa rosa that favoured the quick men. Regardless, the net result was excellent for Girardengo. Aymo and the Legnano team had assumed the lead but was only 1 minute and 15 seconds to the good and the campionissimo had a clutch of flatter stages and mixed terrain stages to get tucked into. In quick succession he clocked up wins in Florence, Rome (after another strong performance in the hills) and Naples before reclaiming the leadership in Chieti. Thereafter it was a procession on much easier terrain with only Alfredo Sivocci in Mantua interrupting his remarkable sequence of stage wins. Girardengo was back where he belonged, on top, although in quieter moments he might have reflected that 37 seconds was quite a slim win the GC. The margins were still fine.
The 1923 Giro was notable for one other performance that occasionally gets overlooked and even slightly derided, namely a fifth place in GC in his only Giro appearance by a wild and haunted looking isolato named Ottavio Bottecchia. As an unknown debutant going up against the big names and their organised teams that was an exceptional result; it’s just that when you place his solitary Giro ride against what he subsequently achieved at the Tour de France it rather pales into insignificance. This was, however, the first real glimpse of an astounding and unusual talent that was to burn brightly for a couple of years across the border.
The 1924 Giro was ill-starred from the start with the painful culmination of a power struggle between the teams and the race organisation. Bianchi and Maino had flexed their muscles two years earlier by withdrawing Belloni and Girardengo when they were leading the GC after the Brunero time penalty. Cougnet stood firm on that occasion but then the following year Girardengo’s phenomenal tally of eight stage wins seemed to redress the power in favour of the teams. How could you have a Giro d’Italia without Girardengo or indeed Brunero, the man most likely to topple the campionissimo if he faltered? Or that great crowd-pleaser Belloni or, indeed, the slightly mysterious Bottecchia from the Veneto, the man who had lit up the 1923 Tour de France and become the first Italian on the podium there?
These were the star names, the talent, and they thought it was right they start demanding bigger money from their teams. The teams pleaded poverty and decided to ask for appearance money from the organisers, but Cougnet would never agree to that dangerous precedent and dismissed any such notion. At which point all the top teams promptly withdrew. The Giro was in real trouble but Cougnet sensed that if they could get through this test of their resolve they would break the teams’ opposition for good. In the long term Italian cycling teams could never exist without the opportunities, afforded by Gazzetta, of racing in the Giro d’Italia, Milan–San Remo and the Giro di Lombardia. Great riders come and go but they are nothing without the great races in which they can display their talents.
It was time for a charm offensive for those who were happy to compete without making a fuss. For 1924 therefore everybody racing the Giro would be given free board and lodging for the duration, an offer which attracted 90 starters. Each competitor was given a daily food allowance of a quarter of a roast chicken, 250 grams of meat, two prosciutto and butter sandwiches, two jam sandwiches, three raw eggs, two bananas, 100 grams of biscuits and 50 grams of chocolate along with as many oranges and apples as the rider wanted or could carry. Yet the field badly lacked stardust and dynamite. Witness a distinctly underwhelming top five in the final GC: the American-born Giuseppe Enrici, Federico Gay, Angiolo Gabrielli, Secondo Martinetto and Enea Dal Fiume. No names to set your pulse racing there. It should probably have been the year that the worthy Bartolomeo Aymo – deciding to compete as an isolato – should have triumphed but he crashed out on stage three.
As a newsworthy story capable of selling newspapers the race was only saved by the presence of an extraordinary trailblazer – Alfonsina Strada – who to this day is the only woman ever to ‘compete’ in a male Grand Tour.
Born Alfonsina Morini in a poor family of ten in Castlefranco Emilia, her story according to the Gazzetta version was that her father swapped ten chickens for her first rusty bike which was intended to help her run errands and chores. She then started riding for pleasure on Sunday mornings, telling her mother instead that she had been to church. Eventually everybody was in on the secret and she started racing against the local men, the local press soon christening her ‘the devil in a dress’. Her career received a further boost when she married the cycling-loving Luigi Strada in 1915, Luigi giving her a new man’s racing bike as a wedding present, the same bike she was to ride in the 1924 Giro.
Cycling lore has it that she entered the Giro under the name Alfonso Strada which fooled the organisers who only realised they had a woman in their race the day before it began in Milan when everybody gathered for registration. Frankly, you have to take that with a pinch of salt. This is a lady who started and finished both the Gazzetta-organised 1917 and 1918 Giri di Lombardia, placing 31st and last in the former and 21st in the latter when she beat a number of men. Those rides were big stories, Alfonsina was the media’s darling and already quite a celebrity in her own right, a friend of many of the top male riders and an instantly recognisable figure. It is inconceivable that her participation in 1924 was in any way random or unexpected. It was a clever ploy to breathe a little life into a Giro that would otherwise have died on its feet.
Come the start Strada lined up with number 72 pinned to her jersey and, although finishing stage one, a 300km run to Genoa won by Aymo, with the stragglers, she made the cut and was good to go for stage two. In Florence she was 56th out of 65 finishers and finished 2 hours and 6 minutes behind the stage winner, Federico Gay, a respectable time given that the winner’s time was the best part of 12 hours. And so she battled on day after day with the crowd on the road and the travelling press corps concentrating as much on her plucky rides as the battle for GC which had developed into a race between Enrici and Gay. It was on stage eight, a nasty hilly day from L’Aquila to Perugia with the rain sluicing down and winds blowing hard that Strada really began to suffer with a series of punctures and crashes – one badly bruising a knee – which resulted in her missing the cut. At one stage her handlebar snapped but an ad hoc repair was effected by using a broom handle donated by a housewife on the roadside. She wasn’t the only rider in trouble, however. Gay had endured a poor day and was now over 40 minutes behind Enrici. The GC race was all but over but there were four stages still to go, the Giro having reverted to a 12-stage format.
All of which probably helped Strada as she pleaded to be allowed to continue. Colombo, Cougnet and the judges conferred and came up with a compromise agreement. She had to be withdrawn from the official classifications but she would be allowed to ‘race’ on with the peloton and the organisation would continue to provide free board and lodging. This was too good a story to end prematurely. And so she raced on, covering every last centimetre of the 3,613km course, eventually finishing some 30 hours behind Enrici. To put that into perspective, only 38 of the 97 starters completed the race. Strada succeeded where 59 men failed.
It is salutary to note, however, that 12 months later, when peace had broken out again between the teams and the organisation, and the luminous presence of Alfredo Binda had arrived like a meteor to light up the scene, Strada was surplus to requirements. Her enlightened participation in 1924 is a strange episode and ultimately, alas, a pyrrhic victory. She had served her purpose and was no longer wanted. Now there were genuine male stars to lionise again Gazzetta reasoned that readers wouldn’t be interest in a woman rider trailing home in the gloaming after the finish had been dismantled.
Indeed, the rest of Strada’s life has a slightly melancholic tinge. She continued racing in exhibitions, novelty races, walls of death at the circus, and as late as 1938 she set the female world record for the hour, covering 32.58km at Longchamp in Paris. After her husband Luigi fell ill, she was his carer until he was hospitalised and died in 1946. She remarried in 1950, a former cyclist Carlo Messori, and they ran a cycling shop in Milan. Messori had started to write her biography when he also died young. She closed the shop, discovered motorbikes rather late in life and treated herself to a 500cc MotoGuzzi on which she cut quite a dash. Alas, the bike was to play a part in her death after she had been riding it one day to the Tre Valli Varesine event. Returning home, she was trying to restart her motorbike when she collapsed, suffering a fatal heart attack.