The Despotic Reign of Alfredo Binda (1925–33)
By 1925 peace of sorts had broken out, or at least an uneasy truce. The big teams and major players had made their point and vented their spleen and although they could in no way claim a victory it had been a shot across the bows for Gazzetta. A race like the Giro cannot flourish without its star riders and personalities. Take away the x factor and soon it would become just another bike race. As it happened the Maino and Bianchi teams didn’t compete in 1925 but their star names still mustered in new colours with Girardengo and Belloni riding for Wolsit. Brunero and the Legnano team were back and from the outside looking in it seemed like a straightforward tussle between Girardengo and Brunero with both riders looking to become the first rider to win three Giri individually.
Pre-race, though, Gazzetta was trumpeting the cause of a young Italian émigré, Alfredo Binda, who was returning from Nice just over the border to make his debut in the Legnano team alongside Brunero. It was a good call. The next superstar of Italian cycling – the next campionissimo – was about to announce his presence to the wider world in the most spectacular fashion. Originally from Cittiglio near Varese, Binda had arrived back in Italy as a 22-year-old and in less than a decade rewrote the record books and in a very real way redefined what could be achieved on a bike. A genuine all-rounder in that he could excel in all departments, Binda was also a calculating and ruthless racer. Although not academic – that opportunity was denied him – Binda was intelligent and measured in everything he did. Combine those exceptional physical and mental attributes with a robust constitution and the result, eventually, was five Giri titles and 41 stage wins. Binda’s dominance of the race became such that, by the time he had won 33 stages in the previous five editions, the organisers paid him to stay away from the 1930 Giro, in many ways the ultimate compliment.
One of Binda’s nicknames was ‘the dictator’, fairly self-explanatory given his dominance and the inevitability of victory, but perhaps his kinder moniker – ‘la Gioconda’, the Mona Lisa – captures him better. He undoubtedly possessed the inscrutable smile of the Mona Lisa; we see it in almost every picture of him. He tends to look pleased with himself – with good reason – but there is also another slightly more unnerving quality he shares with Leonardo’s masterpiece. He is observing you just as the Mona Lisa seems to do. Even in repose you sense a hyperactive enquiring mind which misses nothing.
Binda’s cycling style fascinated the critics who constantly struggled to do it justice. The words effortless, floating, stylish and perfect all appear frequently in contemporary reports and the absence of any obvious excessive physical exertion was puzzling and rather defied analysis. He appeared to spin along like a modern-day rider doing a gentle recovery ride, requiring no more effort to climb steep gradients than to ride on the flat. That, of course, was his genius, making the difficult look easy and the unlikely inevitable. French cyclist René Vietto memorably noted of Binda that: ‘If you put a cup of milk between his shoulders at the foot of a mountain, he would cross the summit without spilling a drop. He was at one with his bike. Elegance, purity, he was an artist. He was the epitome of beauty in action.’ But he had worked hard to become this good. Study images of Binda from 1925 onwards and you see a fantastically honed and strong-looking athlete, and if you start examining his palmares before he arrived back in Italy its shows a driven man packing in thousands of kilometres of high-quality racing and training over very tough terrain. Slightly under the radar over the border in France, Binda was unstoppable in 1923–4 riding for the La Française team. He was putting in the hard yards. There were 29 wins in all including Nice–Nice, the Mont Cauvaire, Nice Trophée du ‘Petit Journal’, Circuit du Provençal, Toulon–Nice, the Mont Faron climb and two victories in the annual Nice–Puget–Théniers–Nice event.
As early as 1923 Girardengo and Belloni were alerted to his talent when a young Binda went steaming past them high on the slopes of Mont Chauve (better known as Mont Ventoux) at the conclusion of the Nice–Mont Chauve race. This was the apprenticeship which went largely unseen by the parochial Italian fans even though the young man tearing it up in France was one of their own. Strangely, the lack of any obvious suffering, struggle and inner torment meant that for many years he was admired rather than loved. Binda was so extraordinarily good that he wasn’t a rider the tifosi could identify with though his results were incredible and his style peerless. With his good looks, slicked-back hair, perfectly pressed trousers and apparent playboy lifestyle in the resort of Alassio, Binda was from another world altogether. In some pictures you even see him lounging around post-race in the sort of dressing gown more usually associated with Noël Coward.
If there was indeed the hint of a playboy about him, appearances can be deceptive. Although he famously stayed single until the end of his competitive career and was perceived as playing the field for much of that time, he shared Girardengo’s aversion to mixing sex and cycling. In 1949, when he was coaching the Italy squad at the Tour de France, he clashed with Fausto Coppi who wanted his wife Bruna to accompany him. Binda refused him this and was quoted in the press as saying: ‘A real professional should concentrate exclusively on his job. When I was winning I permitted myself one sexual encounter a year.’
Binda was difficult to pigeonhole. The tenth child of 14 – parents Maffeo and Martina were another prolific Italian couple – Binda grew up initially in Cittiglio, close to Lake Maggiore, and a strong musical strain ran in the family. Brothers Albini and Benito played the trombone and the saxophone respectively while Alfredo took up the trumpet and together they played in the town’s marching band. Later, when his cycling career took off he inevitably became known as ‘the Trumpeter of Cittiglio’ and you wonder if a sense of timing and rhythm might in some small way account for the languid riding style, tapping out the smoothest of beats. A number of riders over the years have spoken of almost riding to an internal soundtrack and tempo as they try to ease their way through rugged, staccato terrain, smoothing out the harsh edges, in their minds at least.
Bringing up 14 children was not easy and there was little prospect of employment in Cittiglio, so eventually Binda’s parents sent Alfredo, aged 16, and a younger brother, Prima, to stay with an uncle in Nice. Initially, Alfredo earned his keep as a plasterer although much of his spare time – he had one day off in midweek as well as weekends – was spent riding with the local Nice Sport Cycling club or on his own up in the mountains close by. He was a regular at the Vélodrome du Pont Magnan where he developed a love for the track as well and worked on his devastating sprint finish. His talent was obvious to all and by the age of 21 he had signed for small local professional team La Française with whom he claimed those first important victories.
The ‘breakthrough’ moment came when, at the end of 1924, he decided it was time to test his mettle against the top Italian riders at the Giro di Lombardia. His main objective was to win the 500-lire prize awarded for the first man over the Ghisallo climb but, having accomplished that, he hung on to finish fourth behind Brunero, Girardengo and Pietro Linari. The subplot, though, was that ahead of the race he had written to Eberardo Pavesi – the ‘lawyer’ – who was directeur sportif for Lagnano saying that he hoped to ride at Lombardy and hinting that he might be available should he feel so inclined to sign him for next season. There was even a suggestion doing the rounds that Binda was on the point of applying for French citizenship – by now he was mainly talking in the Nasasrte patois of the Nice area rather than his native tongue.
Pavesi recognised Binda’s outstanding talent, his only reservation being whether Binda’s form could transfer across from the smooth paved roads of the South of France to the much rougher surfaces he would encounter on the Giro and the Italy’s one-day classics. Binda’s showing in the 1924 Lombardy offered reassuring evidence that ‘the Trumpeter of Cittiglio’ could make music anywhere. Pavese offered Binda 20,000 lire a year and 5,000 for every Classic he won. Much emboldened by Pavesi’s interest, Binda held out for a week or two for a slightly larger basic wage and eventually the deal was done. In no time at all an avalanche of prize money rendered his basic wages fairly insignificant anyway.
That was the Alfredo Binda who made himself known to the Giro officials in Milan the day before the 1925 Giro d’Italia. An incredible ride was about to begin. The 1925 Giro boasted a quality field and a tough-looking 3,520km course spread over 12 mainly hilly or mountainous stages. Girardengo and Brunero, first and second at Milan–San Remo a couple of months before the Giro, were the big favourites as they renewed their battle from 1923, but Belloni was always competitive, Linari was a quality sprinter although this wasn’t a sprinter-friendly course and Binda was an exciting if unproven talent in a Grand Tour.
It was tight and cagey to start with and at the end of stage four, from Pisa to Rome, Girardengo led Binda in GC although they both shared the same time, Girardengo being considered the leader by virtue of his win on stage two in Arenzano. Unwittinglyly, however, Girardengo had already made a tactical error which was to come back and haunt him. On stage three the campionissimo, seemingly in generous mood, had ridden hard to help his gregario Pierino Bestetti take a much-valued stage win, a reward in advance for the hard work that Girardengo would undoubtedly require from his man in the long days ahead. All of which was admirable except that one of Girardengo’s other team-mates – and very good friend, Belloni – was having a bad day at the office and would himself have appreciated a helping hand and a little TLC from Bestetti and indeed Girardengo. As a former Giro winner Belloni felt he was entitled to rather better from his colleagues and was not a happy man when he trailed into Pisa 16 minutes behind the stage winner. He and Girardengo might be firm friends and frequent travelling companions but that was out of order. Just because he was the eternal second didn’t mean there was any reason to treat him as a second-class citizen.
Fast-forward to stage five from Rome to Naples and the sporting gods offered Belloni a chance to get his own back when Girardengo suffered a puncture. Belloni instantly went full gas and drove home a decisive break to win the stage with Binda in close attendance. Binda took over as the race leader with a fuming Girardengo at 5 minutes and 32 seconds and the Herculean efforts of Girardengo to close that gap – and Binda’s implacable resistance – provided the narrative for the rest of the race.
By way of celebration, and possibly to demonstrate how fit and fresh he felt, Binda wandered over to the marching band that had been entertaining the crowd at the Arenacia Track and borrowed a trumpet to give a solo rendition of a couple of rousing tunes before making his way to the podium. The subliminal message was very strong.
Still, the Giro wasn’t even at halfway and nobody was throwing the towel in just yet. Indeed, in many ways what transpired was one of Girardengo’s finest moments, the old gunslinger bravely taking on the new hotshot. Could he somehow ramp up the pressure and expose Binda’s relative inexperience on Italian roads? Binda looked as if he was in control but would he, like others had done before, crack at some unlikely point when all the stresses and strains of a race suddenly manifest themselves in a crisis? Girardengo kept plugging away – his pride and reputation at stake in his own mind at least – yet, despite reeling off four stage wins in the second half of the race, he simply could not shake off Binda who rode effortlessly on his shoulder with that inscrutable smile, shadowing his every move. When Belloni led the peloton home in Milan by winning the stage win, Girardengo was still 4 minutes and 58 seconds behind. He had pulled back just 34 seconds in the final seven stages, 2,051km of full-on, eyeballs-out racing. The new campionissimo – for Binda was surely now that – was unbreakable, a man of granite as well as genius.
It was the changing of the guard but the cycling world seemed stunned more than anything else and some attempted to explain away Girardengo’s defeat by the two or three punctures he had suffered, including that costly one on stage five when Belloni led an attack. Remarkably, Binda didn’t have a single puncture. Or was it so remarkable? Well aware that the big question mark against him was his inexperience on rough Italian roads, the new man had taken the key decision to ride with stronger, tougher, heavier – and slightly slower – 500-gramme tyres as opposed to the sleeker 390-gramme tyres the rest of the top riders utilised. He sacrificed a little speed for extra reliability. Yes, he probably was still a little lucky to suffer no punctures at all but he had done everything possible to encourage such good fortune.
Girardengo was nonplussed and there is a wonderfully evocative picture of the two of them on the podium which speaks volumes. A garlanded Binda seems slightly bemused, bored almost – another race, another win – while Girardengo completely ignores Binda’s presence and looks defiantly at the camera assuming the pose of the winner almost as if he was still in denial. He was a factor again in the early stages the following year but, poignantly, 1925 was the last time he completed the Giro d’Italia, even if he kept plugging away until 1936.
These two giants of the early years of the Giro’s history had no real rapport with each other; their relationship was very different from that of Girardengo and Belloni where there was a well-established hierarchy. When two athletes are equals and seeking the same goal simple cordiality is probably the best we have any right to expect. Anything more is a bonus. It is said that later that year, in the winter, when Binda and Girardengo were made an offer they couldn’t refuse to ride together in the Milan Six, they didn’t even shake hands or say goodbye at the end of a long week living and racing together. The campionissimo was dead. Long live the campionissimo.
The 1926 Giro, a famously wet and muddy edition featuring more than 200 starters, was billed as the Binda–Girardengo rematch but steadfastly refused to follow any preordained script and ended with Giovanni Brunero becoming the first rider in history to win a third, individual, GC title at the Giro. That chain of events started as early as stage one with Binda crashing while descending the Serra climb between Milan and Turin when he also managed to damage his brakes. His first inclination was to retire – in fact technically he probably did retire – but frantic Legnano officials persuaded him to remount and continue. He wasn’t too badly injured and if he could limp home there were still stage wins to aim for while, with his help as a gregario di lusso, or super-domestique, there would be every chance of making Brunero very competitive against Girardengo.
So Binda made his way to Turin as safely as possible, finishing 37 minutes behind the stage winner Domenico Piemontesi, which was some 18 minutes behind Girardengo. The decision seems to have been made there and then for Binda and Brunero to switch roles which seems slightly premature given the Giro’s justified reputation as being a race in which there can be huge swings of fortune from one day to another. Still, emotions were high and two days later, during stage two, it was Brunero who shadowed Girardengo all day long as they gave gentle pursuit to Piemontesi who bagged himself a second stage win to consolidate his lead in GC. Girardengo and Brunero crossed in second and third just under 3 minutes behind with Binda making his unhurried way home in tenth place, a further 6 minutes back.
Some 45 minutes behind the race leader and 25 minutes behind Girardengo with Brunero safely tucked in alongside Girardengo, Binda was well and truly off the leash. The trumpeter was free to make some noise and in his own inimitable way he won six of the last ten stages. The great man started picking off his wins on stage three with a stunning victory over the lumpy route from Genoa to Florence when he soloed in 4 minutes and 30 seconds ahead of Brunero with Girardengo another 30 seconds back. That had been fun and with the gauntlet thrown down Girardengo responded a little although he was canny enough to realise that Brunero and the course itself were now the opponents, not Binda, and he needed to avoid getting dragged into a one-on-one tussle with his conqueror from 12 months earlier.
The three rode together at the head of the peloton on stage four hammering everybody into submission, including Piemontesi, who cracked in the Cimini Hill, abandoning and, according to Gazzetta, throwing himself into a ditch in despair. The events of the day catapulted Girardengo into the GC lead with Brunero second and the big three continued to dish out the punishment in stage five which Girardengo again won although he gained no time on Brunero who he now led by 2 minutes and 36 seconds with Binda at 24 minutes and 55 seconds.
Binda took the sprint as the big names again dominated stage seven, after which came the pivotal stage and another Girardengo abandon, this time with an unspecified sprain in the Abruzzo en route from Foggia to Sulmona. Girardengo had certainly shown no signs of injury until this point – two stage wins and a second place in the previous three stages – and the exact nature of the injury never came out although the ever-supportive Gazzetta wrote that ‘he had honoured the maglia tricolore with his valiant efforts’.
Perhaps we are too cynical these days but you look at that unfolding scenario and wonder if Girardengo might have done the maths and decided there was no hope of winning and little purpose in continuing. Brunero was in splendid form and his gregario di lusso Binda was off the leash and making mischief at every possible opportunity. Barring accidents and crashes there was no realistic way he could counter that duo. Better, perhaps, to abandon when in front, harvest the usual sympathy vote around yet another example of his infamous ‘bad luck’ in the Giro, and leave a few doubts hanging in the air as to the definitive quality of Brunero’s third Giro win. It was an odd affair no matter how you look at it.
Following Girardengo’s withdrawal it really was a promenade to the finish in Milan. Binda helped himself to that Foggia–Sulmona stage and three others, including the final day, while Brunero happily tucked into his slipstream to win the GC by over 15 minutes from Arturo Bresciani of the Olympia team with Binda in third just over 19 minutes behind. Despite this record third Giro for Brunero he still he struggled to get the plaudits he deserved. Gazzetta was all geared up to laud the new campionissimo Binda or to celebrate a miraculous return to winning ways from Girardengo. A Brunero win, albeit that he was a worthy and classy individual, remained a hard sell. The Gazzetta think-tank went into lockdown again in their smoke-filled offices in Milan and came up with the radical idea of awarding a 1-minute time bonus – abbuoni in Italian – for stage wins in the 1927 addition and to increase the number of stages to 15.
In racing terms it was a conscious decision to award the crowd-pleasers and to that end the stages were also made shorter and flatter. Financially, growing the race to 15 stages resulted in more starts and finishes – and more cities and towns bidding to host the travelling circus. You can see the logic but in racing terms anyway it backfired spectacularly as it provided the launching pad for a remarkable despotic winning run from the hungry Binda which nearly brought the Giro d’Italia to its knees.
In the next three Giri – 1927, 1928 and 1929 – Binda won 26 of the 41 stages contested and, of course, given that domination, won the three General Classifications virtually unchallenged. In 1927 he took 12 of the 15 stages available and although the organisation had another re-think on granting time bonuses for all stages the following year Binda was on a roll. In 1928 he limited himself to just the six stage victories although there were in fact seven for the Binda family with his brother and loyal gregario Albino taking stage eight from Rome to Pistoria, while in 1929 Alfredo blew the race to pieces with a run of eight consecutive stage wins (two to nine). He also crossed the line first on stage 13, a sprint finish in Alessandria, but he and the top four finishers were all disqualified for dangerous racing and the stage awarded to the grateful Mario Bianchi.
It should be added that Binda also won the Italian championship in all these three years, won a hat-trick of Giri di Lombardia between 1925 and 1927, won the inaugural World Championship in 1927 and was an outstanding winner of Milan–San Remo in 1929. His consistency was staggering, especially in the Giro. Grand Tour riding at this stage of the sports’ development was the Wild West, on occasions just one step removed from bare-fist bar-room punch-ups. To impose such order and routine, such predictability on such random chaos, was and remains mind-boggling. There were huge unruly pelotons – 258 riders in 1927 and an all-time record of 298 in 1928 – full of riders of mixed ability making big crashes a daily occurrence; the rough Italian roads and tracks made mechanicals inevitable while, given the extremes of weather and climate, just staying healthy was a massive challenge. Despite all this, Binda reduced one of the great adventures in sport to a procession.
Binda is paid not to ride in the Giro
It is difficult to think of many comparable examples of such total individual domination in a given sport – the remarkable Donald Bradman certainly, perhaps Pete Sampras in his pomp at Wimbledon, and Usain Bolt. So absolute was Binda’s mastery that the Giro organisers ultimately had to find a way of getting him not to compete in 1930, an artificial hiatus which took a little of the momentum and steam out of Binda’s career. It was also a lifeline to battered opponents who picked themselves off the floor and continued when otherwise they might have quit.
Binda’s ‘removal’ from the Giro for being too good really was an extraordinary episode. By the end of the 1929 Giro the truth is that most Gazzetta readers were bored to distraction from consuming the same old story and viewing pictures of the same victory pose virtually every day. There was no variety and very little human interest and, perversely, the public rather grew to resent their greatest champion. When Binda stood atop the winner’s podium in Milan in 1929, for example, he was greeted with a volley of boos and jeers.
Colombo was apparently having none of that and wrote one of his more trenchant, less flowery pieces in which he made his displeasure quite clear: ‘He has won the Giro again, in extraordinary fashion, though it’s really not important how he won. This athlete, who has elevated Italian cycling to a different level, who has delivered us our first World Championship, deserves better. By all means offers him less of your applause but don’t ever whistle at a great champion again.’
Fine words from Colombo but words are cheap and Binda, aged just 27, hadn’t even reached his peak yet. This problem needed solving sooner rather than later. In no time Colombo and the ever-practical Cougnet, alarmed at the prospect of another Binda stage-winning fest in 1930, were conducting clandestine meetings with Legnano owner Emilio Bozzi and trying to explain to Bozzi how his rider was destroying the Giro and the profound knock-on effect this would have on the Italian cycling industry. It would, of course, also result in the near-certain collapse of Gazzetta although Colombo preferred not to dwell on that. Instead he made the radical suggestion that Binda miss the next Giro which would give the sport and readers new names to concentrate on. Perhaps instead Binda could, for once, look to the Tour de France. Henri Desgrange was a massive admirer of the great Italian champion and had frequently pressed Binda to skip the Giro one year and tackle Le Tour. Bozzi contacted both Binda and the directeur sportif (DS) Pavesi. The rider himself, as well as being instinctively against such a deal, was also furious that Colombo had not had the guts to contact him first. After his four titles in five years and 26 stage wins in the last three editions Binda was the Giro and the Giro was Gazzetta.
Pavesi, though, could see a certain logic in the suggestion. He believed he had uncovered a fine young rider in Luigi Marchisio who could win the Giro in Binda’s temporary absence, and the sportsman in him also fancied the idea of Binda attempting the Tour de France and Legnano pulling off a famous double even though the bike company had no interests in France and there would be little or no financial advantage in winning the Tour. Another meeting was arranged at the Gazzetta offices, this time between all the interested parties, and the savvy Binda had sniffed the wind and knew where this one was heading: Colombo was a newspaper man first and a cycling fan second, just as Gazzetta was a commercial organisation first and a race organiser second.
Binda’s priority now was to extract maximum benefit from the situation. As expected Colombo and Cougnet lavished great praise on the campionissimo and his record-breaking achievements before suggesting that he show the true Olympian virtues of a champion and step aside for one year to allow other lesser mortals the opportunity to shine. That would allow Italian cycling to regenerate around an open and competitive 1930 Giro, after which he would be welcomed back with open arms.
Few opposition cyclists had ever outfoxed Binda and unsurprisingly he arrived in Milan armed with a few facts and figures. At the very least he would expect to win six stages in the 1930 Giro although it would probably be more. And of course he would also, barring an act of God, expect to win his fourth Giro on the trot. Add all that up and the winnings he would have to forego and the cost to Gazzetta, should he withdraw at the organisers’ request, would be a minimum of 22,000 lire. The newspaper’s top brass were dumbfounded, but, caught off guard, they couldn’t argue with Binda’s logic and reluctantly agreed to his demands.
‘It was my best Giro,’ Binda said many years later. ‘I didn’t just get the prizes without riding but I took up about ten contracts on the track in France, Germany and Belgium. The records say I won the Giro five times but I consider I won it five and a half times.’
Binda was on a financial roll and now entered into similarly clandestine negotiations with Desgrange and the Tour de France who were desperate for the world’s greatest cyclist to appear in their race. Desgrange was adamant that the Tour, like the Giro, would never pay appearance money and he went to his grave insisting that was the case, but shortly before Binda himself died in 1986 he revealed that he had been paid appearance money to ride in the 1930 Tour de France. Binda, it seems, agreed to ride the Tour on a daily rate equivalent to the appearance money he had already been receiving at those top track meetings during the Giro. You can only doff your cap and admire one of sport’s great coups. To be paid the winner’s fee for not competing in the Giro is outstandingly good business by any criteria, but then to be also paid, in advance, for simply turning up on a daily basis at the Tour de France regardless of whether he won or not was off the scale. It certainly demonstrates the power his virtuosity had now bought him within the sport but it was also indicative of a pretty ruthless and calculating attitude from Binda. You can see why the tifosi often withheld their unreserved love for him.
In Binda’s absence Marchisio, just 21, justified Pavesi’s faith in him by climbing strongly to win a worthy if unspectacular Giro. Seemingly close – Marchisio beat Luigi Giacobbe by 52 seconds and Allegro Grandi by 1 minute 49 – the race in truth lacked star quality and excitement despite being hyped by Gazzetta. Marchisio himself was certainly a genuine talent but he was a cyclist who burned brightly at the start of his career before a rapid and sad decline.
Meanwhile, when he arrived at the 1930 Tour de France Binda understandably appeared a little demob happy and less focused than usual. The driving need to win wasn’t there. He lost 1 hour after a crash and a mechanical on stage five – Bordeaux to Hendaye – but bounced back with brilliant back-to-back stage wins the following days in Pau and Luchon, the latter after a brutal mountain day.
In the next stage – another mountain classic from Luchon to Perpignan – he appeared at his dismissive best again as he raced ahead of the peloton on the first climb, the Portet d’Aspet, only to climb off and abandon in bemusing circumstances. Officially Binda claimed he felt he needed to rest up in preparation for the World Championship soon after the Tour in Liège – and in fairness he did win a famous victory in Belgium – but unofficially the rumour persisted that during the rest day preceding the stage he had received word that Gazzetta were trying to renege on their payment to him for not racing the 1930 Giro. There was a sudden urgent need to be back in Milan to sort that out and Binda’s subsequent appearance at the 1931 Giro would suggest that any problems regarding the payment of his fee were indeed resolved.
The enduring mysteries of Bottecchia and Aymo
Away from the Binda narrative, which dominated the Giro in the late twenties, there are a couple of other storylines that clamoured for attention. A week after Binda’s crushing victory and 12 stage wins in the 1927 Giro, just about the only Italian sportsman who could match his fame was found dead on a quiet Italian roadside, apparently the victim of a murderous attack. Just four years after winning the Isolati Classification in his one Giro appearance Ottavio Bottecchia was dead and in circumstances that sent a shiver down the spine of Italian cycling.
The war veteran, cycling star and high-profile anti-Fascist was found unconscious in a field by the roadside just outside the village of Peonis, close to the spot where his brother had been killed in a car accident just a month earlier. The great champion’s skull was cracked, his collarbone broken and an arm as well. His bike, found nearby – he had been out on an early morning training ride – was in good repair and there were no tell-tale skid marks on the road suggestive of a hit and run motor accident. The coroner’s verdict was sunstroke – almost certainly an act of clemency on the part of the local courts to ensure that his widow and two young children enjoyed the benefits of an uncontested insurance payout. Things start to get very complicated if a verdict of murder is returned and in this case murder it surely was. Police investigations indicated that the broken skull and abrasion to his face were seemingly the result of being hit by a rock, which clearly didn’t tally with the sunstroke ‘story’, but they were told to drop the case.
Bottecchia, a stout socialist, never hid his anti-Fascist views and Fascist hit squads were known to be operating around this time. Some years later an Italian docker working in New York claimed on his deathbed that he was the hitman who had taken out Bottecchia, but are we really to believe that a professional hitman chose to beat a man’s head with a rock in broad daylight? Another time a local farmer insisted he had seen this figure ‘eating my grapes’ in his vineyard so he picked up a rock and threw it at the intruder, felling him in an instant. Picking green grapes to eat in June? A shot so deadly from distance that it not only cracked the man’s skull but also caused other fractures? It sounds unlikely.
The death of Bottecchia remains a mystery, and so in many ways does the lionisation of Giro stalwart Bartolomeo Aymo by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. Aymo rounded off a stalwart career with third place in the 1928 Giro before finding his name immortalised in a small but key character, a heroic Italian ambulance driver in A Farewell to Arms, perhaps Hemingway’s definitive book.
The choice of Aymo, who achieved a literary immortality greatly in excess of his sporting legacy, was a big call on the author’s part. Hemingway, a big cycling fan, clearly needed to find a suitable generic Italian name but to opt for a well-known and current professional cyclist when the book was published in 1929 was unusual to say the least, but also deliberate. The individual in the book would automatically take on the characteristics of the athlete in real life, thus saving Hemingway the problem of having to spend valuable time and space characterising the soldier in the book. By brazenly name-checking Aymo, Hemingway was tapping into a considerable ‘back story’ that many will have been aware of.
All of which begs the question: what kind of rider and man was Aymo? What was his back story and the assumed knowledge many of the book’s readers would share. He wasn’t quite at the level of Girardengo, Brunero, Belloni, Bottecchia or Binda because essentially he wasn’t a winner. But he was no mug either, claiming four podium finishes at the Giro – 1921, 1922, 1923 and 1928 – and two consecutive podiums at the Tour de France in 1925 and 1926. He was a stalwart, a man who just fell short physically compared with the very best of his era but a trier, a man who endured, who never gave up and who conferred dignity on the process of losing. He was at all times honourable and rose above much of the chicanery and backbiting that was commonplace in the peloton. He was a man who was happy to serve. Certainly when claiming his first two Giro podium places Aymo was very much the junior partner to his Legnano-Pirelli team leader, expected to rein in personal ambition to assist race winner Giovanni Brunero who was in any case an exceptionally talented rider and obvious team leader. Again in the 1926 Tour de France he also rode largely in support of the runner-up, Nicolas Frantz, his team leader at the high-profile Alycon team.
A number of additional factors may also have kicked in for Hemingway. Surviving portraits of Aymo show a handsome, modest-looking individual with more than a whiff of movie-star charisma, and Hemingway was not above preferring aesthetically pleasing individuals in his books when it suited him. Hemingway might also have been tapping into a certain contemporary poignancy about Aymo. When he was writing A Farewell to Arms in 1928 Aymo was undertaking his final attempt to win a Grand Tour at the age of 39 and that would have been big news and fresh in his mind.
There was no recorded meeting between Hemingway and the real Aymo who seems to have virtually disappeared from public life after his retirement in 1930. Other than a brief obituary in La Stampa in 1970, which mentions that he subsequently ran a bike shop, nothing is known. Italian cycling journalists and historians have searched in vain but to no avail. Nothing, for example, is known of his reaction to Hemingway hijacking his name. His disappearance from cycling circles in real life seems as random and complete as his character’s sudden death in A Farewell to Arms.
Learco Guerra becomes the first maglia rosa
It was a new, streamlined Giro to which returned Binda amid some fanfare in 1931 with just 109 riders contesting the 12 stages. The no-hopers among the isolati were beginning to fall out of favour with the organisers, who preferred dealing with well-organised teams and viewed the isolati as doing little more than making up the numbers, so although small the field was very competitive. Gazzetta, rather slower than usual in mimicking the Tour de France, had also finally decided to issue the leader of their race each day with a distinctive jersey and opted for pink in celebration of the paper itself which was famously printed on pink paper. It was considered an odd decision at the time and reportedly Mussolini wasn’t terribly happy, calling it too effeminate, but the maglia rosa quickly obtained iconic status. Indeed, among sporting jerseys and shirts, it is probably second only to the Tour’s yellow jersey. Initially the Fascist emblem of Mussolini’s regime was embroidered onto the jersey but this was dispensed with after the Second World War.
Learco Guerra was the first rider to wear pink, winning the sprint into Mantua, and for a few brief years the dashing and extremely talented Guerra was the one Italian rider whose charisma put him on an almost equal footing with Binda. A would-be footballer from Bagnolo San Vito in Lombardy, Guerra only turned to cycling at the age of 26 when he finally quit football and within a year had won the Italian championship riding as an isolato. Strong, stocky and powerful he was known as ‘the Human Locomotive’ on account of his irresistible strength on flat stages. He was also handsome and photogenic and became one of the poster-boy sportsmen for Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
Guerra took stage two as well before Binda flexed his muscles, winning two of the next three mountain stages to take the overall lead heading towards Rome and a sprint finish at the end of stage six. The Giro was far from won – Binda’s lead over Michele Mara was only 1 minute and there was a cluster of riders just seconds back with Guerra also in close attendance, having recovered from illness on the first mountain stage – but all the smart money was on Binda. And then the Giro blew apart, as bike races often do. Coming into the finish at Rome’s Villa Glori horse-racing track Guerra and Binda were manoeuvring for a head-to-head battle when Binda crashed painfully although he quickly remounted and crossed the line 96 seconds behind stage winner Ettore Meini. Binda had badly injured his back, though, and had to withdraw in some distress midway through stage seven.
Two stages later, on stage nine, Guerra abandoned as well after crashing into an over-enthusiastic fan, which saw him hospitalised although there was no long-term damage. Indeed, he won the World Championship later that year in fantastic style in Copenhagen, routing the field in an extraordinarily long time trial with which the organisers decided to experiment. The GC was now a fight between Marchisio, Giacobbe and precocious climber Francesco Camusso, a second-year professional who had shown up well in a couple of stages the year before. It was all to play for and Camusso clinched it with a memorable coup on the penultimate stage from Cuneo to Turin.
Before the intimidating Sestriere climb Camusso slipped quietly off the back pretending to be concerned about a slow puncture and, when he was out of sight of the leaders, flipped his rear wheel around to change for a lower gear which he wanted to spin on the massive climb ahead. He quickly rejoined the front group and then, when the main climb started just outside Pragelato, he immediately went on the attack while the others stopped to make their own gear change. Camusso climbed beautifully – there have been few better Italian climbers – and enjoyed an inspired day on the descent to finish nearly 3 minutes ahead of Giacobbe and more than 6 minutes in front of Marchisio. The Giro was his.
The following year, 1932, was curious. Guerra was in fine stage-winning form with six of the best to please his adoring fans, but Binda seemed subdued and happy to work for the GC ambitions of his colleague Antonio Pesenti. The so-called ‘Cat of Zogno’ – his hometown – took the race by the scruff of the neck on stage seven when the peloton, expecting Binda to make his move, were caught dozing. Pesenti went nearly 4 minutes in front of the pack that day and, with Binda now watching his back, enjoyed an armchair ride to Milan where he finished over 11 minutes ahead of the second-placed man in GC, Joseph Demuysère. Pesenti was not a completely unknown quantity but he was another talent who blazed but briefly. He had finished third in the 1931 Tour de France and was to again go well in France just weeks after his Giro triumph with a creditable fourth, but after 1932 he never won another race of any description in a professional career that stretched all the way to 1939.
There appeared to be little wrong with Binda’s form as such in 1932 – a couple of months later he won the World Championship in superb style in Belgium – so cycling fans and historians are entitled to wonder exactly what was going on during this Giro. Was there an injury he was protecting? Was he becoming a fat cat content to live off past glories? Or perhaps he was still working off his anger with the Giro organisers. They might have thrown their weight around and effectively determined when he could or couldn’t line up at the start of their Giro but he, Alfredo Binda, would decide when he actually ‘raced’. In 1932, for whatever reasons, it seems he didn’t fancy racing. But in 1933 he most certainly did.
Learco Guerra, after a stunning win at the early season Milan–San Remo, was probably still the favourite going into the 1933 edition but it was a different, more focused Binda who turned up in Milan. It had now been four years since he had bossed the 1929 Giro and at the age of 31 there might not be too many more opportunities left to win the event. Guerra was quality, though, and the set-up of the race possibly favoured him. The corsa rosa now consisted of 17 stages, which brought down the average daily length, with fewer rest days. And for the first time the organisers added a King of the Mountains classification, contested over a number of designated climbs with points being awarded in descending order as the race crossed a summit. (Over the years, the climbers’ competition gradually extended to all categorised climbs in the race, although it wasn’t until 1974 that the maglia verde was introduced – changed to blue, the maglia azzura, in 2012 – for the leader of the mountains classification.) It also featured the first time trial in Giro history, a 60km run from Bologna to Ferrara in which he expected to defeat Binda by a considerable margin.
Initially a battle royal unfolded, a treat for all cycling fans, with Guerra taking three of the first five stages. Binda boxed clever, though, took time back with an outstanding breakaway victory on stage two and was handily set in fourth place at the end of stage five, less than 2 minutes behind leader Joseph Demuysère and just 15 seconds behind second-place Guerra who he had identified as his main rival. Then came another contentious finish at the Villa Glori in Rome with Guerra crashing in a sprint finish as he tried to go outside Binda. He claimed his great rival had thrown out an elbow – which in reality was just part of the normal rough and tumble – while the judges concluded that what had actually happened was that in taking the outside line Guerra had clipped a branch of the hedge that lined the racetrack. Whatever the truth Guerra was badly injured and much to his chagrin was forced to retire from what had been shaping up as one of the great Giri.
From there on it was plain sailing for Binda as, in one of his last great outpourings of virtuosity, he claimed five stage wins including that inaugural time trial which even he had expected to lose to Guerra. Only the weather threatened his fifth and last Giro win with the conditions on a seemingly innocuous stage 16, from Bessano to Bolzano, not far removed from the 1914 epic. Survival became the order of the day which Binda achieved before he crowned his triumph with a final-day victory in Milan. His win had something of a valedictory feel about it: it was his last great Giro triumph and this time he was greeted by loud cheering rather than jeers.