I tip my hat to the cycling media who have come up with all kinds of ways to provide us with a racing fix during the sport’s lockdown. Special mention goes to Cycling Weekly, L’Equipe and the Cycling Podcast as three that I turn to most regularly.
Listening to the latter’s captivating virtual Giro over the last few weeks, and specifically one of the initial shows in that series focusing on the post-war “Giro of Rebirth” in 1946, the obvious comparison was made between that race and the first post-virus edition that is now planned for this autumn. With expert input from historians John Dickie and John Foot, the podcast reflected on how that race signalled to Italians that normality was returning after so many years of conflict, offering a diversion from the country’s devastation.
The race was pitched as a duel between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, and it was Bartali who ran out the narrow victor in Milan, beating his rival by 47 seconds with the rest out of sight, third-placed Vito Ortelli a quarter of an hour behind the illustrious pair. Listening to the conversation about the battle between the two Italian legends and particularly the context in which it was contested, I thought back to a feature I’d written for Cycling Weekly in the spring on the best Classics of all time.
As L’Equipe did at around the same time, I’d ranked Bernard Hinault’s success in the snow-hit 1980 edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège – or “Neige-Bastogne-Neige” as the French paperneatlydubbed it – the best Monument ever. In the same list, I’d placed Coppi’s astonishing solo ride to victory in the 1946 edition of Milan-Sanremo in fifth place. Yet, listening to the podcast and re-reading John Foot’s description of the event in his excellent book Pedalare! Pedalare! I started to rethink.
“It is rare for a cycle race to symbolise a key moment in a country’s history; rarer still for one moment, in one particular race, to encapsulate a significant sense of change of an entire nation,” Foot writes about that first post-war Sanremo, the first big event in Italy since 1940. Coppi had prepared for it by doing 6,000 kilometres of training, a huge amount during that period, some said too much. But he was determined to win, to show that his victory in the 1940 Giro hadn’t been a one-off.
Coppi’s mentor and team manager, Biagio Cavanna, told him he needed to attack when no one was expecting it. Come race day, Coppi was still unsure of his tactics, but he noted as he registered that there were a number of spot prizes on offer in towns that featured early in the route and that several track specialists had signed up with these primes in mind. On the outskirts of Milan, these sprinters all made a dash for a 3,000-lire prize. Frenchman Lucien Teisseire followed them and then continued the momentum. Coppi bridged across. “We saw him go at Binasco, and then I next bumped into him at dinner,” one rider later said.
Riding into a headwind, it looked a foolish move, especially as Coppi and Teisseire soon found themselves alone. Climbing the Turchino pass, the Italian made a series of accelerations to test his rival out, then pushed hard and was alone with more than 150km left to race.
The “moment” Foot refers to came at the top of the Turchino, as Coppi emerged from the short tunnel at the crest of the pass and began to descend from the Piemonte plateau towards the coast. Covering the race for L’Équipe, Pierre Chany wrote: “The tunnel was of modest dimensions, just 50 metres long, but on 19 March 1946 it assumed exceptional proportions in the eyes of the world. That day it was six years in length and lost in the gloom of the war… A rumbling was heard from the depths of those six years and suddenly there appeared in the light of day an olive-greenish car stirring up a cloud of dust. ‘Arriva Coppi’ the messenger announced, a revelation only the initiated had foreseen.”
According to Foot, “At that moment, Coppi and Italy became one. They were fused together. A myth of endurance, of a superman in peasant’s clothing, had come into being, and for many it wiped out, if only briefly, bad memories of the war.” As Coppi rode on, people listening in on transistor radios turned out in their thousands on the roadside to cheer him as he passed. He arrived at Sanremo 14 minutes ahead of Teisseire and 18 up on the remnants of the peloton, the disgruntled Bartali among them.
We still don’t know whether Milan-Sanremo or any other major event will take place this season, but whenever the calendar does restart I’ll have this long-distant race very much in mind. While we haven’t endured the destruction of six years of warfare, the Covid-19 virus has changed everyday life in fundamental and perhaps permanent ways, and the reappearance of cycling’s Monuments and Grand Tours will signal a shift towards normality, or whatever that new normality is.
Scheduled to take place on 8 August, Milan-Sanremo could once again be the first big race to take us in that direction. There has been talk of moving it to later in the month in order to give riders more chance to prepare for La Classicisima’s 300-plus kilometres. But I hope it retains its place as the first of the Monuments, as an indicator of change. Usually it marks the passing of winter to spring. But this year, as it did in 1946, it could have greater significance.