fallen angel excerpts - book

[AgilisMerlin]

I am fully absorbed in William Fotheringham's book Fallen Angel http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RtGqyxgyL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0224074504/ref=sr_1_1_olp?ie=UTF8&qid=1352988470&sr=8-1&keywords=fallen+angel+coppi&condition=used

some excerpts:


page 56

"The sport resumed after the war in an ad - hoc way, largely under the impetus of Gino Bartali and another influential figure of the time, Adolfo Leoni, a sprinter who would go on to win seventeen stages of the Giro. Between rhem they mustered as many as they could find of their fellow professionals from before the war; it was this circus that Coppi joined after he was released from detention in Salerno. As the front line moved northwards in 1944 and a form of normality was restored from the south upwards, Bartali, Beoni and company would race with local amateurs on whatever bikes had survived the war.
Tubular tyres were in particularly short supply. For training, riders would use punctured tyres repaired with rags. The prize money was tyaken out of a hat passed among spectators , and shared by those present. Leoni converted an old car into a riders' minibus, the Caroline, which travelled the newly liberated areas carrying up to ten cyclists, their bikes and their bags. It was, recalls Alfredo Martini, a time of austerity, 'no cars, no enjoyment, just the satisfaction of seein things reborn. There was a human reaction to the bad times, a desire to rebuild, to go back to being something.' Pugnaloni is less nostalgic; 'it was disgusting. The roads were in pieces, the hotels were all requisitioned by the Allies and water was rationed in some places.'
Much of the racing was on the track, because the roads were rarely fit, and with rampant inflation and a primitive economy often the prizes were in kind. After a race, the winner might be seen riding home through the shell-holes with a gas stove under his arm. Or there were barter deals, such as the on Bartali managed, where Legnano paid him in steel tubing, which he sold on to a plumber in Florence. Riders who were hungry would go for lap prizes such as pigs and bottles of wine, and there were curious awards such as paintings and tortoises.
To compete again, Coppi had to base himself briefly in Rome, where he and Serse stayed in a hotel near Nulli's shop in Vi La Spezia, racing in the colours of the Societa Sportiva Lazio. 'He thought that the years he had spent in prison had cut short his career. If Serse had not been there, with his optimistic, forward looking nature, perhaps Fausto's career would have ended that year. But it was Serse who said that their lives had not yet begun and Serse who who wanted to race the Giro d'italia if it had been back on the calendar.'
The need for money and the insecurity of those who had once lost everything would haunt the war generation. Later, they would take on ludicrous schedules of exhibition events purely because they dared not turn down the cash. They had little kit; serse Coppi raced in teh pink jersey his elder brother had won in the 1940 Giro. And, like most of europe's people, they were hungry."

page 26

"First thing in the morning, Cavanna would bang on the bedroom door with his stick, thwacking the planks as if he wanted to break it down. Some former pupils have it as early as 4 a.m. , others 7 a.m. presumably it depended on the time of year Cavanna's contacts in Novi would have let him know if any of his charges had been seen in a bar, or in female company. They would receive their instructions - 'andate di qui, di la, di su, di giu, here there, up, down, as one protege told me, quoting Firaro - and they would be waved off as if it were a race. All Cavanna lacked was finish flag, said another. Each training circuit had its set time which the riders had to better. One typical circuit was 190 kilometers, westward over the Appennines to the Mediterranean and back again, partly on unmade roads, to be done in six hours, the riders propelled by bottles of water, caffeine and the stimulant simpamine, a mild form of amphetamine that the students took to get them through their exams. 'It won't make you campioni, but it will help you concentrate,' their master would say."

[Keith A]

I'll have to read this. I'm in the middle of Road to Valor right now which is Gino Bartali's story.

[AgilisMerlin]

it is very full, for such a thin book












lyrics (http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858860264/) to DEvothKa (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCtcAl_AUM) below link

[Johnny P]

I read Road to Valor. I liked it. It was a very worthwhile read.

[rwsaunders]

True hard men from another era.

[AgilisMerlin]

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/Arezzo%20liberated%20Mid%201944.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/Generals-Siena-14Jul1944-BR.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/800/USArmy-Rome-1944-BAR800.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/Prato-45R.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/PonteV-WWII-BR.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Covers%20Images/WW2/War%20Photos/Mascot-14Jul44-BR.jpg

http://www.paradoxplace.com/Books/Montages/WW%202%20in%20Italy.htm

page 65


"An image encapsulates the post-war Italy through which Coppi rode to victory on that March Day. The photograph shows a vast sea of empty tin cans and three women scavenging among them for something to eat. The caption does not say where it was: it could have been anywhere. the Italian economy was devastated, its output a third of what it had been before the war. Wages could not keep pace with inflation that had pushed prices to fifty times the pre war average, meaning people simply could not afford most goods. Food rationing had pushed consumption back to nineteenth-century levels, the black market was rampant, and food shortages were so acute that in Naples, post-liberation, women and girls would sell themselves for a packet of biscuits. Police would raid restaurants and inspect the diners' plates to see if the proprietor was adding anything beyond the ration. The country's infrastructure was in ruins, with half the country's road network unusable and people living in tents and railway carriages.
Coppi's fellow cyclist had all played their part in the war. Coppi's future gregario Ettore Milano, who did not start racing until after the war, was a youthful partisan fighting in the Appenines. He still has the marks to prove it, including shrapnel scars on his fingers and his back, and he managed a cycling carreer in spite of having one leg shorter than the other after injuring his back. One of Coppi's most faithful team-mates, Sandrino Carrea, spent part of the war in captivity in Buchenwald concentration camp and survived two death marches. Another of that era, Alfredo Martini, used his bike to ferry rucksacks of Molotov cocktails to the partisans. On the potholed, gravelly roads, that was dicing with death.
Coppi's former leader, Bartali, never fought, but it later emerged that he had ben part of a network based in Pisa, founded by a jewish accountant, Giorgio Nissim, which assisted refugees. The champion cyclist was on of their 'postmen'; he could get through the checkpoints on the pretext that he was training over the 370 kilometer round trip to Pisa from his home in Florence. Hidden on his bike as he went between the convents used as hiding places were the documents used to make false identity papers. It is estimated that 800 lives were saved by the network. More controversially, the third great Italian cyclist of the time, Fiorenzo Magni, was tried after the war on a charge of collaboration, but was cleared.
Two wars had been fought on Italian soil simultaneously between 1943 and 1945. The Allies had made their painfully slow and hotly contested advance northwards through the succession of German defense lines, a highly visible conflict had seen the leveling of towns such as Cassino and Cisterna in the Anzio landing zone, saturation bombing of the front lines, and the destruction of infrastructure such as railways, bridges and roads as the Germans retreated gradually up the peninsula. The other war was the hidden but dirty civil war, Italian against Italian. Together with German troops, the Fascist militia and the thousands of Italians who joined Hitler's SS tried to root out the partisans, many of whom were former socialist opponents of Mussolini's regimes. In this conflict there was no distinction drawn between combatants and civilians, with mass executions of villagers who harboured and aided partisans, house burnings and torture as the militia and the Germans hunted down the fighters.
The wave of atrocities scarred the national consciousness well beyond liberation. As the war ended there was a brief month of something approaching anarchy, with summary executions by hastily convened 'peoples tribunals', revenge killings and random murders as old scores were settled. There were executions of the wrong people as a result of false denunciations and mistaken identity - Bartali for one would have been shot without the intervention of another cyclist, Primo Volpi. Of the public lychings, that of Mussolini and Clara Petacchi was merely the most celebrated. The mood of those months is illustrated by one episode from Coppi's native Piedmont, in which a fascist militia commander was paraded through villages in a cage. On many occasions, fascist fearing reprisals commited suicide.

Serse winning Paris Roubaix http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-H69O3ljj-W4/T2KDtjn-YQI/AAAAAAAARtM/hhOCANg-KWE/s1600/Coppi%27s+brother.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_atrK-jBKJKY/TRynT3pwIBI/AAAAAAAAOXI/N58CKHTXeV4/s1600/GINO%2BBARTALI.jpg

[blessthismess]

Seems like a very interesting book. Im eager to check it out.

[AgilisMerlin]

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tags/faustocoppi/interesting/


http://www.scrivonapoli.it/notizie/coppi1.jpg

http://static.blogo.it/06blog/fausto-coppi-il-campionissimo/11_Laconsegnadiunpanettonecomepremiodopolavittoria dellatappaFirenzeModenaalGirodel1940AssociazioneFa ustoeSerseCoppi.jpg

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http://www.dewielersite.net/db2/wielersite/beeldbank2012/1330447558_3810.jpg

http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceout.gif

[AgilisMerlin]

Cultural and sporting landmarks acquired more significance in post-war italy than ever before. The army was disgraced, politics suspended, the King gone. Sport and culture offered stability, hinted at normality. So La Gazzetta's writers compared the start of their race to Toscanini's first baton stroke at the reopening of Milan's La Scala a month before. The sense of rebirth was not limited to the witers on the recently relaunched Gazzetta, The Church - the only national institution that had survived the war - was keen to be involved. Pope Pious XII wrote to the organizers saying that he saw the Giro as an act of 'supreme faith in our country's rebirth, in the spirit of fraternity that unites our people. He blessed the peleton before the start of the stage from Rome to Perugia. Alcide De Gasperi, newly elected as head of government, watched the race between Bassano del Grappa and Tiento on 5 July. The stage was deliberately chosen: Trento was part of the Alto Adige, the German-speaking region n the Northern Alps that had reverted to Italy as part of the post-war settlement. The head of state's presence here, watching the event that united the disparate areas of Italy, was a symbolic statement: you are part of our country now.

http://thevirtualmusette.com/storage/Gino%20and%20Fausto.virginmedia.jpg

The riders too, felt they were involved in something bigger than themselves."There was a huge feeling for the Giro della Rinascita,' Alfredo Martini told me nearly fifty years later. 'Racing is was a positive, emblematic thing. People understood that Italy had ao start from nothing, roll up its sleeves and also think of things that would provide enthusiasm, reignite passion. The Giro offered hope for the future.

A key part of that future was mobility. The destruction of roads and railways had made it a nightmare merely to travel or carry goods from A to B: getting the cyclists from Milan to Naples and back was an assertion of 'a rapid return to daily normality, or at least the desperate desire to believe that that return had been made,' wrote the historian daniele Marchesini. 'If the caravan was able to move from the north to south it symbolized the fact that the public powers had managed to recreate, in the shortest of time spans, the minimum conditions needed to ensure that the nation could live together in one whole.' In contrast, the first post-war football championship-starting in autumn 1945- had been divided into north and south divisions because communications were so bad.

The Giro organizers' inspection noted that almost all the bridges on the route were temporarily, often shared with railways. In places the riders would have to get off and walk up steps. In Milan, the race had to start several miles from the city's outskirts, due to the abysmal state of the roads. The food available to the riders was a monotonous diet of minestrone and chicken , and that not always good. Prizes offered by local sports clubs along the route included demijohns of wine, furniture, sacks of potatoes, home-made cheeses, tubular tyres, fishing rods, 'sometimes cash' - a reflection of an economy which had been reduced to barter. Pigs and chickens would be awarded as prizes at the stage finishes, then sold immediately by the riders.

The newspapers saw the Giro as offering a first chance to go out and report on the state of the nation, so they sent their best writers, men such as Orio Vergani of Corriere della Sera, who described the event as a sort of unreal joust in the rubble', Vergani described a race of jarring contrast: the happiness of the event against the grimmest of backdrops, with constant reminders of the conflict and death. He observed that in Ancona, where the Giro started, running water had yet to be restored, and he made a point of visiting the vast swathe of flattened buildings. There was dust, clouds of it blowing from ruined towns and villages, and 'thousands upon thousands of houses reduced to nothing good only for bats'. The roads were lined with war cemeteries, each with its sign: English, French, Indian. Ninety-five percent of the people on the roadsides seemed to be wearing dirty khaki, abandoned military uniforms. Many were bare chested, because shirts were in short supply.
Controversially, the race visited the city of Trieste, claimed by both Italy and Yugoslavia amid bitter post-war reprisals and massacres, and at the time under United Nations control. The secret services were against the stage finish, fearing a violent reaction from the Yugoslav population, who would feel the city's inclusion in Italy's national Tour was an unwelcome statement of Trieste's Italian identity. But they also feared an Italian backlash if the stage were cancelled, and let the organizers go ahead.
Their fears were realised when demonstrators stopped the race at the demarcation line with roadblocks of barbed wire and barrels of tar. Stones were thrown, the security forces accompanying the race responded with rifle shots. The field dived for cover, they recognized the sound. Bartali hid behind a car, Coppi took shelter behind a barrel, and together they led the calls for the stage to be abandoned.
Most of the riders felt it was not worth risking their lives and made for their hotels, but seventeen of the field, mainly from the local Willier-Trestina team, were smuggled through the demonstrators in American military lorries bristling with rifles. They were released eight miles from the finish and raced into the city to a rapturous welcome. The final sprint was rigged, to ensure a victory by the Trestina leader Giordano Cottur. The stage was followed by two days of rioting, fomented by Italian nationalists brandishing a bloodied jersey which had been worn by a rider who had been hit by a stone. Bombs were thrown at the police, buildings connected with Yugoslavia were burnt. The riots left two dead and more than thirty wounded.

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5044/5209832721_0bbe8c1334_z.jpg

WT history -http://www.beelinebicycles.co.uk/wilier-triestina-history-_3693

Wilier Triestina was founded in 1906 by Pietro Dal Molin in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. The company name originated as an acronym for the phrase “W l’Italia liberata e redenta” (Long live Italy, liberated and redeemed). The 'Triestina' part of the name was added in 1945 in support of Trieste, which was under territorial dispute following the Second World War.

At the outset Wilier rose as a small workshop along the banks of the river Brenta, at Bassano del Grappa, and it became more and more successful by keeping up with the increasing demand for bicycles.

In the first post-war period, Mario, one of Dal Molin's sons, gained the leadership of Wilier and he began a constant perfectioning of the bicycles through chromium and nickel-plating. Under his leadership, the production increased considerably and the firm, which came unsmirched out of the II World War, after the Armistice, started again its activity.

Those were the years of the Reconstruction, when the bicycle was the most important means of transportation as well as cycling, together with football, became the most popular sport. For this reason, Dal Molin determined to set up a professional team captained by the triestin Giordano Cottur, well-know for succeding no less than Gino Bartali during the Bassano-Monte Grappa lap for amateurs.

In the same time, according to the common feeling of uneasiness about the fate of Trieste, Dal Molin decided to associate the name of this julian town to that of his own firm. In this way, in Autumn 1945 the Wilier Triestina was born, distinguished by its red copper-coloured bicycles, which later became an authentic trade-mark. The following year the team took to the first Tour of Italy of the post-war period, cutting in the duel between two great champions, Coppi and Bartali, and gaining flattering victories in several laps. After all those successful races, Wilier became part of the most important Italian cycling: this big industrial boom involved an enlargement both of the plant and of the staff, in the order to meet the increasing demand; so, the production reached 200 bicycles a day, employing 300 workers.

Strong in its success and thanks to the prestige it had gained, in 1947 Wilier bought up a promising young cyclist: Fiorenzo Magni, this one, instead of being crushed in the challenge between Coppi and Bartali, found out the right system to become the third great protagonist of Italian cycling, by winning the Tour of Italy in 1948. This is the same year Wilier spread its intense activity in South America too, where a small team of local professional cyclist collected dozens of wins.

In the following season, the team, reconfirmed for its great performances, won several national races, until it became successful in 1949 and in 1950 in the Tour of Flanders and the Tour de France.

Unfortunately, after the first enrapturing phase of national reconstruction, in the early '50s, came the period of the economic miracle: people gave up bicycles to discover scooters and motorbike. Cycle firms suffered the damage of progress, and in 1952 Wilier Triestina had to shut down and leave its agonistic activity.

Nowadays, the glorious story of this firm and of its "copper-coloured jewel" lives again thanks to the Gastaldello brothers from Rossano Veneto, who bought the Wilier Triestina mark in 1969, proud to bring again great favour to one of the best known Italian cycle houses and providing dozens of professional and dilettantish Italian and foreign teams with their bicycles.

http://www.beelinebicycles.co.uk/medialibrary/_genpagefullwidth/2011/03/09/4eee838c/Wilier%20History.jpg

[AgilisMerlin]

page 78

Outside his family, to most of those who met him, Coppi appeared distant, ill-at-ease. One former team-mate, Michele Gismondi, told me: 'He always seemed to be fond of us, deep down inside, even if sometimes his mind seemed elsewhere, as if he were thinking of something else. 'Jean Bobet concurred: 'Out of his racing kit he looked fine, but the suit never seemed quite to fit him. I had the impression he was not at ease. He was always polite but seemed to be watching everyone else, and looked as if he was watching everyone else watching him.'

Coppi was impossible to pin down. Team-mates and friends find it hard to remember specifically what it was that made his character special. He is not, it should be pointed out, the only cyclist of this kind. Orio Vergani of Corriere della Sera, for one, believed that most of the cycling champions of that era were reticent men, never letting too much out in public about the efforts they made, the drugs they took, their childhood, their dreams. They were peasant boys with the peasant's instinct for caution, thrown into a bizarre, dog-eat-dog world where they gambled every day - on their own strength, on the trajectory of a bend, on the line to take in a sprint - and where they were surrounded with people whose aim was to deceive them.

http://cycling-passion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/fausto-coppi-football-calcio.jpg

The media found him a mystery, apart from one confident, La Gazzetta dello Sport correspondent Rino Negri. 'Very secretive in what he says and on what he intends to do in a race.' wrote a reporter in 1940. 'Don't try to elicit from him a single word more than he might feel he can say without giving anything away.' 'He was hard to drag out of himself even though he was naturally well-mannered and well brought up,' recalled the historian Indro Montanelli, who felt that this was not something the cyclist tried to cultivate, but it had its uses. 'Everyone would look at him and wonder "What is he thinking? Is he on a good day or not? What is he planning to do?" And no one ever knew.' The writer condluded: 'He never had many [words] at his disposal. And he seemed to have great difficulty in getting out the words he did have. Perhaps this was why I never managed to understand if he was happy to the king of cycling. It seemed he wasn't.
He was not a chatterer, not a man who opened up easily. 'Often Fausto's silences were long, he seemed a tremendously long way away, closed in his thoughts', said a contemporary, Romeo Venturelli. On the road, travelling between criteriums and track meetings with team-mates, the talk was of practical matters: racing programmes, holidays, the next day's schedule. He was obsessed with the logistics, making sure the scheduling was right, that the train tickets were arranged. He was not a man given to daydreams or reflection, even among friends. Fiorenzi Magni noted, for example, that he did not discuss his experiences in prison camp, other than to mention that is had damaged his career because his digestive system was affected.

Coppi was unwilling to make a spectacle of himself in public. For example, if he gave a gift to a charity, he would be determined that it should remain anonymous. He was a man who never made reckless predictions: he would never say 'Today I'm going to win', merely 'Oggi ci daremo una botta', We'll give them a kick up the backside today. The former soigneur of the Italian national team, Giannetto Cimurri, recalled that the campionissimo had his own way of showing someone when they had been admitted to the select inner circle of people who were to be trusted: Coppi would shake hands with them using his left hand. The rest of the world got the right hand.

http://bp2.blogger.com/_SZx2oaxuJSA/R5ipXih6hPI/AAAAAAAAA6c/6Ffw1BEaIUQ/s400/CoppiHrRec.jpg

[AgilisMerlin]

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02414/Fausto_Coppi-121_2414688k.jpg

page 84

"Many books on Coppi fail to mention a tragedy involving the cyclist in early May 1947, when Coppi ran down a bookshop owner, Giuseppe Vallino, in the Genoa suburb of Sampierdarena, while returning from the Giro di Romagna. Vallino died in hospital from his injuries, unleashing a series of legal battles that ran on for nearly a year. Due to a lack of evidence, claims for damages from Vallino's widow and his brother were thrown out, as was a requested six-month prison sentence for culpable homicide. Coppi eventually paid the widow 1.65million lire in compensation. By Italian standards it was relatively uncontroversial, but it was a little foretaste of bigger nastier legal wrangles to come."

http://books.google.com/books?id=SjiTuKfz7ckC&pg=PT90&lpg=PT90&dq=coppi+Vallino&source=bl&ots=CYwNyekiZk&sig=Z9MFgSrdIUHQLRc9T78n7QvhlqI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=S17gUJWXI9SI0QGt34GQDw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01635/Fausto_Coppi-2_1635202c.jpg

[AgilisMerlin]

page 165

'He is alone on his bike. He is a man' - Curzio Malaparte, Coppi e Bartali

For most Italians of a certain age, it takes only three words to evoke Coppi's image and achievments. Un uomo solo. A man alone. The phrase was coined in 1949 by the radio journalist Mario Ferretti when Coppi staged his longest solo escape to crush the Giro d'Italia field on the Cuneo to Pinerolo leg. 'Un nomo solo e al comando, la sua maglia e biancoceleste, il suo nome e Fausto Coppi.' One man alone is in the lead, his jersey is white and light blue, his name is Fausto Coppi. He remains the greatest of cycling's escape artists. Rino Negri estimates that he raced 3,000 kilometres alone, to win only fifty-eight races. His philosophy was simple: 'Either I don't escape, or if I do, it is when I cannot be caught.' In a pamphlet comparing Italy's two great cycling champions, the writer Curzio Malaparte felt that Coppi's habit of winning on his own reflected the cyclist's belief in his own strength rather than in any divine power. 'He has no one in heaven to protect him. He only believes in the motor that has been given to him, his body.'

http://images.gazzetta.it/Hermes%20Foto/2011/01/02/0LEEL5YA--300x145.jpg

[AgilisMerlin]

page 101

http://www.sbs.com.au/cyclingcentral/resize/file/4791_bartali-640-uci.jpg/id/26197/w/640/h/360

Bartali relied on peasant remedies, some learned from his mother, but all harking back to the witchdoctor notions peddled by the soigneurs since cycling began: salt, olive oil and vinegar baths, hot compresses of vinegar and salt applied with a well wrung cloth, local application of tobacco from cut-off cigarettes butts, and rubs with grape juice because he had noticed that vineyard workers did this to relieve pain. He like a glass of liqueur distilled by his father, and believed he had to protect himself from magnetic fields. To that end, he traveled with a compass so that he could align his bed north-south, and every night when he arrived in his hotel room he would shift the furniture accordingly.