Free Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham Page A

their mascot. Coppi did not smoke, so he was able to swap his cigarette ration for food. He shaved with broken glass; he never quite resolved the dilemma of having only one shirt. If he wore it, it would have to be washed, if it was hung out to dry it might well be stolen. He was spotted occasionally, and his celebrity meant that those who did meet him never forgot. Among them was a British soldier named Len Levesley, a London bike shop mechanic in peacetime, who met Coppi under the strangest of circumstances. An Italian prisoner was called to cut his hair, and the barber proved to be none other than Coppi.
    â€˜I should think it took me all of a second to realise who it was. He looked fine, he looked slim, and having been in the desert, he looked tanned. I’d only seen him in magazines, but I knew instantly who he was. So he cut my hair and I triedto have a conversation with him, but he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Italian. We managed one or two words and I got through to him that I did some club racing. I gave him a bar of chocolate that I had with me and he was grateful for that, and that was the end of it.’ Later, his cycling club mates would nickname Levesley ‘Holy head’.

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    Coppi eventually found a role as a mechanic, cleaning lorries for the British and ferrying the occasional Red Cross parcel; significantly, he had declared loyalty to the new Italian government after Mussolini’s deposition on 8 September 1943, so he was treated as a cooperative prisoner. Equally importantly, early in his captivity he had met another Tortonese, Eteocle Ventura, who put both their names on a select list of just eighteen lorry and motorcycle drivers who would be transferred to Naples, where he landed on 3 February 1945. Once on Italian soil, Coppi was held in a camp in Salerno, just outside Naples, but his fellow countrymen saw to it that the rest of his spell as a prisoner was brief. Initially he worked as batman to a sandy-haired English lieutenant who had no interest in cycling, but who at least let him train. The bush telegraph works fast in Italy, however, and eventually he was directed to the offices of a sports journalist, Gino Palumbo, at a newly created newspaper, La Voce . Palumbo later recalled that the guard at the door had no idea who Coppi was, but he recognised him immediately as he stood there nervously in his fatigues, twisting his beret in his hands.
    Coppi wanted one thing: a bike. The one he was using in camp was simply too heavy. Palumbo knew that the paper could not provide one – there was no money – so he put an announcement on the front page: ‘Who would like to give a bike to Fausto Coppi?’ There were just three replies and theone that was taken up was from a carpenter in the nearby village of Somma Vesuviana who brought him an old Legnano. ‘I didn’t understand at first,’ Coppi recalled. ‘Then I burst into tears, and he, the carpenter, could only blow his nose when he saw me like that.’ Two months later, Coppi would race in Somma as a gesture of thanks.
    In early April, he was ‘sprung’ from the camp in Salerno by two older racers, Romano Pontisso and Pietro Chiappini, and a Roman framebuilder, Edmondo Nulli, who obtained his release documents for him. ‘Come on, come to Rome with us,’ they told him. Initially, he could not believe it was actually happening. For a fee of 12,000 AMlire, the occupation currency, Nulli became his first post-war sponsor. The backer could hardly have been more appropriate: nulla is the Italian word for nothing. Coppi was racing with a big zero on the back of his orange jersey; like his country, he was starting again from scratch.
    Initially Coppi’s racing was restricted to events in the south of the country, the north being still at war. There were hints of better days to come, however: for a track meeting at the Appio velodrome in Rome, Coppi received 16,000 lire,