Free Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham Page B

but in one of his few surviving letters his spidery script betrayed his anxiety: ‘I’ve begun racing again but I can see I am only the shadow of myself and I’m worried I won’t be able to become what I used to be. For the moment I’m only interested in one thing: getting home.’
    That return took place through a devastated Italy of ruined towns, fresh war graves and broken people. Such trains as ran were intermittent and unreliable, so Coppi rode back to Castellania on his bike, on shell-holed roads lined with mine-fields. The journey’s dangers are summed up by a single episode he told later: at one point he was given a lift on a lorry, laden with returning prisoners and refugees, and was lucky to be sitting on the back, legs dangling above the road.There was a violent shock, and he was thrown into the road. When he looked up, the lorry had crashed. He grabbed his bike and wheels from the carnage and went on.
    His family had had no idea where he was. Initially, he had been reported severely injured in a hospital in Tortona, and later there were rumours that he had been taken as a prisoner to America – one magazine in early 1943 had written that they hoped the Americans would return him as soon as possible. His first stop was Sestri Ponente, the home of Bruna’s parents; she was not there, having returned to Villalvernia, where they had first met. He doubled back to find her, together with Serse, who had survived a brief spell fighting for the Repubblica di Salò (Mussolini’s puppet state); he had been tried by the partisans but had escaped.
    On Coppi’s back was a haversack, containing his contract money from Nulli. He did not know it as he pedalled north-wards, but it was all the cash he had, although before the war he had saved about 36,000 lire from events such as the hour. ‘How many times in Africa did I think of this fabulous sum and the use I would put it to? I wanted to set up home because I had fallen in love. I also wanted to buy a car.’ It would be a Fiat, he thought; his old friend Cuniolo would get him a good deal. Unfortunately, the money had been entrusted to his parents, who had converted it to Italian government bonds, which were worthless by the time he rode up the hill to Castellania.

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    Cycle racing had continued right up to the resignation of Mussolini’s government on 25 July 1943, the very day that a young man named Ubaldo Pugnaloni won the national championship; when he finished the race, there were no officials there to present the prizes. Pugnaloni removed the fascistinsignia from his jersey the minute he crossed the line; he had to wait fifty years to be given the trophy. That year’s Giro di Guerra stopped at its fifth round. 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 them 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, Leoni 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 taken out of a hat passed among the 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 seeing things reborn. There was a human reaction to the bad times, a desire to rebuild, to go back to being something.’