Maglia Rosa
Mezzogiorno, chose instead to include the far northern corners of Italy; dreamy Mondovì to the west, Udine to the east. Thus the percorso was significantly extended, to 2,987 kilometres. In addition to the professional riders, the Giro featured the so called isolati – individuals riding for themselves, for bread and for board. Given the huge time gaps between the two groups the points format remained unchanged, much to the chagrin of the trade teams. Bianchi, having invested heavily in a talented bunch headed by Rossignoli, abandoned without obvious cause on the second stage. There followed a bizarre turn of events as the next day Gatti’s entire Atala team, Bianchi’s rival-in-chief, went down with diarrhoea amid a strong suspicion of foul play. Following a thorough investigation, the police station at Teramo declared that there had been no dirty tricks campaign. Rather they concluded that Ganna, the reigning champion and self-proclaimed champion chef of the Italian peloton, had poisoned his muckers with his sugo di pomodoro, his tomato sauce. All of which contrived to hand the initiative to another Milanese framebuilder, Legnano. They’d hired a bunch of French mercenaries headed by Petit-Breton. Depressingly, though, he snapped a fork and retired the following day, the first in a long, risible series of racing disasters to befall the Legnano team at the Giro. Thus The Squirrel, Carlo Galetti, deeply unattractive and deeply unpopular among cycling fans (they had him down as a wheel-sucker) won the Giro d’Italia for Atala. Carlo Galetti had been born in Milan’s canal side slum dwellings in 1882. Aged 11, he’d found work in a print works owned by the Azzini brothers, keen cyclists who would later participate in the inaugural Giro. The job afforded him ample time to hone his skills and pretty soon he was supplementing his income by winning copiously. Now he, Ganna and Eberardo Pavesi, close friends and training partners, became known as The Three Musketeers. In 1911 Bianchi paid Galetti a king’s ransom to switch camps, for now there was much more at stake than a mere bicycle race. Atala and Bianchi, the big two, were to go toe to toe later that summer for an even bigger prize, a contract to supply 63,000 folding bicycles to the Bersaglieri, the Italian military’s cycling regiment. The Giro would once more test the mettle and the metal of the two, as Bianchi claimed to have produced a bike under the magical 14kg barrier. Once more Galetti prevailed ahead of Rossignoli and Gerbi, and the contract was theirs. The Giro, its appeal boundless, celebrated 50 years of the Italian Republic by beginning and concluding in Rome. Again the route was extended, this time to 12 stages and a mind-boggling 3,500 kilometres and the race ventured into the Alps for the first time. Only 24 desperate souls hauled their ruined bodies to the finish. The athletes, the so called girini, were tasked with a truly monstrous undertaking. They were to climb, on bicycles, to Sestrière, 2,000 metres above sea level on the French border. Problem was that by the time they arrived it was snowing so heavily that the road had become a quagmire. The Giro’s great showpiece became a tortuous procession as, forced to dismount, they pushed their bikes over the top. On the penultimate stage to Naples the whole thing descended further into farce as the group containing Ganna, Gerbi and Galetti was charged by a herd of buffalo. The three incensed the crowd by arriving two hours down on the others. The Neapolitans, famously direct and evidently unaware of their near death experience, hurled insults and, worse still, rotten fruit. The foreigner Petit-Breton, riding for the new Fiat team and lying a close second, suffered his customary mechanical. His fancy new reversible rear wheel, with different sized sprockets on either side, snapped on a dirt road near Potenza. So much for innovation… By 1912 Italy was at war with the Ottoman Empire. (The country all but bankrupted itself in wresting control of Libya, using aerial bombs for the first time in military history.) The Gazzetta 18
MR#2 Chapter_02.indd 18
21/01/2013 15:26