mortirolo

Luis Herrera, Millar, Beat Breu, Bernard
Hinault and Laurent Fignon during stage
17 of the 1984 Tour de France
Offside / L’Equipe
Monday June 10th 1991
Giro d’Italia stage 15, Passo Mortirolo
MORTIROLO
The 1991 Giro, billed as a battle royale between Gianni Bugno,
consummate winner the previous year, and the brilliant,
charismatic climber Claudio “Il Diavolo” Chiappucci, has
deviated somewhat from the script. Chiappucci, runner-up
behind Miguel Indurain at the Tour de France, is the new darling
of Italian cycling, and the race organisers have filled the percorso
with mountains, apparently playing into his greedy little hands.
But on stage two the lanky, angular Tuscan, Franco Chioccioli,
assumed the maglia rosa and is stubbornly refusing to give it
up. He leads the excellent Spaniard Marino Lejarreta by half a
minute, the great climber Chiappucci by 90 seconds. A strangely
subdued Bugno lies only fifth, over two minutes in arrears.
words Herbie Sykes photography Timm Kölln
With his skinny limbs, long, hollow torso and ample, aquiline
nose, Chioccioli is a dead ringer for the great Fausto Coppi.
So striking is the likeness that poor, likeable Chioccioli labours
under the twin sobriquets “Coppino” (little Coppi) and, more
fancifully still, “The Heron”, Coppi’s old nickname. There,
however, the similarities evidently end, because Coppino doesn’t
win bike races, at least not bike races of any great import. Not
that he isn’t a decent enough bike rider – twice fifth and twice
sixth at the Giro, the 31-year-old is a reliable, conscientious, if
unspectacular GC rider. The Gazzetta dello Sport had it about
right when it said in a Giro preview: “Chioccioli is an excellent
stage racer, but ultimately incomplete. His best chance to win
was in 1988, but it disappeared under a blizzard on the Gavia.”
Today the race will reach the most spiteful of all Italy’s climbs,
the merciless Passo Mortirolo, 12 kilometres at an average
gradient – an average – of 10.5 per cent. For the middle six of
those kilometres, the gradient will average a bruising 13 per
cent, unheard-of anywhere else in the world of cycling. Here
the big hitters – Chiappucci, Pedro Delgado, Greg LeMond,
Bugno – will make their move, restoring the natural order of
things. Today, sadly for the romantic hordes jostling for position
on Mortirolo, the Heron will in all probability have his wings
firmly clipped.
“Passo Mortirolo gave me one of
the most beautiful days of my life.
I saw an angel there…”
On the valley road to Mortirolo a group of seven, none
particularly significant in the great scheme, have escaped a
disinterested peloton. Others, mostly big, fretful-looking
blokes afraid of missing the time cut, take off in clumsy, leaden
pursuit. Bugno, the man most in need of a big day, sits in the
bunch wearing a face like a slapped arse. Elsewhere, Chiappucci
makes ready to light the fuse, makes ready for the maglia rosa,
for cycling immortality.
Approaching Mazzo, the village at the base of the Mortirolo,
LeMond, here training for the Tour de France and keen to test
his climbing legs, has his Z Team task force ramp up the pace.
The fugitives are reeled in after two bruising kilometres into the
Carmine Castellano, former race director Giro d’Italia
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ROULEUR
build-up when braking, allowing the tyre to move on the
rim with inevitable consequences. Advance launched the
first widely available tape solution, and for the most part
it was satisfactory, unless the temperature started to rise.
But after a friend of mine rolled both tubs in a criterium
one hot mid-summer afternoon, I never taped again.
With all these obstacles to overcome and decisions to
be made, it was no wonder that the high-performance
clincher tyre was met with open arms when they
started to come to market. Sure, the modern highpressure gets close to the ride quality of many
tubular tyres, but there is no doubt that a quality tub
has a ride characteristic that is hard to define – good
clinchers are close, but not as supple. Advocates
of high-end carbon fibre wheelsets such as the
Lightweight Obermeyer and Campagnolo Bora are
forced to choose tubular tyres as the manufacturer
does not provide an alternative, but by default
they are rewarded with wheels that feel noticeably
smoother when road surfaces disappoint.
For me, the ritual of preparation, checking the bike
over and gluing new tyres on if need be was part of
the appeal of racing. It was never about just chucking
something on and we’re done. The careful preparation
and painstaking gluing on of tubs was, and still is,
all part of it. The bicycle tyre is asked to respond
to undulation, pothole and flint. Rain or shine, the
tyre reacts to forces of acceleration and braking,
cornering and sprinting. The tyre is the conduit, the
communicator. A good tyre does all these things very
well; a great tyre does them better.
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Pages from ‘Bike-Riders Aids’ – The Holdsworthy Co. Ltd., 1965-6
“The careful preparation and
painstaking gluing on of tubs
was, and still is, all part of it.”
ROULEUR
COPPI
the tangled, anguished love life; the public trial for breaking
the rule of Church and State which dictated that anything
outside marital norms should remain hidden; the slow decline
to the futile early death caused by a sheer quirk of fate. Like
Tom Simpson, his overwhelming desire to race did for him in
the end, luring him to Africa and a malaria-bearing mosquito.
Since that death, the volume of prose, film and art he has
inspired puts him beyond any other cyclist.
If I have a personal connection to Coppi’s world, it is
with Italy, the country where I lived, loved and learned.
His story is that of his nation as it struggled to rebuild
materially and morally after the war; his love affair with
Giulia Locatelli/Occhini remains a key milestone in the move
to a secular state. For me, the personal side is in the bits
of the Coppi story hinted at before writing: faded photos
on bike shop walls, tales from old Italian writers and cyclists,
glimpses of an aging Gino Bartali signing racing hats at
Milan-San Remo.
Like all books, there were discoveries. The horrors unleashed
in the civil war which ran in parallel to the Second World War
come as a shock to anyone used to the pacific, conspicuously
consuming Italy of today. The sport’s Catholic heritage turns
out to be surprisingly deep; so too the pain felt by Coppi’s
contemporaries at his affair.
All these things and more make up the Fausto Coppi story.
As Raphael Geminiani said to me, his life is a novel. The tale
has lost nothing in the last 50 years and it needed retelling.
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