OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Fifty- odd years ago, one of Wallonne cycling’s foot soldiers enjoyed a magical Indian summer. Procycling salutes the legend of Pino Cerami
Notwithstanding cycling’s stagger towards globalisation, the bulwarks of the season remain largely intact. Despite the endless tinkering, much of it hopelessly misguided, the song remains the same where the big races are concerned. Het Nieuwsblad leads to Paris- Nice and Tirreno, whereupon all roads lead to Milano- Sanremo. The Liberty splendour of the Ligurian coast yields to the bullying cobblestones of the north, to the redundant mining towns immortalised in Émile Zola’s Germinal. Next, the climbers of the Ardennes lift the curtain on the Giro while the Dauphiné represents the opening skirmishes on the road to Paris. August is fast, flat and furious, the Vuelta two races in one. The last chance saloon for the stage racers, it also constitutes the perfect test bed for those with rainbow jersey aspirations. Finally Lombardy, the most aesthetic of all, bestows a breathtakingly evocative coda. One may legitimately debate the quality of cycling’s administration but the music of its calendar remains ( at least for now) a symphony of genuine beauty.
For all cycling’s pretensions of modernity, few sports venerate tradition more than this one. It’s true that cricket and baseball are each replete with history, each saturated with innate beauty and drama. Theirs, however, is of a more cerebral variety. Neither makes the same demands on body and spirit as bike racing and great sport, ultimately, is about physicality. This is precisely why, with the possible exception of boxing, no sport is greater predisposed to legends.
It’s also true that cycling, the great anachronism, can have no future without its past. For the proof, one need take but a cursory glance at the calendar itself. The ultimate litmus test of its wellbeing, it’s suffused with history and with the names of those who made it. On most summer weekends, in any of the heartlands, you’ll find riders remembered. In Belgium alone, a plethora of memorial races honour its great sporting patrimony. Heroes international or local, from the recent or distant past, are evoked across all disciplines. From starry- eyed junior to hardened, varicose professional, all are invited to recall those who toiled in the construction of cycling’s great pyramid.
Meanwhile, the new brooms at the head of the UCI delude themselves that the sport can be remodeled into something it never was. The fatuous notion that it may become a top- down spectacle, a sort of Formula 1 on bikes, is hopelessly misguided commercially but also at variance with the spirit and values which created it. Worse still, such an overhaul risks consigning the memory of a century of champions to the landfill of sporting history.
They know a thing or two about cycling in Belgium, and not for nothing did they create races to honour Jef Scherens, Raymond Impanis and Stan Ockers. Since they exist outside of the WorldTour, they will doubtless be surplus to Aigle’s next artifice. Don’t, however, fall into the trap of believing that these, and dozens like them, are expendable races. They matter a great deal because they are the foundation stones upon which the professional sport is built. Their continued wellbeing keeps genuine cycling people – riders, administrators and bike manufacturers – in work. The planned reformation or, more accurately, deformation, of the calendar, proposes that no top-level riders be permitted to compete in lower level races and vice versa, with inevitable consequences. Both television and sponsors, the lifeblood of the sport, will turn their backs on the smaller events, whereupon each one will wither and die.
Each year on the first Thursday of April, the Wallonne province of Hinault plays host to one such race. The GP Pino Cerami is a beautiful event, a geographical and strategic bridge between the northern Classics and those of the Ardennes. Past winners include Eddy Merckx, Joop Zoetemelk and Bernard Hinault and, like all races, its wellbeing is reliant upon the patronage of the big riders. In 2013, four WorldTour outfits took to the start, which in turn guaranteed healthy media interest. Under the latest UCI proposals, though, they would be absent by decree, sealing the fate of the race and snubbing the memory of an iconic figure in Wallonne cycling history… GIUSEPPE ‘ PINO’ CERAMI’S story began not in Hinault but some 2,300 kilometres south, in Sicily. He was born in 1922 at Misterbianco, a comune of 10,000 or so just inland from the Gulf of Catania. Though gilded by lemon groves, it was denuded both by Etna’s shadow and by endemic poverty. Try as he might, Pino’s father couldn’t put food on the table and by 1927, Misterbianco had broken his resolve. The Cerami family, like thousands of Sicilians before them, headed for New York but never got further than northern France. After six backbreaking months working down the mines, Pino’s dad found work in the brickworks of Charleroi and set about building a new future for his flock. For all that Flanders is reputed to be the school of hard knocks, back then Wallonia was the undisputed university of cycling. Pino Cerami – predisposed to hard graft – was an excellent student. When his father died in 1943, he set to honouring his memory by excelling at the thing he’d loved most – bike racing.
At the cessation of World War 2, he took out a professional license. He won a couple of crits and by 1948 he was out of the mines and earning a living of sorts from the bike. An exceptional rouleur, he finished top-10 at Lombardy and at Flèche Wallonne, his local race.
The following year, he missed out on the podium there but confirmed his class – when Fausto Coppi attacked on the outskirts of Spa, Pino alone was strong enough to hang on. As the two of them hammered on towards Liège it seemed done and dusted but Rik Van Steenbergen and Edward Peeters, apparently assisted by the race convoy, bridged across.
Van Steenbergen was unbeatable in a gallop, Pino next to useless. When he finished fourth of the four, it underlined his two greatest cycling shortcomings: he couldn’t sprint and he wasn’t quite Belgian enough. Like many migrants, he remained emotionally attached to Italy and here it had cost him. For all that he was immensely popular, there’s no way Van Steenbergen would
have been towed across had he been a true Wallonne. Two Italians in the break, on the other hand, were considered fair game.
His reputation enhanced, he made his way down to Genoa, then climbed aboard a ferry bound for Palermo and a date with destiny. His late father’s dream had been to watch his boy at the Giro and the opening stage of the 1949 edition would conclude in his beloved Catania. But Pino got sick on the boat and barely made it round. Wishful ( or wistful) thinking…
Cycling back then was pretty much feudal in nature. In Italy, Coppi, Gino Bartali and Fiorenzo Magni constituted an all-powerful cartel, while in Pino’s adopted homeland, the likes of Van Steenbergen, Stan Ockers and Raymond Impanis held the whip-hand. Those who challenged their dominion needed not only exemplary talent but also extreme self- confidence and an iron will. The rest were compelled to choose: risk the champion’s ire – and by extension their own careers – by challenging their hegemony, or
CERAMI WAS THE INDENTIKIT DOMESTIQUE. HE TAUGHT HIMSELF NOT SO MUCH HOW TO LOSE BUT TO AVOID WINNING
make do with the guaranteed income of the domestique. Those who took the first option but came up short were swiftly discarded. So powerful was Van Steenbergen, for example, that a word in the right ear could effectively finish a rival’s career at a stroke. GENERATIONS OF THE Cerami family had been born into genuine poverty and were conditioned by it. So while Pino was a talented cyclist, his character and the choices he made were informed by the genetic fear that he might be returned to hunger. Furthermore, he’d spent his formative years trying to fit in, flung into a new country aged just five and forced to adapt to a new language extremely quickly. Through his innate humility he’d fashioned his otherness into a virtue, but he’d no wish to make himself an outsider once more. These factors, allied to his giving nature, made him just about the identikit domestique. He settled into working for Van Steenbergen and Ockers, and for the bread and milk on offer for winning midweek criteriums…
Pino taught himself not so much how to lose but to avoid winning. Therein lay the essential paradox of the sport as only by toeing the line could he and his like earn the occasional potshot at glory. Pino’s came at the 1951 Tour of Belgium. With the big guns deployed at the Giro, he and the rest of the Peugeot infantry were instructed to go after stage wins. Pino duly obliged with escapes at Virton and Brussels.
Two years later at Lombardy, he almost fell on his feet. He was detailed to work for Ockers but with Coppi and Bartali absent, the smart money was on Hugo Koblet and Magni. When the Swiss abandoned, a group of 10 were left to slug it out in Milan. The rain was so incessant that day that the entrance to the Vigorelli velodrome became waterlogged. The finish was then moved to an adjoining street but as Magni, Ockers and Pierre Molineris wriggled clear, a marshal sent them the wrong way. Pino and an unknown Italian named Bruno Landi guessed right, while the other seven followed Magni’s group. The result? Pino Cerami finished second at the 1953 Giro di Lombardia.
And that, for the next three years at least, was pretty much that. Pino had started late but, like many good domestiques, his stamina had improved with age. Now one of the very best in the business, brave, apparently indefatigable and relentlessly good-natured. His job consisted principally of fetching and carrying but he was extremely good at it.
That all changed on 1 October 1956. During a track meet at Antwerp, race leader Ernest Sterckx flatted on the curve and the great Stan Ockers suffered a fractured skull in the ensuing pile- up, dying in hospital the next day. Pino’s great friend, the reigning world champion, was no more.
Elsewhere, Italian cycling was in crisis, with cash draining out of the sport, so only by attaining Belgian citizenship could Pino be guaranteed a decent working wage. Giuseppe Cerami of Italy belatedly became Joseph Cerami of Belgium.
Ockers’s loss represented a window of opportunity. With Van Steenbergen past his best and with no new star ready to emerge, Peugeot finally gave Pino license to race for himself. He finished runner- up at Het Niuewsblad, top-10 at Bordeaux- Paris, won another stage at the Tour of Belgium. Not bad for a 35-year- old.
The following season, he finished second at Paris- Brussels, Romandie and Bordeaux- Paris, top-10 at both Flanders and Lombardy. His longevity was matched only by the myriad ways he found to lose sprints. By the conclusion of the 1959 season, his strength apparently deserting him, Joseph Cerami declared himself ready to call time on his career after 11 eventful years.
The problem was that Peugeot’s new DS, Gaston Plaud, was a persuasive man. He implored Pino to take one more shot, promising him the freedom to ride as he saw fit. Since Pino had never learned to say no, he signed on for one last shot and on 10 April, took to the start at the one Classic he’d never distinguished himself in. THE 1960 PARIS- ROUBAIX is legendary for all sorts of reasons. The weather was apocalyptic, the racing ferocious, the champions undone systematically by mechanical failures. Jean Graczyk, Andrè Darrigade and Emille Daems all fell while young Willy Vannitsen, the great white hope, flatted five times.
As they fell by the wayside, a scrawny-looking Englishman named Tom Simpson launched an audacious attack. Over the climb at Mons- enPevèle ( yes, there were climbs in Roubaix back then) he announced his talent, but when Pino bridged across with France’s Tino Sabbadini, he completely capsized. When Sabbadini buckled under the onslaught, Pino became, incredibly, the last man standing.
Three weeks later, he celebrated his 38th birthday with another blinding achievement. The finish of Flèche Wallonne had been relocated to his home town and, 15 kilometres out, he blasted out of the lead group to a hero’s welcome.
By now, Van Steenbergen had been usurped by another lightning-fast sprinter, Rik Van Looy. At an attritional World Championship in East Germany, ‘ Rik II’ would lead the Belgian team, Pino deployed to lend a wheel and, if needed be, lead out the sprint. With his domestique instinct honed over more than a decade, he did precisely that and Van Looy duly delivered the rainbow jersey. Third- placed Pino Cerami, however, had been the strongest in the race. Though he wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to articulate it himself, many maintain he had it in him to ride away once more that day.
Pino would add more wins over the ensuing three seasons but we’ll never know just how good he could have been. What we do know is that his innate altruism and generosity of spirit made him both the rider he was for a decade, the rider he could have been only fleetingly. We know that at 91 he’s alive and well, that he’s an authentic Wallonne great, and that he and his like wrote the story of cycling.
We’ve run out of space now but that’s why the GP Pino Cerami, a relatively small midweek race sandwiched between Flanders and Liège, exists in 2014. It’s why it deserves not only our profound respect but also some consideration from the people who run cycling. Because this race, and others like it, remind us of what cycling ought to be. They’re priceless…