In praise of… the Giro d’italia
Chaotic, colourful, passionate and unpredictable – the Giro is a race that perfectly reflects the country of its birth
f the Tour de France is the champagnequaffing grand dame of Grand Tours and the Vuelta is the Ritalin-popping young attentionseeker swinging from the chandelier, then the Giro is the eccentric old aunt with the ivory cigarette holder who simultaneously oozes style and poses a fire risk.
If this year’s 101st Giro actually does start in the disputed city of Jerusalem, it will be only the latest in a long line of coups and controversies that have made the Corsa Rosa the most compelling of the three Grand Tours.
It was the Giro that designed the toughest route of any cycling race – so gruelling that only eight of the 81 starters finished the 1914 edition after spending an average of 18 hours in the saddle per stage.
It was the Giro that became the first and only Grand Tour to include a female rider, with Alfonsina Strada achieving what 59 male rivals failed to do by completing the 1924 race.
And it was the Giro that nurtured the greatest soap opera in the history of cycling – some would say the whole of professional sport – when the modern, scientific and secular went head to head with the traditional, instinctive and religious in the forms of Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. Yes, their rivalry was equally intense at the Tour, but it was in the Giro during the 1940s that it inflamed a nation to such an extent that both riders required bodyguards to protect them from each other’s fans.
Even without these claims to fame, it’s hard to dispute that the Giro has outshone the Tour in sporting terms in recent years. The racing has been thrilling and visceral while the Tour has become a procession of riders seemingly more fixated with their power figures than their rivals.
The first Giro took place six years after the inaugural Tour and set itself apart immediately. Travel agent Thomas Cook – already well established in Italy offering clients the original ‘grand tour’ – was hired to sell hospitality packages to affluent cycling fans, while eventual winner and former bricklayer Luigi Ganna delivered sponsoring newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport a headlinegrabbing quote: ‘My arse is killing me.’
Fast forward to the race’s 101st edition and the Giro’s choice for the location of its grande partenza has created much controversy. Whether it’s as controversial as the monstrous stages of its 1914 edition (five of the eight stages were more than 420km in length) or the inclusion of Signora Strada in 1924 (a previous finisher in two editions of the Tour of Lombardy, she was invited by the organisers when a string of big names pulled out after a row over money) is a matter of opinion.
And yet the choice of Jerusalem is not the first time the Giro has elected to visit a politically contentious and potentially dangerous territory.
In 1946, the race was ambushed – literally – before a stage finish in the disputed city of Trieste. While the Tour de France wouldn’t resume until a year later, ‘somehow, sometime in some way, Italy, a country of three million bicycles and an unquenchable thirst for racing, would have its great festival restored in 1946,’ writes Herbie Sykes in his history of the Giro, Maglia Rosa.
Inevitably, the result was unlike any Giro held before or since. The flashpoint was Stage 12 to the border city of Trieste. The post-war city and its surroundings had been divided into zones controlled by the Allies (in a similar manner to Berlin) while a border agreement between Italy and Yugoslavia was being brokered.
Winner Luigi Ganna delivered sponsoring newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport a headlinegrabbing quote: ‘My arse is killing me’
The stage was ambushed 40km from the city with riders forced to take cover from a hail of stones from suspected Slavic sympathisers. One rider was seriously injured.
The assailants eventually fled, leaving organisers and riders with a dilemma – to continue to Trieste with the possibility of further ambushes or booby-traps, or to abandon the stage there and then. Though most of the peloton refused to continue, one rider tried to convince them that if the Giro didn’t appear in Trieste, it could have even more disastrous consequences.
Giordano Cottur was Trieste-born and the captain of the Wilier Triestina trade team (the name Wilier was the Italian abbreviation of the popular expression ‘Long live Italy, liberated and redeemed!’ according to John Foot in his authoritative history of Italian cycling, Pedalare! Pedalare!).
He persuaded the organisers to agree on a compromise: the stage would be deemed to have finished at the point of the ambush, but any riders who wanted to continue would be driven to the edge of the city and allowed to continue racing from there. A group of 17 riders – including the whole of the Wilier team – took up the offer. Dropped off by a US army truck just seven (flat) kilometres from the finish line, Cottur broke away to ‘win’ the most famous stage in Giro history.
The ‘happy ending’ was tinged with tragedy, however. Although Cottur was greeted by cheering crowds in the city’s velodrome, the arrival of the Giro also triggered two days of rioting that left two people dead. Foot reminds us that the Giro’s visit to Trieste effectively provoked the bloodshed, even though most contemporary accounts offered a more rose-tinted view.
While it is to be hoped this year’s departure from Jerusalem will pass off without similar incident, it is worth remembering that even the most beloved of eccentric old aunts can sometimes be a liability.