RETRO: GIANCARLO FERRETTI
Giancarlo Ferretti was one of the most successful team managers ever, with a winning record which stretched from the mid-1970s to 2006. Procycling looks at the career and methods of ‘The Iron Sergeant’
Read how the Italian, renowned for being the toughest DS of the 90s, coached his teams to results
The scene: a hotel car park in the little Tuscan seaside town of Donoratico. It’s a cold winter day early in 1995 and the MG-Technogym team riders are milling around getting ready for a long ride inland to Volterra as part of their pre-season training camp. With temperatures not far above zero, the riders are muffled up in all the kit they can muster, and one, Luca Scinto, is wearing his favourite woolly headband. It neatly keeps his ears covered against the spring chill.
There is just one problem with the headband. It isn’t team issue. The direttore sportivo, Giancarlo Ferretti, notices. He isn’t happy and instructs Scinto to take it off. Scinto isn’t happy and refuses. The pair have a brief stand-off in the carpark. “Ferron” won’t let Scinto leave if he’s wearing it and eventually the rider gives best, takes off the offending article and away the riders head for their stint among the olive groves and renaissance hill towns.
It would be nice to think that Ferretti was simply playing the role of the hardcore traditionalist who takes no comeback from his riders in order to impress an English journalist and photographer who happened to be there. I don’t think he was. This was pure Ferretti: the hardest direttore sportivo in 1990s cycling, the man who ran the tightest of ships. By the time he retired in 2011, ‘the Iron Sergeant’ was known for one thing: he had put teams on the road that made a mark in pretty much every race they rode.
Fifteen months earlier, I’d stood in the grim industrial road in Monza where the Tour of Lombardy finished, and watched the end of one of Ferretti’s masterpieces, when Giorgio Furlan and Pascal Richard broke away on the final climb, the Lissolo, and rode into the finish together, with Richard taking the victory ahead of his team-mate; behind, Max Sciandri and Claudio Chiappucci closed to within 10 seconds, after being within sight of the pair for the final 20km.
“We could see them on the run-in,” recalled Sciandri. “I knew they hated each other, because they’d had a fight in the Giro del Lazio. So I said to Chiappa, we need to keep riding because they will start to look at each other at one kilometre to go. Normally I was the fastest of the four of us, so it would have worked for me. The commissaire didn’t want Ferretti to go past us, as the gap was so small, but he just flew past and was out the car window screaming at them.”
The story goes that Ferretti told the pair – who were riding their last race together, as Furlan would join Gewiss the next year – that whoever won, the prize money would be divided with the second rider. That guaranteed that both men would collaborate until the final metre. The Iron Sergeant had struck again.
The one-two in the 1993 Lombardy was an appropriately dominant finale for the Ariostea colours. In Ferretti’s time at the team, between 1986 and 1993, he took it from being just another Italian squad to one which punched massively above its weight. It was said that the distinctive hatched red and yellow jersey of the Italian tile company particularly appealed to Ferretti, because from his place in the team car behind the bunch, he could clearly make out when his riders were attacking at the front of the peloton.
By the time Ariostea pulled out, the team had taken 16 stage wins in the Giro in 10 starts. It had won seven stages in the Tour de France, including a team time trial win in 1991 that placed Rolf Sørensen in the yellow jersey. It had landed classics: that Lombardy for Richard, the 1990 Paris-Tours for Sørensen, the 1991 Ardennes double of Flèche and Liège, and 1990 Flanders for Moreno Argentin. Ariostea had established Ferretti as a pitch-perfect practitioner of the ‘total cycling’ espoused at the end of the 1970s by Peter Post, where a team had no designated leader but would turn up at any race with a wealth of potential winners.
When he took over at Ariostea in 1986, Ferretti was already one of Italy’s most distinguished and experienced direttori sportivi. An eight-year pro career had been followed by a dozen years at Bianchi that included the final racing years of the late Felice Gimondi, with whom he had been linked for a decade. A native of Ravenna, Ferretti had been a solid amateur, frequently placed and rarely winning, and good enough to ride for the Azzurri in the 1962 World Championships at Salò, and good enough to be a contender in the 1962 Tour de l’Avenir, where he fell when poised to win the toughest mountain stage in the Alps.
He turned professional with Legnano, for the same direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi, who had managed Gino Bartali, and in 1967 he joined Salvarani alongside Gimondi under the tutelage of Luciano Pezzi, another man whose roots lay in the Coppi-Bartali era. Ferretti was Gimondi’s chosen training partner – valued to the extent that Gimondi gave him a Porsche to persuade him to spend several weeks riding with him in Lombardy. He was the Salvarani leader’s room mate and driving partner on the French criterium circuit, where the 1965 Tour winner would seek out Michelin starred restaurants.
After quitting racing at 30 due to persistent injury, Ferretti transferred to the wheel of the Bianchi team car behind Gimondi, initially alongside another big personality in Italian cycling, the 1968 world champion Vittorio Adorni. He hadn’t won a race as a pro, but he had twice finished in the top 20 of the Giro and had comfortably got round the 1967 and 1969 Tours de France: he was one of several riders who all claimed to have passed Tom Simpson the fatal bottle of brandy during the Ventoux stage of the 1967 Tour de France
As a directeur sportif, Ferretti had helped Gimondi to a world title and a Milan-San Remo in 1974, and had won the Giro d’Italia twice, with Gimondi in 1976 and Johan De Muynck in 1978. He had overseen a wealth of wins for Gianbattista Baronchelli, and had directed Silvano Contini to an epic, arctic Liège-Bastogne-Liège win in 1982. He had survived a terrifying accident in the Pra-Loup stage of the 1975 Tour, when the Bianchi team car had come off the
Ferretti survived whisky drinking sessions far into the night with Gimondi’s friend and rival Eddy Merckx
road on an Alpine descent and careered down a mountainside. He had also survived whisky drinking sessions far into the night with Gimondi’s friend and rival Eddy Merckx.
So when Ferretti was berating Scinto for wearing the wrong headband, this wasn’t the act of a lightweight. He delivered that lecture in the car park in Donoratico with all the heft of a man who had rubbed shoulders with all the legends of Italian cycling in the post-Coppi era. Ferretti was a manager who had his little ways, honed by a lifetime in cycling. He didn’t like riders coming back to the team car to pick up race capes. He didn’t give race briefings with maps. He wasn’t keen on having a sprinter in his team. Italian cycling has always loved its larger than life personalities and ‘Ferron’ was one of those.
“Some directors would have a map at the briefing, show you the roads, but Ferretti never did that,” said Sciandri, who rode in 1994 and 1995 for ‘the Iron Sergeant’ – a nickname coined by the television commentator
Adriano De Zan, which Ferretti initially disliked but later embraced. “He just said, ‘This is what we are going to do, off we go.’ He had huge authority, and he would push us hard. He would swear a lot. You could feel the presence. He wasn’t just a guy who drove a team car. He gave us clarity and certainty, which are what you need as a rider.”
His time spent alongside Gimondi, Baronchelli, Merckx et al notwithstanding, Ferretti rated the Ariostea years as the best of his career as a manager. He came to the team after losing his place at Bianchi when it fused with Sammontana in 1985. Ferretti took a year off, fending off calls from the Ariostea founder Oriello Pederzoli, before accepting the offer. He later recalled, “I felt I was mature as a team manager and the team got behind me.”
At Bianchi, Ferretti had managed one of the greatest talents cycling has seen in Gimondi but at his smaller teams such as Ariostea he forged those talents, shaping the careers of riders like Richard and Rolf Sørensen, and making winners out of lesser lights such as Marco
Lietti, Rolf Järmann, and Marco Saligari. “I loved to win, and I was delighted when I won with second string riders. It meant I’d been able to get them into a position where they could win,” he said.
Bjarne Riis, who rode with the team between 1992 and 1993, was another rider who first blossomed at Ariostea. In his second year there he won a Giro d’Italia stage and after years of nondescript results rose to fifth overall in the Tour de France.
“The first year with Ariostea is the one I remember with the most affection,” recalled Sørensen, who joined in 1988 and stayed until 1992. “He wanted to do something that was different. As a rider you may be part of a team but you are often on your own. I remember this as a team. We are still all in touch, and we are planning a reunion. I still speak to him maybe 10 times a year.” Sørensen points out that today, a team like Quick Step which wins with rider after rider is doing nothing new. They are simply racing the way that Ferretti’s Ariostea did.
“With Ariostea I may have achieved the maximum,” said Ferretti in a 2012 interview. “We were a little war machine, we enjoyed it and I think the fans loved it. I pulled together a group of riders who, at a certain point, knew what they had to do. The role of a DS is preparation, training, the team meeting in the morning, all before the race. But in the race the riders have to resolve situations on their own. I would impose the tactic, invite them to throw themselves into everything for an hour to get a breakaway, and then to do it for another hour if it didn’t work, then raise hell. And off we would go to do or die again.”
This was the Ferretti ‘hour’, l’ora. Sciandri remembers the slow-risers at MG putting on a long face when Ferretti told them at the team meeting the ‘hour’ would be the first one of a particular race. “He loved the ‘hour’ – we would get the break moving, make sure we did something. There would be fireworks.”
“There were no radios, so you’d talk when you went back to the team car for water,” Sørensen says. “He’d look at me and say, ‘When shall we start the hour?’ It might be a hilly bit, or crosswinds. We’d go full gas for an hour, the peloton would be split in pieces and we loved it. We made trouble.” On the other hand, Sørensen – a ‘mad dog’ who would attack anywhere and everywhere – was taught to choose his moment: “I was very impulsive, so what he did was to get the route card we put in our pockets, put crosses on it at certain places, say, ‘Go here or here; try once or twice.’”
“Sometimes we f*cked up,” says Sciandri. “He made me attack two days from the end of Tirreno when I had the jersey and we lost it.”
“We had no leaders, and sometimes it all went up in smoke,” recalls Sørensen. Ferretti never won a grand tour with Ariostea, MG or Fassa Bortolo, because his teams simply didn’t race that way. But then, he’d been there and done that with Gimondi.
“He was tough, very, very hard with the riders,” says Sørensen. “But if you listened and were tough yourself he was the best teacher you could get. When we went to race in Flanders he said, ‘Now you are going to university. If you can stay here for a month and just finish the races you will be big riders.’ It took five or six years, but I got there.”
There was an obsessive side to Ferretti, says Sørensen. “If you were two or three kilos overweight because you’d not been living right, he would be angry. He would say if you didn’t get back into shape you wouldn’t be selected maybe for the Giro or the Tour.” One rider who was overweight at the end of the season was simply told to go to bed hungry for a month.
“There were times he would call me on a Friday or a Saturday between 11 and 12 in the evening, the time
“Sometimes we f*cked up. He made me attack two days from the end of Tirreno when I had the jersey and we lost it” Max Sciandri
when you might be out and about,” said Sørensen. “He’d say,
‘Rolf, drink one or two beers less and go to bed an hour earlier. He kept up like that and eventually you’d think about it.”
At training camps, when the team were to simulate racing for the final hour of a long ride, Ferretti would go to the rooms of a couple of the lesser lights and offer them money: their role would be to attack, to make the ‘race’ hard for the rest, who knew nothing of it until later.
Ariostea went up a notch in 1990, when Ferretti hired the 1986 world champion Argentin after a couple of lean years. Argentin – an early devotee of Doctor Michele Ferrari – won an unusually dry Tour of Flanders then backed up with Flèche Wallonne and an opportunistic stage win in the Tour de France. Ferretti didn’t take his Ariostea there until that year. In 1991 they returned to the Tour and dominated the opening week with Sørensen, winning the team time trial in spite of a crash on the final corner which, the Dane recalls, left Argentin “so pissed off.” That placed the Dane in the yellow jersey until an unlucky crash on stage 5.
By 1993, Ariostea had got to the point where that onetwo result in Lombardy was seen as dramatic but not exactly surprising. The following year, Ferretti endured a less than happy stint at the GB-MG ‘super team’, before leaving to recreate Ariostea at MG-Technogym, where the sponsorship was cut short after the death of the company’s head. Later, there was a spell at the head of Fassa Bortolo from 2000-2006, a period spearheaded by Alessandro Petacchi’s sprint successes, but which now looks like the last flourish of Italian cycling as it descended into a miasma of doping allegations.
Better by far to remember Ferretti for the aggression his riders showed at Ariostea, for the obsessive drive that helped him make average riders race out of their skins.
“We never had a big budget, but we always made a difference,” concludes Sørensen. “We really had fun, because he got the best out of us,” says Sciandri.
And there was that magic 60 minutes in every race: Ferretti was the man of the ‘hour’, but not in the conventional cycling sense.