STATE OF THE CYCLING NATION: ITALY
The second in our major series on the international sport takes a look at the rise and fall of Italian cycling
The final week of the 2020 Giro d’Italia was dramatic and exciting but it underscored the painful truth about Italian cycling in general. As Vincenzo Nibali prepares to leave the stage, we ask what – or who – next for the Bel Paese, in the second of our special features looking at cycling nations
The Giro d’Italia has always needed Italian winners, and the 1977 edition was a case in point. It was billed as a showdown between a local sporting David and a marauding foreigner. The previous September, the Worlds road race in Puglia had been a twohorse race. Folksy, popular Francesco Moser had defended Italian honour, values and virtue, while the Flemish bruiser Freddy Maertens had been a natural fit for the Goliath role. They’d distanced the rest, but Maertens broke the locals’ hearts by galloping clear at the line. Now, over three bruising weeks, Moser would get his revenge. It was precisely the formula which had put Italian bums on seats each May for decades.
Maertens crashed out early and Flandria, his team, pushed his best lieutenant to ride for GC. Michel Pollentier reasoned that he might as well, and agreed to give it a shot. While Maertens’ absence was unfortunate, it had the local press salivating all the same. Moser was a shoo-in to reach the promised land, and the remaining two weeks would amount to a celebration of his talent. Wouldn’t they?
Not quite. It transpired the ugly duckling Pollentier was a useful bike rider after all. He’d been developing, quietly but assiduously, in the long shadow cast by more celebrated team-mates, but here the shackles came off. He matched Moser in the Tuscan time trial, and began to chip away at his deficit in the Alps. Then, in the Dolomites, he bludgeoned the living daylights out of it, out of Francesco Moser, and out of Italian cycling’s hubris.
The rest, as they say, is history, and cycling history always repeats. This year saw the Ineos proxy Tao Geoghegan Hart take up the cudgels following Geraint Thomas’s latest Giro misadventure. Just as Pollentier had rained on Italy’s parade back then, Hackney’s finest produced a stupefying performance in the third week. First he broke Vincenzo Nibali, then he broke everyone else, and by the time he reached Milan he’d replicated Pollentier’s 1977 heist. This extraordinary Giro had the winner it deserved, though not necessarily the one it wanted. Geoghegan Hart had been brilliant, but this was supposed to have been Nibali, the great standard bearer, four-square against Thomas et al.
In one important respect however, 1977 and 2020 were as different as night and day. Back then, planet cycling was a small one. It was run by the Italians, the French, the Spanish and the Belgians, and the Giro well reflected the fact. So while the hosts had come up short that time, they still had world-class talents in Moser, Gianbattista Baronchelli and Giovanni Battaglin, and great things were expected of young, rapier-quick Giuseppe Saronni. Cycling was still hugely popular, and with over a thousand clubs affiliated to the Italian Federation, there was no cause for alarm. Later that summer Moser claimed the rainbow jersey in a Venezuelan deluge, so while those pesky foreigners had won the battle at the Giro, they sure as hell hadn’t won the war.
A SHALLOW POOL
Of all the major sports, cycling remains by a distance the most European, even now. That’s a matter of historical, geographical
and quintessential fact, but it’s also inarguable that it belongs to everyone now. Only a churl would deny that it’s the better for it, but in relative terms the transition has been quite sudden. For 80 years, pretty much all of its professional practitioners were western Europeans. When Pollentier ambushed the Giro, all but a dozen of its 140 starters hailed from Italy, Belgium or Spain. Even as recently as 20 years ago, the Giro was fundamentally an Italian race for Italian people.
The modern iteration takes place in Italy but its riders, like its fans, come from far and wide. Italians made up little more than a quarter of the 2020 start list, and there were three times as many Australians - 18 - as Belgians. Only two Italians won stages, and the major jerseys were exported to England, France and Portugal. With Nibali starting to look his age, the hosts were entirely absent at the pointy end, and only three of them so much as contested the GC. Nibali and Domenico Pozzovivo are closer to 40 than to 30, Fausto Masnada is no Fausto Coppi, and what lies beneath is nothing as regards maglia rosa contenders.
Fabio Aru is 30 now, and he looks spent. He may yet surprise us, but it’s been three years since he won, and he seems beset by physical and psychological demons. His Tour performance last year left Saronni, the former president of UAE, apoplectic.
Five years ago, Jonathan Vaughters was declaiming that Davide Formolo was a Giro winner in the making, but then reality intervened. Formolo, 28 now, is a tidy climber, but he’s yet to make the top six of a grand tour. Matteo Trentin, Alberto Bettiol, Giulio Ciccone and Diego Ullissi will sparkle intermittently, and there are hopes for young Andrea Bagioli. Then again, Fabio Felline was once heralded as the latest ‘new
Moser’, and we were reliably informed that Davide Villella was the chosen one. With the best will in the world, it’s not going to happen and so, with Nibali in his dotage, Italy has exactly one world class performer. Filippo Ganna has a generous heart and a colossal engine, and without him this Giro would have been unprecedented, unmitigated and frankly unthinkable.
MOVING WITH THE TIMES
The question, therefore, is why? How can it be that the country of Pantani and Bugno, Moser and Saronni and yes, of Coppi and Bartali, can be so hopelessly out of its depth in the new cycling? Why, with so much history and so much expertise, is the production line choked? Why do the likes of Aru, Gianni Moscon and Moreno Moser fail so regularly, publicly and spectacularly, and why is there no sign of a replacement for Nibali? What on Earth has gone wrong, and what’s to be done about it?
For some of the answers we spoke to Enzo Vicennati. He’s been at the coalface of cycling journalism for 30-some years, and he’s as qualified as anyone to make sense of it. The problems, he reckons, are myriad, and there’s no obvious quick fix.
“Post-Nibali is a bit like post-Pantani, excepting that the cycling world is much, much bigger now,” he explains. “Twenty years ago it was natural that new Italian winners would emerge, because almost all of the talent was concentrated here and in the European heartlands. These days it’s not like that at all, and we’ve become just one of many. I’m not sure that Italian cycling has deteriorated as such, but in relative terms it’s gone backwards. New countries have emerged with new ideas
and better models, and the fact is that we’ve failed to adapt. The British and the Australians may have fewer riders, but the results tell us they’re better at developing them. They don’t have a monopoly on talent, so you have to conclude that their methods are superior to ours.”
LEVELS OF THE GAME
The numbers tell their own story. Britain, for 60 years a cycling backwater, has produced five separate grand tour winners in the last decade.
People often cite the Manchester velodrome as having been instrumental in the development of the Cavendish-WigginsThomas generation, and doubtless there’s some truth in that. However Chris Froome didn’t ride it, and while Simon Yates is a product of the programme, his twin Adam, plus Geoghegan Hart, went to the road early.
Vicennati says, “I think that in part it’s to do with the intensity of the junior categories here. Italians take junior cycling extremely seriously, and I think you see the consequences of that when they turn professional. Physically they’re probably more or less intact, but they’re already tired psychologically. Think about the problems Aru has had, or about Moscon. Make no mistake, he’s a colossal talent, yet he seems to have disappeared. Some say it’s because people like him ride for foreign teams, so they become mere numbers. That’s possible, but Ganna has thrived at Ineos just as Geoghegan Hart has. Then if you look at the development of Tom Pidcock, it’s almost the polar opposite of Moscon. Pidcock has been allowed to develop as a rider. He isn’t over-raced, and if you look closely it’s easy to determine a trajectory. Everything is planned meticulously, and you just know he’ll be the best rider he can be. I’m not sure you can say that about a lot of the Italian boys.” Vicennati seems to be suggesting that, had Geoghegan Hart been Italian, the pressure and expectation might have compromised his chances. He also cites the Australian model: “They take them early, and fast-track them to the national team. They have structure and measurable goals, and it seems to work. The Danes are doing something similar.”
The criticism levelled at the Italian scene was always that it was too diffuse. It was harder to corral into a cohesive whole because there was just so much of it, but sheer weight of numbers ensured that the production line rolled on. Marco Pastonesi, one of Italy’s more lyrical cycling writers, says that’s changing. His has been a working life venerating the gregario, but of late the contraction of Italian professional cycling has been dramatic.
“Each time the government introduces an initiative to get people on bikes, it’s oversubscribed,” he says. “The problems for the professional sport are systemic though, and to do with investment. There are fewer sponsors, fewer races and fewer racers, and the consequence is fewer – which is to say zero – Italian WorldTour teams. There is a disconnect between people who cycle recreationally and those who do it professionally. Things like L’Eroica are popular, but I’m not convinced they help the sport. There are pockets here and there – Veneto and Tuscany - but they’re cycling archipelagos.”
He’s right. On any given Sunday morning, tens of thousands of Italians throw their legs over the latest Wiliers, Colnagos and Pinarellos. However, most are middle-aged or beyond, and that’s testament more to cycling’s demographic shift than to a direct connection to professional road cycling. They have all the gear, but as regards the history and values of professional cycling, little or no idea.
Milan, traditionally the crucible of the Italian sport, is a death trap for bike riders. Turin is a large city of wide, tree-lined boulevards. Like Milan it has lousy air quality, and it’s a natural fit for an Amsterdam-style cycling revolution. However, its governance is myopic and its cycle paths, such as they are, are worse than useless. That’s mirrored the length of the peninsula, and that explains why there are so few cyclists in Italian cities. That may seem secondary but history – and human nature - tells us that fewer people riding recreationally means fewer people riding competitively. The Dutch dominate women’s cycling because, quite simply, there are a lot of women cycling there. Riding a bike is part of the daily warp and weft, the most natural thing in the world.
Sport is important in Italy, and Italian kids are generally much less sedentary than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, parents are understandably worried about exposing their kids to the risks which are implicit in cycling. They might get injured playing football, or basketball, or athletics, but it’s unlikely they’re going to be killed.
Bardiani manager Bruno Reverberi has been running a pro team for 40 years. He comes from Regio-Emilia, traditionally a stronghold of the sport, but even he struggles to unearth the raw materials.
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TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE WINS How can it be that the country of Pantani and Bugno, Moser and Saronni, and Coppi and Bartali be so out of its depth in the new cycling? Why, with so much history, is the production line choked?
“Our problem is finding kids prepared to try it,” he says. “Cycling is the opposite of cool, and Italy is a country obsessed by football. It’s easy and accessible, so while it ticks all the boxes, our sport is hard work on every level. It’s expensive in time and money, the races are spread far and wide, and physically it’s hard. There are no short cuts, and other sports demand much less of them. It’s frustrating, but objectively it’s not hard to understand.”
Twenty years ago, you couldn’t move for cyclists in the valleys around Bergamo. To cycle there now is to be reminded of Italian cycling’s glorious past and, by extension, its meagre present. Gewiss and Mapei each sponsored powerful teams, but these days their billionaire owners throw fortunes at Atalanta and Sassuolo respectively. They are provincial clubs, and yet as I write they are second and fourth respectively in Serie A. That’s big, big money, and it represents the tip of cycling’s lost glacier.
THE ITALIAN CYCLING CRISIS
When Italians talk of the crisis affecting their sport, they infer that what’s happening is temporary, an aberration, but the unpalatable truth is that it’s not. Young Italian males couldn’t care less about cycling, and a cursory glance at Tutto Sport or Corriere dello Sport is testament to the fact.
Gianluigi Stanga was the manager of the mythical Gatorade team of Bugno and Laurent Fignon. By the 1999 Giro d’Italia he was running Polti, and for him the morning of June 5 that year was the beginning of the end.
“When Pantani was expelled from the Giro, one of my riders, Ivan Gotti, went on to win it,” he says. “People said we were the beneficiaries, but we weren’t at all. I knew instantly that it was going to devastate the sport in Italy, because to most people Pantani was the sport in Italy.”
Stanga is a perspicacious guy. Pantani’s expulsion was front-page news and so, subsequently, were the vicissitudes of his private life. Everyone in Italy knew he’d been expelled from the Giro for doping, and everyone knew he had problems with recreational drugs. They put two and two together and concluded, quite rightly as it transpired, that cycling was a doping basket case. It would be five tortured years before Pantani took his own life, but in the meantime those who came in his wake simply confirmed as much. Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni, the maglie rosa of 2000 and 2001, were expelled from the 2002 edition for doping infractions.
The Italians had introduced blood spinning to cycling in the mid-80s. By the early 1990s they’d perfected the use of EPO, and the results had been astounding. The Italian cycling press had been complicit, and the omertà had held because everyone had made hay. They’d been the smartest guys in the room, but now the foundations of their sport began to buckle.
Pantani is largely perceived as the victim of cycling’s doping culture, and winning the Giro without EPO was inconceivable for his generation. However, many of Italian cycling’s more reasoned observers maintain that cycling was also the victim of him and some of his peers. Carmine Castellano, the race director back then, very well remembers the anguish.
“After the Festina affair at the Tour the previous year, we knew we couldn’t afford a scandal at the Giro,” he says. “On the eve of the race we all sat down, and I implored the riders and sports directors not to do anything which would compromise the
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race. We looked one another in the eye, and everyone agreed to proceed on that basis. I was in no position to stop anybody from doping, and I wasn’t so naïve as to think they were all clean. However, they left that room well aware of their responsibilities. You can legitimately argue that Marco paid the ultimate price for his mistake, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. Hundreds of people lost their jobs, and what we see today is a consequence. It was catastrophic for the sport, and there’s no obvious way back from it.”
Pantani’s fall from grace provoked an exodus of capital, races and interest. That largely explains why Nibali never really crossed over into the wider public consciousness. In 2014, when he won his maillot jaune, Italian cycling was still synonymous with doping. All conversations about the sport seemed to start and finish with it, and almost without exception ordinary Italians were of the opinion that you couldn’t do what cyclists did without it. It was all pretty dispiriting, but the sport had been the author of its own misfortune. That explains why, while the yellow jerseys of Bradley Wiggins and Jan Ullrich presaged a massive uptake of competitive racing among British and
German kids, Nibali’s was largely overlooked. Cycling was putting its house in order, but it was still perceived as toxic here. The bigger they are the harder they fall, and in Italian sport nobody – not anybody – was bigger than Marco Pantani.
The numbers tell their own story. As I write this, there are seven Brits taking part in the 2020 Vuelta. That’s more or less the total for the whole of the noughties, and it’s no coincidence. In Germany, Ullrich did for cycling what Steffi Graf and Boris Becker had done for tennis, and what Federica Pellegrini has latterly done for Italian swimming.
For all the weekend warriors, competitive road cycling is a minority sport in Italy now. In 2019, the year British Cycling reached 150,000 members, its Italian counterpart had 103,124. Of those, 31,000 claimed to be judges, organisers and directors, and some 41,000 were competing in the veterans category. Italy has lost 12 per cent of its competitive riders in three years, and two thirds of its professional peloton since that fateful day in 1999.
A BRIGHTER FUTURE
For all the fine words and all the veneration of its glorious past, there’s no obvious sign that the trend is likely to be reversed any time soon. The Pantani affair constituted the perfect storm, but the long-term decline it predicated was exacerbated by lousy governance, by endemic behaviours and by societal stuff over which the professional sport had no control. It takes generations for that sort of thing to wash through, and still more so in a country as regressive as this one. Until such time as Italy builds itself a new identity as a cycling-friendly country, such success as it achieves in professional sport will be due largely to happenstance. When Italy finally gets it right, furthermore, it will still be true that cyclists now come from all over the world - the talent pool is deeper and broader than ever, so world domination is out of the question forever.
All isn’t quite lost. It’s now 17 years since Pantani passed away, and a new generation of fans and riders is beginning to emerge. They’re relatively few in number, but they’ve never been exposed to doping or its scandals. They’re not much interested in Coppi, or Moser, or in the sordid detail of the EPO years. For them all that is prehistoric and it’s Ganna – humble, eminently likeable, transparent – who fires their imagination. He’s great news for the Italian sport, but better still would be a no-strings Italian Giro winner or even a maglia gialla in France. Geoghegan Hart and Pogacčar are proof that either can happen in an instant, and Bagioli aside there are a couple waiting in the wings. Giovanni Aleotti was runner-up at the Tour de l’Avenir, and he joins BoraHansgrohe in 2021. The 19-year-old Milanese Andrea Piccolo is a couple of years behind him but he’s very, very talented.
Italian cycling’s decline isn’t quite terminal. Wherever people ride bikes people will race them, and cycling remains a great sport. The Italian version is battered and bruised but there’s life – albeit a different life – in the old dog yet.
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