The Faema team
Cycling and coffee proved the perfect mix for the famous Italian set-up
There’s a photograph of Luxembourg’s Charly Gaul taken during the 1956 Giro d’italia which shows the ‘Angel of the Mountains’ in distress. Gaul had just won a 242km stage through the Dolomites to the summit of Monte Bondone, a day blighted by freezing rain, snow and high winds. Dead-eyed and on the verge of hypothermia, Gaul is pictured being carried from his bike by two policemen with concerned team officials surrounding him. On the front of his frozen red and white woollen jersey is a single word: Faema.
Carlo Valente, a Milanese entrepreneur, had founded the Faema company in 1945 to manufacture coffee-making machines, later entering the world of cycling sponsorship to publicise his company on the roads of Italy and beyond. Two days after his legendary ride to Monte Bondone, Gaul rode into Milan wearing pink. It was only Faema’s second season and already they had their first Grand Tour win.
Gaul was by no means Faema’s only star rider. After an uncertain first year, where wins were scarce, for the 1956 season the Belgian director Guillaume Driessens had been brought in to run the team alongside Italian Learco Guerra. They had signed both Gaul and the man who would eventually win them every Monument in the calendar, Rik Van Looy.
While Germain Derycke claimed the team’s first Monument, winning Liègebastogne-liège in 1957, it was Van Looy who was Faema’s major one-day star. After taking back-to-back Ghent-wevelgem titles in 1956 and 1957, he won Milan-san Remo in 1958 and didn’t look back. Van Looy claimed no fewer than eight Monuments and two World Championship titles for the team. For his part, in 1958 Gaul added the Tour de France title to his palmarès, albeit carrying the Faema name while riding for the Netherlandsluxembourg national team.
Faema bowed out of its first period of sponsorship in 1963, having claimed all of cycling’s major honours. After a five-year absence they returned and soon started adding again to their collection.
With Gaul retired and Van Looy towards the end of his career, in 1968 it fell to a 22-year-old Eddy Merckx to lead the new-look Faema team. Merckx opened his account for the squad in February at the Giro di Sardegna and two months later claimed his first Paris-roubaix title. For the next three years Merckx and Faema (Faemino in 1970) dominated the cycling scene, claiming multiple Grand Tours and Classics, with Merckx ably supported by Guido Reybrouck and Vittorio Adorni, the latter claiming the rainbow jersey in 1968.
With the firm under financial pressure, Faema bowed out of cycling sponsorship at the end of the 1970 season, returning to co-sponsor the Bianchi team in 1978 and 1979.