Fallen Angel (4 page)

There are at least four versions of and several different dates for the first meeting between Cavanna and Faustino Coppi; it is variously said to have been through the butcher or through various cyclists trained by Cavanna who met Coppi on the road and reported back to their master. The masseur and the youth met some time between the end of 1937 and the summer of 1938 and that is all that matters. It was a key moment in Coppi's story, probably the single most important event.

Cavanna was Fausto's cycling father and the most important influence on his cycling career. Cavanna drove the budding champion forwards in his formative years and was behind him in his greatest ones, providing far more than massages. He taught him how to train, how to ride his bike, how to behave as a professional sportsman should. Eventually, he provided him with team-mates, sympathy and magic mixtures to make him go faster.

Before his blindness struck, Biagio Cavanna had noticed Fausto Coppi as a fifteen-year-old working in Merlano's shop, a ‘reed-thin lad with joints of meat on his handlebars'. The man who made the champion would never know what his protégé looked like at his peak, would never see the colour of the yellow, pink and rainbow-striped jerseys he won.
He would only know Coppi's voice, and his body: the tone of each muscle, the temperature and texture of his skin. The sound of the young cyclist's voice was still in the ears of the old man twenty-two years later after Coppi's death. ‘A bit timid and awkward, the voice of a young boy from the country.'

Cavanna had started out as a cycle racer of some talent, then turned boxer, where he had a reputation as a clever fighter who could not take punches and was willing to play dead to escape a nasty bout. After his sporting career was over, he had settled for a backroom role. He had looked after Girardengo and had been the confidant of the legendary Learco Guerra, the ‘human locomotive', world road champion and winner of the Giro d'Italia with ten stages along the way. He had travelled Europe to the indoor cycling tracks of Belgium and Germany and had followed the Giro and Tour de France. This was exotic enough, but there was talk of murkier links. Cavanna had been a close friend of a legendary bandit, Sante Pollastro, who had gone on a Bonnie and Clyde style spree of robbery and killing across Lombardy. There was a story that he and Pollastro communicated by whistles; on one occasion, it was said, Pollastro had whistled while Cavanna was at a Six-Day race in Paris and he had upped and left the track centre. It may or may not have been true but it reflected Cavanna's larger than life aura.

It was some time in 1936 when Cavanna first began wearing the sunglasses which would be his trademark. His blindness had been a gradual process over three years, the sight going first in the right eye, then in the left. The precise reason was never clear, but the gossips, inevitably, said it might be syphilis. Cavanna himself claimed it was as a result of getting hot smuts from a steam engine in his eyes when he was on a trip to Brussels. Perhaps understandably for a man who had been deprived of sight, Cavanna liked to be in control of the world around him and the people in it. His wife would read him
the papers. He controlled the family's cash by touch. Through his work he came to manage entire careers and dictate the pace of men's lives.

Traditionally, Cavanna is described as a
soigneur
– French cycling jargon for a team helper, who gives massages, providing race food and lends a sympathetic ear as he rubs his charges' legs. The term is no longer officially used, because since the dawn of cycle racing, the
soigneur
has also been the provider of secret remedies that range from old wives' tales about training and diet to the latest wonder drugs. But the blind man was more than a leg rubber and witchdoctor.

One old cyclist of the era, Alfredo Martini, calls him
un maestro
, which variously translates as a teacher, a master, an expert in his field. He was talent scout, tactician, trainer, team manager. Behind his back Cavanna was called ‘
l'umon
' – dialect for
l'omone
, big man. He had been christened Giuseppe, but this was long forgotten. He was always Biagio, Biasu in the local dialect, Signor Biagio to his pupils. There were other nicknames: the Miracle Maker, the Muscle Wizard. He was an intimidating figure to his protégés, by and large ill-educated young labourers and peasants, who had never been far from their home villages. As one of them said: ‘I wasn't afraid of God or Fausto [Coppi], but I was scared of Cavanna.'

Post-war, he ran a legendary cycling ‘college' at 4 Via Castello, where the courtyard is still recognisable from old photographs, although the frescoes have long since faded and fallen. To the left through the arch was the kitchen, in which
il maestro
would hold court. The yard, however, was the hub, with its workbench and tools, dismantled bikes, empty petrol cans, sheets, and jerseys and shorts hanging on the washing lines. The dining table would be placed outside the kitchen window, or under the arch when it rained in winter; wheels were hung on hooks on the walls. Rooms were rented above the arch where the riders slept, and there were other rooms
about the town, where the riders ‘camped out like gypsies'. Cavanna would never use a massage table; the riders lay on the bed in the room and he went to work. There was a small toilet in one corner of the yard, a thirty-foot-deep well in the opposite one, with a winch formed from a tree trunk for bringing up the water.

* * *

To this day, blind masseurs carry particular status within cycling. As recently as the 1990s, the ONCE professional squad set great store by one Angel Rubio, but sixty years ago, among sportsmen who lacked education and experience of the wider world, a
soigneur
's market value was based only partly on what he actually knew. Just as important was the mystique these figures carried with them, which added a whole psychological side to their treatment and their remedies. Given the intensity of superstitious belief in rural Europe at the time, they had a ready market. Whatever the degree of his expertise, Cavanna inspired both fear and faith among those he treated.

Cavanna's blindness added to the aura created by his connections and his personality. All those treated by him would maintain that his massages were better than others', because he had
il tatto
, the healing touch, in both hands. The
soigneur
was happy to build on the mystique by claiming he had super-natural qualities: ‘My hands can see better than any human eye and my ears can hear sounds inaudible to the normal person. My hands and my ears never lie.'

Asked further about the blind man's sense of touch, Alfredo Martini simply grabbed the scruff of my neck. ‘There were points in the physique which let him understand if you were strong, if you were weak,' he said, and this was one of them. ‘A thin neck is worth nothing', the blind man would say.
Cavanna also claimed that he could assess the strength of a rider's heart by taking his pulse, then he would move up the arm to check the musculature, to see if the cyclist was willing to do hard physical work. When he got to the neck, the muscles there would tell him if the rider had tried hard in training and could sustain the workload. The muscles of the lower back and buttocks would show the cyclist's strength and ability to change pace – the ‘cartridge belt', Cavanna called it.

His charges also remember the things he said, in the didactic, semi-mystical phrases typical of such eminences grises. One motto was ‘
niente fumo, niente donne, niente vino
': no smoking, no women, no wine. Another was ‘Enjoyment of any kind is a cyclist's worst enemy.' On sexual activity he subscribed to the view of some modern day team managers, that it is not the act but the hunt that is harmful to the athlete, hence the maxim ‘Don't fool about with girls, they'll leave you in bits. It's better to go to a brothel.' Most important of all was the call for absolute obedience: ‘If you want to be a cyclist, don't ever ask questions. Do what I say and remember that others have done the same before you.'

Cavanna ‘could go inside the mind of the athlete, indicate to each guy how to prepare,' Martini told me. There was a practical side to his work. He taught his pupils skills such as how to remove gravel from their tyres with the palm of the hand, and invented a primitive kind of tyre saver that skimmed flints off the tyres before they could be driven through the cover, a vital aid on the unmade roads of the time. As well as training, the pupils were taught ‘behaviour with women, with journalists, at table, how to look after the bike'. He had made Girardengo shift baskets of gravel in a riverbed over one winter in order to strengthen his back. He had an obsession with position on the bike and with training in different, usually difficult conditions. His method of assessing whether a cyclist was ready to turn professional was simple. There were two
sweet factories nearby; one in Novi, the other in a village called Serravalle, seven kilometres away, and if a rider could travel from one to the other in seven minutes, averaging 60kph over the distance, he was good enough.

* * *

Faustino Coppi may have been whizzing ever faster around the Piedmont hills on his butcher's bike, but as a racing cyclist he was the rawest of recruits. He had begun racing unofficial local events for Spinetta Marengo, the club nearest to Castellania. A photograph of this time shows him on a machine that clearly does not fit, with balloon tyres and floppy brake cables. Coppi's shorts are baggy around his stick-thin legs but his hair already has the neat side parting that would be his trademark. His uncle remembered one event in particular, in 1936, held at a nearby hamlet, Buffalora, to celebrate the return of troops from one of Mussolini's African wars. The sixteen-year-old Coppi rode up to the startline from Novi Ligure, won on his own by five minutes and took home fifty lire and a salami. Other records show him riding an event on 1 July 1937, over a course that started and finished in Buffalora, in which he punctured and failed to finish.

Cavanna initially had his doubts about Coppi but it was nothing to do with his cycling ability. One of his criteria for accepting ‘students' was that they should be neither well off nor well educated. In his view, only the poverty-stricken had the hunger to make a champion. He liked carters, masons, builders, peasants. He hesitated to take Coppi because he had a job and might be soft, but he changed his mind when he heard that Coppi had worked in the fields at Castellania. Coppi, on the other hand, knew all about Cavanna when the blind man came into the butcher's shop and asked to meet
il Faustino
.

By the late 1940s the diminutive would be gone and Fausto Coppi would be legendary for his perfect pedalling style on the bike and his sartorial elegance off it. A 1938 description by fellow cyclist Luigi Malabrocca underlines the Cinderella-like transformation effected with the support of the blind man. In those days, he said, Coppi was ‘in a right state, only fit for the dustbin. Shoulders hunched as if he was choking, sickly, pallid, twisted to one side, nervous, with feverish eyes, the eyes of a man possessed, and up front a big pointed nose. A shabby jersey and flapping breeches, fixed to his gaiters with clothes pegs. A military haversack around his neck and an old gate of a bike.'

According to Cavanna's later accounts, Faustino pedalled with his head in the clouds and his toes pointing at the ground. In spite of the balloon tyres on his heavy bike, he punctured time after time, and Cavanna realised it was because he was not looking where he was going. That habit had to be brow-beaten out of him. It took time, and so did persuading him to give up the wine he had always drunk, as peasants always did. Instead, he was put on a diet of minestrone made with greens, which he disliked. Faustino was made to sleep as if he was on his bike, lying on his right side with his knee brought up to his body.

Cavanna's school had yet to grow to the scale it reached when Coppi's career, and the blind man's reputation, were collectively at their zenith, but at the time he had three
allievi
, pupils. Coppi was put to train with the best, Borlando. It was not an easy life. ‘The principle was: ride your bike. On your bike every day. Even rest days,' recalled Michele Gismondi, who went through the ‘nursery' when Coppi was in his prime. Gismondi would have preferred any other life, ‘alive or dead', it was so hard.

First thing in the morning, Cavanna would bang on the bedroom door with his stick, thwacking the planks as if he
wanted to break it down. Some former pupils have it as early as 4 a.m., others 7 a.m.; presumably it depended on the time of year. Cavanna's contacts in Novi would have let him know if any of his charges had been seen in a bar, or in female company. They would receive their instructions – ‘
andate di qui, di là, di sù, di giù
', here, there, up, down, as one protégé told me, quoting Figaro – and they would be waved off as if it were a race. All Cavanna lacked was a finish flag, said another. Each training circuit had its set time which the riders had to better. One typical circuit was 190 kilometres, westwards over the Apennines to the Mediterranean and back again, partly on unmade roads, to be done in six hours, the riders propelled by bottles of water, caffeine and the stimulant simpamine, a mild form of amphetamine that students took to get them through their exams. ‘It won't make you
campioni
, but it will help you concentrate,' their master would say.

‘When we came back Cavanna would come to us. He would be waiting with his hands to feel whether we had sweated, whether we were thin, whether we were dry, in form, or still had work to do,' said Riccardo Filippi, whom Cavanna guided to a world amateur championship. If the blind man's hands felt that a cyclist's neck was dry, he would be sent out to sweat some more. One protégé recalls that they would sometimes get round him by wetting their collars with water.

Cavanna was paid in kind – a basket of fruit, a chicken, a demijohn of wine or a big bottle of oil – and he would take a cut when he placed cyclists with professional teams. His
allievi
would put their prize money into a common pot to pay for their rent. As aspirants to the senior categories – they would make the transition via the intermediate category of independent – theirs was a primitive, relentless life: riding to races with their kit on carriers on the front wheel, sleeping in schools on overnight trips further away. But it was better than labouring, and it was not without its lighter moments.
On one occasion the
allievi
caught a goose while they were out training and brought it back to the master, who could tell from its terrified protestations that it was not a young bird. He was right: it took three days to cook.