Gino Bartali (left) and Fausto Coppi; two legends of the Giro whose stories loom large in Herbie Sykes's "Maglia Rosa: Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia" but who are not permitted to dominate the revised work.
Maglia Rosa, by Herbie Sykes
Review by Feargal McKay
Originally released in hardback 2011, Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa: Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia has been re-released this year in a revised soft-back edition.
Sykes’s book is not the definitive, year-by-year history of the Giro. It’s no stat-laden stage-by-stage telling of the race’s history.
It is, instead, a history of the Giro told through the stories of the people who helped make that history. Some of those people have names known to all; some have names long since forgotten by others.
Added to the well known names – men like Costante Giradengo and Alfredo Binda – Sykes also tells tales about lesser known riders. This is ground familiar to readers of Sykes’s earlier The Eagle of the Canavese: Franco Balmamion and the Giro d'Italia (Mousehold Press, 2008); a biography of the winner of the 1962 and 1963 editions of the Giro, a rider today barely known outside Italy.
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Some of the stories Sykes tells are of men who have won the Giro, some who pulled on the pink pullover for just a couple of days in their lives, and some who never got to wear it all.
For Sykes, it is the ordinary riders that interest him the most, partly because there is already so much known about the stars. But also because it is the ordinary riders who have really written the Giro’s history and whose stories too often remain unwritten.
Think of the Giro and the people you probably think most of are Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. It’s hard not to think about Coppi and Bartali when you ponder Italian cycling.
They are as central to the legend of Italian cycling as Campagnolo gears, Cinelli bars and Colnago frames.
But there is a problem with Coppi and Bartali. Even though there are few English-language books currently in print telling the stories of their lives, it’s easy to feel you already know far too much about them.
No history of the Tour de France is complete without capsule biographies of both and most magazines mine their legends regularly. Everywhere you look you will find the same stories being told and retold time and again; how Bartali saved Italy from Civil War, how even the Pope asked Coppi to leave his lover and return to his wife.
And how Bartali was a Simon Pure and Coppi only charged up on amphetamines when he needed to but that he needed to all the time.
This is where Sykes does something different in Maglia Rosa; he doesn’t exactly ignore Coppi and Bartali, but he doesn’t allow them to take command of the centre stage and hog all of the limelight.
It’s tempting to say he almost makes them bit-part players in the story – the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Maglia Rosa – except that they are very important bit-part players.
For their stories have coloured the Giro to the present day. Ever since they both shuffled off the stage the tifosi has dreamt of the second coming.
Italian cycling in the post Coppi and Bartali years is littered with the corpses of all the new Coppis and Bartalis who failed to live up to the hope and the hype. It is this shadow of Coppi and Bartali that Sykes allows to hang over the tale more so than the story of the men themselves.
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Three men whose stories stand out in Maglia Rosa are Tino Coletto, Orfeo Ponzin and Italo Zilioli.
Zilioli’s name is reasonably well known even in the Tour-centric cycling world, he was once one of the future Coppis.
Coletto was one of the survivors who trailed up the Bondone behind Gaul that horrible day in 1956. And some would argue he would have caught Gaul if the mountain had only been a few kilometres longer.
Both of them have been interviewed by Sykes for Maglia Rosa and their stories alone are worth the price of admission.
As is that of the third man, Ponzin. He’s beyond an interview microphone at this stage and the book’s subtitle – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia – may give you a clue of why that is.
That subtitle bears consideration. As well as the individual tragedies – particularly careers that failed to live up to the hopes piled upon them – there is broader tragedy in the Giro’s tale. It is the tragedy that afflicts the rest of the sport; doping. Not to mention the manner in which it has been dealt.
Cycling has never been dope free. The riders in the Parc St Cloud races in 1868 - or the 1870 time trial between Florence and Pistoria that ushered in Italy’s love affair with the racing bike - were probably hopped up on something we’d consider today to be performance enhancing drugs. But those substances were perfectly acceptable back then.
Given the longevity of the problem, doping itself is only a small part of tragedy. The substantive tale is how race organisers and the fans have responded to it.
Within the closing chapters of Maglia Rosa, Sykes casts a cold judgement on the Giro organisers – particularly former race director Angelo Zomegnan. And he finds them wanting in the way they have handled the problem.
Those closing chapters are where this revised soft-back edition of Maglia Rosa has most changed from its original hardback release two years ago.
Unlike many cycling books that come out in revised format, Sykes’s revisions do not simply entail tacking on another chapter or two at the end to bring the story up to date.
Instead, he has taken the opportunity to radically rework the closing couple of chapters, adding material that is new to this edition and giving the ending a bit more balance between the dark and the light than the original did.
This work makes it a little less bleak - it is hard not to be bleak when properly dealing with EPO.
Overall, in Maglia Rosa Sykes treads a fine line between the triumph and the tragedy; painting a portrait that is at times uplifting, at times melancholic.
He also manages to tread the line between humanising the race when talking about ordinary heroes and evoking the Giro’s mythological status in the hearts of Italian cycling fans.
All told, Maglia Rosa is a fitting tribute to a race cycling fans are increasingly holding in higher esteem than its over-exposed French cousin.
Herbie Sykes’s Maglia Rosa is published by Bloomsbury (2013, 336 pages)
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