Bartali Gino - Road to valor: a true story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the cyclist who inspired a nation

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Copyright 2012 by McConnon LLC

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McConnon Aili, 1980
Road to valor : a true story of World War II Italy, the Nazis, and the cyclist who inspired a nation / Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon.
1. Bartali, Gino, 19142000. 2. CyclistsItalyBiography. 3. Tour de France
(Bicycle race) I. McConnon, Andres. II. Title.

GV1051.B37M35 2012
796.62092dc23

[B]
2011051159

eISBN: 978-0-307-59066-4

Maps by David Lindroth
Jacket photographs: Publifoto/Olycom (cover image and lower spine image),
The Horton Collection (top spine image)

v3.1

For our mother and late father

Contents

Map of Tuscany and Umbria

Map of World War II in Italy

Map of France

T HIS BOOK IS A work of nonfiction. All characters, events, and dialogue that we include come from a wide variety of historical sources, including Gino Bartalis three autobiographies, declassified secret Fascist police reports, dozens of French and Italian newspapers and books, filmed interviews with Gino and his teammates, an extensive body of photographic and newsreel footage of cycling races, and more than two hundred hours of interviews with Ginos widow, Adriana; son, Andrea; former teammates; friends; former Italian politicians; historians; Italian Jews; and others. We have also visited the locations of Ginos key races and other life events in Italy and France, and conducted interviews in Israel with some of the people with whom he interacted during World War II.

Where accounts conflicted, we tried wherever possible to consult multiple sources to arrive at the most likely version of an event. Whenever we indicate a character thought or felt something, that information comes directly from our interviews with the character depicted or material left in a published interview or memoir. We have not invented any dialogue. Conversations are drawn from records left by at least one of the direct participants. In the rare occasions where we describe an event from Ginos life that he never wrote or spoke publicly about, we have relied on the memories of those events that he shared with family and friends, and their characterizations of his behavior in a variety of situations. In most cases the primary source material we consulted was in Italian or French. We have translated as accurately as possible to maintain the spirit and letter of the original.

Gino Bartali moved through many different worlds throughout his life and consequently this book shines a light on different aspects of professional cycling, Fascist and Nazi-occupied Italy, the experience of Jews in Italy during World War II, and postwar Italian politics. While much more could be said about all of these subjects, we have limited the scope of our discussion to what fit into the context of the narrative.

Let your virtues expand to fill this sad situation:
Glory ascends the heights by a precipitous path.
Who would have known of Hector, if Troy had been happy?
The road to valor is built by adversity.

OVID, TRISTIA

A T THE STEEP FOOT of the Vars, on a windswept slope high in the French Alps, Gino Bartali lost his temper. The two cyclists following him were drafting, riding so close to his back wheel that he was forced to be their shield against the icy wind and drag them along. They refused to take their turn at the front of the group, and this galled him to no end. Ahead of the trio, a lone figure was getting smaller as he cycled away along the muddy road, a coagulated laceration zigzagging its way up the barren escarpment, winding around craggy pinnacles, stunted fir trees, and piles of rock debris until it vanished into the cold mountain mist. Gino had to make his move now if he would have any chance of catching the leader disappearing into the fog before him.

It was July 15, 1948, and Ltape ReineThe Queen Stagethe most important day of the Tour de France. A rough swipe at his dirt-caked goggles revealed a sobering scene, even for a man who had won the Tour on the exact same terrain ten years earlier. In 1938, Gino had soared up the imperial snow-crowned Alps toward azure heavens above. Now he could barely see where mountain met sky as heavy clouds rolled in around him and the mud beneath his wheels became thick as glue.

The dismal surroundings echoed the pain screaming inside his body. After pedaling more than seventeen hundred miles over the most challenging topography cycling had to offer, his throat and lungs were burning, his thighs felt heavy as bronze. Unable to see far beyond his handlebars, he had to depend on his other senses to fill in the details. He could feel the pitch under his wheels as the grade of the road steepened. He could taste the icy rain turning into jagged snowflakes as he gulped the thinning mountain air. And all he could hear, beyond his own body heaving atop the bike, was an eerie, forlorn silence.

Gino marshaled every last muscle and ounce of mental focus to silence the critics with this next climb. Il Vecchio they were calling him in the press, The Old Man at thirty-three years of age! He was fed up with being dismissed as an embarrassing has-been, defiant despite his humiliating twenty-one-minute disadvantage behind the Tour leader. He had even lashed out at the Italian journalists, yelling at them for doubting him. No matterthe reporters had already nicknamed him Ginettaccio, Gino the Terrible, and the newspapers would just chalk it up to another one of his outbursts. But what the press didnt know was that Gino Bartali had a secret. He had much more bottled up inside him, beyond his frustration with being so far behind, and he had not sat idle during the war. Unlike some of the competitors he now raced against, his toughest moments came not on the steepest pitches of the Tour de France, but during the darkest hour of the Nazi occupation of Italy, risking his life for strangers.