Bill - The Story of the Giro d’Italia: A Year-by-Year History of the Tour of Italy

Cover photo: from the 1951 Giro dItalia, Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet, with Ferdi Kbler on Coppis wheel.

All of the photos are at the end of the book. There will be a link to each photo in the appropriate place in the text, and when you get to the photo, there will be a link to bring you back to where you were reading in the text.

Maps of Italy:

19081918: The Giros Origins and Cyclings Heroic Era

19191924: Costante Girardengo is Italys First Great Champion

19251933: The Alfredo Binda Years

19341941: Gaul, Anquetil, and Balmamion Light Up a Decade of Fabulous Racing

19421955: Fausto Coppi Reigns and Cyclings Golden Age Begins

19561964: Gaul, Anquetil and Balmamion Light Up a Decade of Fabulous Racing

19651970: Felice Gimondi and Eddy Merckx battle for Giro Supremacy

from other McGann Publishing books

While working on our history of the Tour de France, I was struck by dearth of information available in English about the second most important race in the world, the Giro dItalia. I say second most important, but I hope after reading this history the reader may come to hold the same opinion I have, that today it is the worlds finest race.

The Giro ranks above all others not because it has a superior peloton or more fans or a longer history or greater prestige or more prize money. The Tour de France easily wins on all of those counts. But this is about sports, and sports are about competition, and there the Giro wins, hands down.

First of all, the Giro takes place in Italy, blessed as almost no other place on Earth with beautiful cities, rugged mountains and people insanely passionate about sports. Here, bicycle racing matters, and matters a lot. The riders know they are competing under the hot light of fiery love of the sport.

The Giro is raced in the spring, when sudden storms can come out of nowhere. In the mountains, this means abundant sunshine can quickly turn to intolerable cold, fog, rain, snow and ice. Some of the Giros greatest dramas took place while Mother Nature raged at the helpless cyclists. Only eight riders finished the 1914 Giro, a testimony to that editions difficulty. Other years have seen mass abandonments when the majority of the racers could no longer endure the dantesque conditions the race imposed. These episodes of terrible suffering, from which great champions have forged victories, are far more common in the Giro than in the Tour. Between baking Sicilian heat, near vertical Dolomite ascents, freezing snowstorms and blinding torrents of rain, the Giro has put its riders in extremis more often than the other Grand Tours.

While it wasnt always true, today the quality of the Giros racing is superior. I believe that the Tour de Frances racing is often dull and negative compared to that of the Giro. It may well be that the Tour is so important, the riders race it not to win, but to not lose. With its days of slow, piano racing mostly a thing of the past, the Giro can be a bare-knuckle brawl from start to finish. There has been no race in recent memory to rival the 2009 Giro, with its down-to-the-wire slugfest between winner Denis Menchov and Danilo Di Luca. The last time the Tour had such a fracas was probably the 1989 duel between Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond.

Today the Giro is measurably harder to race than the Tour. With power meters attached to the riders bikes, we know that Giro racers go deeper and expend more energy than those competing in the Tour.

Following the footsteps of predecessor Vincenzo Torriani, current Giro boss Angelo Zomagnan creates race routes that are interesting, challenging to the riders, generally keeping the outcome in suspense until the final couple of days, leaving the sports fan excited and on the edge of his seat for three weeks.

Thats why I love the Giro dItalia.

The great rivalry between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali is well known, mostly because of their adventures in the Tour de France. But for much of bike racings history the Alps have been a high wall, and Italian sponsors preferred to keep their racers at home where they could earn valuable publicity. Because of this, there is a whole world of great athletes who are virtually unknown to the non-Italian cycling fan. How about Giovanni Valetti? In 1939 Valetti beat Bartali when Gino was at the very peak of his powers. Has anyone heard of Giuseppe Enrici, the Giro winner who was born in Pittsburgh? Alfonsina Strada was the only woman who entered (and unofficially finished) a Grand Tour. And there was Giordano Cottur, who won a Giro stage in Trieste while guns blazed.

Clearly, this is a story that has to be told.

A few notes regarding this text: Where a place or event has a commonly used English equivalent, I have generally used the English term, such as Turin for Torino, Tuscany for Toscana and Tour of Lombardy for Giro di Lombardia. When I use Giro (or its Italian plural Giri) alone in this book, it means the Giro dItalia, even though there are many races in Italy with Giro in their titles. Likewise, Tour means the Tour de France and Vuelta means the Vuelta a Espaa.

I have tried to use Italian sources whenever possible (usually I had no choice), certainly to prevent errors, but more important, to see the Giro dItalia through Italian eyes and to try to convey the race to the reader as Italians see it. I departed from this goal in two important instances. I have leaned heavily upon Herbie Sykes The Eagle of the Canavese (about two-time Giro winner Franco Balmamion) and William Fotheringhams Fallen Angel, the Passion of Fausto Coppi. Both are superb cycling histories that I recommend highly.

When there are two stages in a single day (usually called half-stages), some sources will call them the a and b stage: for instance, stage 14a and 14b, and some will just keep counting, giving each one a unique numerical title. The latter practice was used by the riders we interviewed, and who am I to differ with Fiorenzo Magni; so that is how the stages are labeled in this book.

Because of its rich, virtually unknown history, writing the story of the Giro dItalia was a labor of love. I wish I could have gone deeper into the individual stories of each rider, but since the text is already at two volumes, I had to stick to the plan of a year-by year history, emphasizing the race itself.

There is a glossary of both English and Italian cycling terms at the back of the book.

So many people were generous to me. For years Larry Theobald, co-owner of CycleItalia bike tours and the most passionate tifoso I know, would came back from Italy with cycling books and send these sometimes irreplaceable treasures my way. Besides cajoling, nagging and encouraging me during the four years it took to write this history, Larry also reviewed the text and made many valuable suggestions.