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Authors: David Walsh
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separate ways. Coppi rode part of the way home on his bike and then hitched a lift with a lorry-load of former detainees. 6
Chiappucci went home and raised a son, Claudio, whose head he filled with tales of his time with the great Coppi, whose most wondrous deeds were still to come.
Forty years after Coppi’s lonely ride to Sestriere, Arduino Chiappucci’s son won on the same mountain. I was there on that day in 1992 and this was a classic ride straight out of the book of Coppi mythology. A Saturday afternoon and 254 kilometres worth of attrition, stretching from St Gervais to Sestriere. Just 12 kilometres in, Claudio Chiappucci attacked, which seemed much too early, but we knew not what was about to unfold. 7 All we saw was daredevil ambition. No strategy, just attack, attack, attack; scorching off into the land of pain.
First he got rid of his fellow escapees but behind, the monster in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain had him in his sights. Chiappucci’s pace was too much for Indurain’s teammates, however, so the leader had to make his own pursuit, which evened things up. I loved the style and recklessness of Chiappucci, his Italian need to win on the day the race crossed into his country. This was bravura. This was the Tour offering us a late-twentieth-century epic. This was sport. This was why we came.
In cycling you cheer for the guy who, in the French expression, ‘makes the race’. But Chiappucci had been out there so damn long that we became fatalistic. These guys always get hauled in. The romance of the Tour is that there is no romance. It’s hard and it’s cruel and it’s crushing. On the climb to Sestrierre, Indurain was close enough to know that he could take Chiappucci. Whenever he wished.
In his pomp Indurain was as relentless and uncharismatic as one of the riders of the apocalypse.
His shadow would catch Chiappucci any second. And we knew that Chiappucci and his dream were dead. Indurain was going faster. Chiappucci had been hanging on for too long and Indurain knew what would happen when he bore down on an opponent. He would devour him like a python coming off a Lenten fast. Ciao Claudio.
And then this half-crazy Italian resurrected himself. Strength returned to his legs like a river undammed. The dreamer in you imagined that this was strength leased from his great Italian heart. He went again. There would be a happy ending after all. Chiappucci forged a small gap, increased it and got away from the monster through the last gruelling kilometres.
He won by 1.45 on a day so brutal that eighteen riders who finished outside of the time limit were eliminated. Victory wouldn’t be enough to win Chiappucci the Tour but his breakaway wasn’t about a place high on overall classification but about glory, a thing of beauty in itself. That day he gave us as grand and swashbuckling a race as we could ever hope to see. As sweet as it gets. Romance.
It sounds embarrassing now but I cried in the press room when Chiappucci found the strength to hold off Indurain. I couldn’t help myself as it was the most beautiful, romantic, heroic thing I’d ever covered. Courage beat calculation, as an athlete driven by the need to perform before his own people, transcended himself.
EPO and the weary cynicism it generates weren’t on our radar. I stood there and wept. Not alone either. This was why we loved the Tour. Why July in France could be the best month of your year, any year.
Four years later Chiappucci told an Italian judge Vincenzo Scolastico he had been using EPO since 1993 and, older, wiser, more cynical, I thought, ‘That’s convenient, Chiappa, your greatest ever performance happened just before you started doing EPO. Yeah, right.’ Chiappucci would later retract that admission, but what did it matter, he failed an EPO test before the 1997 Giro d’Italia and later that year was kicked off the Italian team for the World Championships because of an excessively high haematocrit, indicating EPO
Chiappucci went home and raised a son, Claudio, whose head he filled with tales of his time with the great Coppi, whose most wondrous deeds were still to come.
Forty years after Coppi’s lonely ride to Sestriere, Arduino Chiappucci’s son won on the same mountain. I was there on that day in 1992 and this was a classic ride straight out of the book of Coppi mythology. A Saturday afternoon and 254 kilometres worth of attrition, stretching from St Gervais to Sestriere. Just 12 kilometres in, Claudio Chiappucci attacked, which seemed much too early, but we knew not what was about to unfold. 7 All we saw was daredevil ambition. No strategy, just attack, attack, attack; scorching off into the land of pain.
First he got rid of his fellow escapees but behind, the monster in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain had him in his sights. Chiappucci’s pace was too much for Indurain’s teammates, however, so the leader had to make his own pursuit, which evened things up. I loved the style and recklessness of Chiappucci, his Italian need to win on the day the race crossed into his country. This was bravura. This was the Tour offering us a late-twentieth-century epic. This was sport. This was why we came.
In cycling you cheer for the guy who, in the French expression, ‘makes the race’. But Chiappucci had been out there so damn long that we became fatalistic. These guys always get hauled in. The romance of the Tour is that there is no romance. It’s hard and it’s cruel and it’s crushing. On the climb to Sestrierre, Indurain was close enough to know that he could take Chiappucci. Whenever he wished.
In his pomp Indurain was as relentless and uncharismatic as one of the riders of the apocalypse.
His shadow would catch Chiappucci any second. And we knew that Chiappucci and his dream were dead. Indurain was going faster. Chiappucci had been hanging on for too long and Indurain knew what would happen when he bore down on an opponent. He would devour him like a python coming off a Lenten fast. Ciao Claudio.
And then this half-crazy Italian resurrected himself. Strength returned to his legs like a river undammed. The dreamer in you imagined that this was strength leased from his great Italian heart. He went again. There would be a happy ending after all. Chiappucci forged a small gap, increased it and got away from the monster through the last gruelling kilometres.
He won by 1.45 on a day so brutal that eighteen riders who finished outside of the time limit were eliminated. Victory wouldn’t be enough to win Chiappucci the Tour but his breakaway wasn’t about a place high on overall classification but about glory, a thing of beauty in itself. That day he gave us as grand and swashbuckling a race as we could ever hope to see. As sweet as it gets. Romance.
It sounds embarrassing now but I cried in the press room when Chiappucci found the strength to hold off Indurain. I couldn’t help myself as it was the most beautiful, romantic, heroic thing I’d ever covered. Courage beat calculation, as an athlete driven by the need to perform before his own people, transcended himself.
EPO and the weary cynicism it generates weren’t on our radar. I stood there and wept. Not alone either. This was why we loved the Tour. Why July in France could be the best month of your year, any year.
Four years later Chiappucci told an Italian judge Vincenzo Scolastico he had been using EPO since 1993 and, older, wiser, more cynical, I thought, ‘That’s convenient, Chiappa, your greatest ever performance happened just before you started doing EPO. Yeah, right.’ Chiappucci would later retract that admission, but what did it matter, he failed an EPO test before the 1997 Giro d’Italia and later that year was kicked off the Italian team for the World Championships because of an excessively high haematocrit, indicating EPO
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