Cyclist Fausto Coppi during the 1952 Tour de France. Coppi's rivalry with Gino Bartali became a national obsession in Italy. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LIDO DI JESOLO, Italy — Before the Giro d’Italia passed by his shoe shop, Giovanni Facco prepared a shrine.

He dressed his store windows with newspaper clippings from Giros of old. They recounted how the great Italian cyclist Fausto Coppi, with his slender build and angular face, won the race five times. How Coppi had also conquered the Tour de France. And how time and again he had beaten his older rival Gino Bartali, the man with a boxer’s nose and a stockier build.

One item, however, shows Facco’s passion more than any other. It is a small yellowed piece of paper, protected in plastic, with a cross on the front and the dates that framed Coppi’s life: Sept. 15, 1919, to Jan. 2, 1960. It was given out at Coppi’s funeral, which Facco attended.

“In Italy the rivalry of Coppi-Bartali is a religion,” Facco, 73, said through an interpreter while standing beneath a poster of Coppi outside his shop. “Your heart is either with one or the other.”

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This year’s Giro traveled through Lido di Jesolo during Stage 2. In the next seven stages of the race, which lasts 3 weeks and 21 stages, the route has snaked through countless other towns, each dressed in pink to represent the leader’s jersey. Pink flags, pink balloons and pink spray-painted bicycles line the path.

Pictures of Coppi and Bartali are seen just as often. They hang in cycling shops, butcher shops, banks and shoe stores. The images and what they stood for have not been forgotten. The riders once divided the country, and they held social and political significance.

Bartali, a conservative man from Florence, represented the more rural, southern part of Italy. He was called Gino the Pious and had the support of the Vatican. The secular Coppi was from outside of Turin and a symbol of the industrial north. His nickname became Fausto the Sinner.

“If you look at the statistics, Coppi won more races, but they say Bartali lost his best years to World War II,” said Marco Pinotti, a rider from Bergamo, Italy, who races for Team Columbia-Highroad. “People are still debating which one is better. In Italy, they still have that conversation at dinner.”

Fausto Coppi in 1952. In his short lifetime, he won the Giro d'Italia five times and the Tour de France twice. Credit Agence France-Presse

Coppi and Bartali grated against each other, creating an explosive relationship that still captivates Italians. Newspaper articles from the 1940s are reprinted in today’s editions. Books are still being written about them, including one published just in time for this year’s Giro.

“They are part of the history books,” Pinotti said. “You learn about them at home, at school. They are more famous than almost everyone in Italian history because they gave the country hope.”

Before World War II, Bartali won the Giro twice, in 1936 and 1937. He also won the Tour de France in 1938, when it was unheard of for foreign cyclists to wear the yellow jersey. He then headed off to fight for the Italian resistance.

After the war, he won the Giro again in 1946, creating a thrill for a depressed nation. But he is best known for his victory at the 1948 Tour de France. It occurred around the time that Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist party, was shot and wounded. Bartali’s victory was said to have eased tensions in the country as it appeared headed toward civil war and a possible insurrection by the Italian Communists.

Bartali and Coppi became teammates in 1940, before their rivalry became a national obsession.

Coppi was hired to help Bartali win. While Bartali prayed for divine help as he raced, Coppi insisted that he was simply a machine, riding the roads alone.

Coppi had admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, including amphetamines. He said he took them only when it was necessary — which was, he once said in a television interview, “almost all the time.”

Although drug use was not yet banned in cycling, the doping infuriated Bartali. He told reporters he would often pick up bottles left behind by Coppi to taste what special concoction was inside. He would scour Coppi’s hotel room to find remnants of the substances Coppi had taken.

“Bartali told me that he never used drugs because they were bad for him, but he was always very, very curious about Coppi,” said Claudio Gregori, a reporter for La Gazzetta dello Sport, the Italian sports newspaper. “But this was only part of their complicated history together. Their rivalry over so many years was a great battle, the most important battle in sports history for the Italian people.”

Gino Bartali’s career was interrupted by World War II. He won two Giro d’Italia races before the war and one after. Credit Associated Press

At the 1949 world championships, Coppi and Bartali showed their stubbornness: they quit the race rather than help each other win.

They did, however, work together at the 1949 Tour de France, the first of Coppi’s two Tour wins.


“There is a legend about who was giving the bottle to the other guy,” said Gregori, who has written several books about cycling. “Coppi said he was giving it to Bartali. Bartali told me he was handing it forward to Coppi. They argued about it for years. The Italian people still argue about it now.”

On Tuesday, after a rest day, the riders in the Giro will begin Stage 10 in Cuneo and finish in Pinerolo. They will follow some of the course where Coppi and Bartali engaged in one of their most memorable clashes.

In 1949, facing five steep climbs, Coppi attacked on the first one, taking off in an improbable solo breakaway that lasted 118 miles. Bartali chased him, only to finish nearly 12 minutes behind.

Bartali was 85 when he died in 2000. Coppi died a much younger man after a tumultuous stage of his career. He had been having an affair with a married woman, and some fans had turned on him. The pope refused to bless one Giro because Coppi was riding in it.

In late 1959, he was invited to what is now Burkina Faso for a cycling and hunting trip. He contracted malaria and died at 40.

“It was a devastating moment for Italy,” Facco, the shoe store owner, said as a woman walked beneath his poster of Coppi.

She pointed, shook her head and said: “Coppi? Ah, no, no, no. Bartali was much better.”

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