Book review: Fallen Angel

November 12, 2013 § 22 Comments

“Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppi,” by William Fotheringham, suffers from that most terrible of flaws, a colon in the title. It’s as if the author is so afraid of the weak title that he has to further explain with more weakness, further weakening it. Imagine “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Things That Happened to a Young Boy and an Escaped Slave on Their Quest for Freedom.” Or what about “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: The Tragedy of Fate.”

What’s most damning about the colon-in-the-title is the fact that you can’t even think of publishing a book in academia without having at least one, if not two. “Global Warming Factors: The Isolation of Dependent Variables: An Analysis by Team Festersore.”

Once you leave the title, though, Fotheringham does solid work, as he’s wont to do. This book is well worth the read, and certainly a better investment of time than another book on Lance, or a dope-and-tell worst seller by some recently retired drug addict. It is not, however, a better investment than, say, a pint of Atticus IPA. But what is?

The book goes like this: Coppi was a stud. He stomped lots of dicks. He got married to a very nice country girl. He stomped more dicks. A Yoko Ono-type crazypants set her sights on him. They fell in lust. Coppi ditched the nice girl. Later, he died from malaria. In between the crazypants and the lust and the ditching and the malaria, he stomped even more dicks.

After he died everyone loved him.

A real book about cycling

Despite the trite and rather boring story line, “Fallen Angel” is a brilliant book about cycling. It’s not about what we call cycling, however, because what we call cycling Coppi would only dimly have recognized. What we do he might have called “froo-froo,” or “poseuring,” or “hopeless wankage.” He would never have called it cycling.

This is because the thing we do when we straddle our bikes is primarily an activity that involves pedaling the bicycle. For elite professionals like Chrissy Froome and the current (i.e. last forty years) of crop of roadsters, it really has been all about the bike.

When Fausto got up in the morning to go out and stomp some dicks, it was not all about the bike. In the beginning, it was mostly about finding a bike. The next time you look at some punk-ass 13-year-old with a $4k rig, think about Fausto and his first “bicycle.” It weighed forty pounds and didn’t work. Electronic shifting? It had one fucking gear. That didn’t work.

Once the bike finding had been accomplished, Fausto and his compatriots had to conquer something almost as formidable as obtaining a broken, single-geared bicycle. They had to ride it. This required roads, and in the pre-war years, Italian roads were unpaved donkey carts littered with rocks and chugholes, which meant flats. A shit ton of flats.

For us, the road is a thing we actively choose. “Hmmm … shall I pedal forth on the tarmac today, or perhaps saunter out onto the trails de mountain bike? Mayhap an admixture of the two, and a bit of ‘cross practice? That way I could practice my road and my off-road skills.”

Coppi’s rides were all ‘cross rides, as in, the flats and the rocks and the holes and the dirt and the donkeys and the rattling trucks made him cross as shit and want to stomp dicks, which he did. But there was no froo-froo choice of “where to ride” or “which bike shall I pedal today?” It was all gnarly as shit, and when it rained, which it also did a shit ton, Coppi got covered from head to toe in grime, muck, and cold. This would piss him off and make him stomp even harder on the dicks he’d just finished stomping.

After the war, it went from awful to Lubbock. The roads were a shadow of their former selves, which even in the best of times had been wraiths. Cycling was such an awful, painful, terrible proposition and so filled with danger, discomfort, and obstacles of every kind that the only reason people like Coppi persevered is because real life as a farming peasant was ten thousand times worse.

In addition to horrible equipment, horrible roads, training regimens that included cigarettes and powerful drugs that were chosen based on the color of the particular pill, “Fallen Angel” recounts the numerous bad spills that were a part of professional racing. Coppi was continually crashing horribly, breaking major bones, hitting his head, and of course losing his younger brother Serse to a fall that resulted in a subdural hematoma and death.

Unlike the smooth paving that now merely grinds away skin and flesh and breaks perhaps a bone or two, the jagged, cobbled, rough and awful roads of Coppi’s era were made more terrible by the fact that no one wore head protection of any kind save hair and skull. Clothing was lumpy, woolen, baggy, and rough on the nuts. Brakes worked badly at best, and gearing was so limited that riders had to tackle hors categorie climbs with nothing bigger than a 21-tooth cog.

The Velominati … really?

A small cult of foolish people sprang up a few years ago pretending, however tongue-in-cheek, to honor the principles of the “hard men” and the “golden age” of cycling. What began as a lark has now become its own form of cycling lore, as dolts in cycling caps bark out nonsense in Facebook battles like “Rule No. 5!”

The foolishness of the Velominati, of course, is that they are really nothing more than fat slow people on bicycles who would be ground under the very first mile of the very first stretch of the very first wet cobbles they hit at speed. Far from being the hard men they idolize, what “Fallen Angel” makes clear is that the horrendous conditions of post-war cycling were endured by necessity, not out of macho adherence to some silly notion of “harder is better.”

Riders like Coppi were driven over frozen mountain passes on endlessly inhuman stages to the very edge of human endurance. The Velominati are driven no further than the DVD replays of “A Sunday in Hell” or a sunny Sunday pedal followed by a double macchiato with whipped cream. Rather than appreciate cycling for what it is today — a lark for people with tons of free time and the luxury to buy costly toys — the real lessons of Coppi’s era are not so much forgotten as they are unlearned. Pain and suffering and misery to make a buck is only done when the alternative is something worse.

Coppi died in the twilight of his professional career, egged on by the need for money, the desire to avoid his shrewish second wife, and the inability of a human legend to come to terms with the waning of his power and the ascendancy of the new generation. What some call the golden age of cycling, Coppi would have called a back breaking job that he pursued because it was the only one he knew.

A good read. And it beats the Velominati any day.

Buck Davidson, Superhero

June 30, 2012 § 8 Comments

Everybody needs a hero.

When I was growing up in Houston, I used to walk a lot. In summer I walked to the pool or the library. It was always long and hot and boring, so when I walked I imagined I was a superhero.

Buck Davidson was one righteously badass dude. His outfit was a leather suit with lots of buckskin fringe and big, pearl-handled six-shooters. He had long red hair and huge muscles. He was handsome and stronger than a hundred men. Buck Davidson was always saving the world or the galaxy or the universe from all kinds of shit.

Sometimes he’d pick up a bus and throw it at a skyscraper, knocking off an alien who was gnawing the tip off the Empire State Building. Another time he’d use his genius laser brain ray to look at bacteria and figure out how to cure cancer. Other times, handsome and super as he was, he’d run off to a quiet place and have awesome sex with Penelope Watkins, the beautiful actress who followed him everywhere and who he was always rescuing.

Although I was pretty clear on the bus-throwing stuff, the sex thing was kind of fuzzy. I knew that Buck had a penis, and that it was a honking one, and I knew from the one or two times I’d seen my mom naked that there was a furry bush to which the penis was somehow supposed to connect, but the actual mechanics were a mystery.

Having an active imagination, though, I didn’t sweat the details and just made it up, same as with curing cancer. I didn’t need to know jack about Stage 4 or metastasis in order to heal the world. Buck just stared with his brain waves and pow! Cancer was fucking dead. Then he’d flop his big ol’ penis towards Penelope’s bush and pow! They’d do sex, whatever that was.

Fake-believe heroes

Buck Davidson was real to me. As soon as I walked out the door he’d get involved in every kind of escapade and death-defying heroic act I could imagine, and let me tell you, I had an imagination that just wouldn’t quit.

One time Buck was tied up and about to be dipped in a vat of plutonium. Snaxellander, the evil villain from Dorskabenixx, got up close to Buck and gloated over his imminent demise. “Prepare to die, Buck!” he snarled in his alien dialect, which, because he was so fucking smart, Buck could understand perfectly.

Unable to move his superhumanly strong arms or legs, he opened his mouth and knocked the shit out of Snaxellander with his super strong tongue. Snaxellander was knocked out cold and fell backwards into the vat of plutonium, starting a chain bomb reaction that, if not defused, would detonate and explode the planet.

Buck then craned his neck and used his super strong tongue to snap the chains that bound him. Once free, he stretched his super-stretchy leather shirt with the cool buckskin fringe over the vat, revealing hugely massive and powerful muscles that were awesomely strong, and which made Miss Penelope Watkins faint, as she had also been tied up by Snaxellander. The buckskin cover deprived the plutonium of the oxygen it probably needed to start blowing up.

Then Buck lobbed the whole fucking mess into outer space, where it hit an asteroid, which then got knocked off course and wound up smacking into Dorskabenixx, killing all of the Hoganimms (the race of aliens to which Snaxellander belonged) and making the galaxy safe again. Then Buck untied Penelope and they a good ol’ sex together.

He did all that shit just walking to the pool.

The absence of super-villains isn’t the absence of villains

The thing that bummed me out, though, was that no matter how hard I wanted to be Buck Davidson, superhero, by the time I got to the library I was still just skinny little nerdly Wankmeister Jr. Almost as bad, I couldn’t help but notice that we didn’t have any super-villains or aliens or ticking plutonium vat bombs.

Most depressing of all, there was no one remotely like the devastatingly beautiful Penelope Watkins, with the possible exception of Doris Scrantly, the sixteen year-old babysitter who called me and my brother “little disgusting creeps.” I was pretty sure if I ever tried to show her my penis she would tie it around my neck until I choked to death.

Even though Snaxellander never reared his four heads on the way to the library, the world in 1972 did have plenty of villains. One of them, cancer, is still around and still killing people. No Buck Davidson has appeared on the scene to zap the fuck out of cancer with his genius laser brain waves.

There is, however, one globally renowned athlete who has made “curing cancer” his mantra. He has touched the lives of thousands of cancer patients, stumped for cancer awareness, and reached out personally to countless people struggling with the disease.

For this, he’s been called a hero.

Let’s accept his narrative as true, for a moment, and push all of the scandal and grand juries and witness testimony and the impending USADA hearing off to the side. Instead of weighing his heroism against accusations of cheating and foul play, let’s weigh his heroism against something else.

Let’s weigh it against the heroism of a cyclist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

The Chosen

In 1938, Gino Bartali won his first Tour. Hailed by Mussolini’s Fascist government as proof of the genetically dominant Italian race, this devout Catholic and distinctly apolitical bike racer found himself used as a symbol of racial superiority just as the Fascists had allied with Hitler and adopted the basic German social framework for Italy that the Nazis used to plan, organize, and implement the extermination of the bulk of European Jewry.

In an extraordinary book by siblings Aili and Andres McConnon, “Road to Valor,” we have been given that rarest of things: instead of a bike book about a bike racer written by half-literate bicycle fanboys, we have a beautifully written history that took ten years to write and research by two Princeton grads, one a journalist and the other a scholar.

The Italian Jews were first stripped of their property, fired from their jobs, booted from the schools, and ripped from the fabric of the society they had been a part of for hundreds of years. Most importantly, their citizenship was essentially revoked, and along with it the all-important identification cards upon which life itself depended. Without a card, you couldn’t get food rations, rent a home, or work.

People who once led prosperous lives were forced into beggary in a matter of months. By 1943, when Hitler took direct control over the part of Italy that the Allies hadn’t yet conquered, Himmler’s SS arrived and began arresting and deporting Jews to the northern death camps in earnest.

The real suitcase of courage

Bartali, whose fame had allowed him to avoid combat, was recruited by a Catholic cardinal from Florence for a horrifically dangerous mission: to carry forged identification cards from Assisi back to Florence, where they would be distributed to Jews who could use them to either flee Italy or to obtain jobs, food, and housing.

With the cards rolled up and secreted in the seat tube of his bicycle, under the ruse of “training” Bartali regularly made the 170-mile one-way ride to Assisi, met clandestinely with his conspirators, and rode back to Florence. Along the way he ran the constant risk of detection. The stress of being discovered at the numerous military checkpoints led to such fear and anxiety that he eventually developed PTSD.

At one point he was interrogated in one of the most infamous torture chambers in Italy, and only escaped because the inquisitor’s assistant vouched for Bartali’s honesty, as he had previously been Bartali’s commanding officer. As a result of heroism that saved the lives of hundreds of Jews from the Nazis, Bartali was recognized poshumously by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Come together

After the war, Bartali tried to resurrect his career but was far past his prime. He took up smoking as a way to improve his performance, and put in the huge miles of a younger man, with no time for his older body to recover. Moreover, he had lost virtually all of his fitness over the course of the long war, which for all Italians was an extended exercise in malnourishment.

Adding to the challenge, greats such as Fausto Coppi and Louis Bobet were much younger and in the early, rocketing trajectory of their legendary careers even as Bartali was at the end of his own. In 1948,  Bartali returned to the Tour with virtually no chance of winning. After Stage 12, Bobet had a lead of more than twenty-one minutes, and Bartali knew his campaign was hopeless. He was prepared to quit the race and go home in defeat.

That night, Bartali received a phone call while he was in bed. Alcide De Gasperi, prime minister of Italy, told him that Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the opposition had been shot, and Italy might be on the edge of a civil war. De Gasperi asked Bartali to do his best to win a stage in order to distract people from the impending conflict. Bartali replied that he would win.

Against all odds and prognostications, Bartali set out on Stage 13 of the Tour with an attack almost from the gun, an audacious and incredible tactic considering the stage’s 170-mile length and the fact that it traversed five of the worst cols in the Tour, finishing with the legendary Izoard. From the very first serious ascent the heavens unleashed freezing rain, sleet, and snow that continued for the entirety of the race. Frozen to the core, Bartali attacked each climb until none could follow. He took back virtually all of his 21-minute deficit.

The following day he clinched the lead with a devastating win on the 163-mile mountainous stage to Aix-les-Bains, and the next day won the 159-mile Alpine odyssey to Lausanne. No rider would again win three consecutive stages until Mario Cippolini took four sprint stages in 1999. The ten-year gap between Bartali’s first and second win has never been matched, and only three riders have ever won a Tour at his age or older. Bartali won the 1948 tour by more than 26 minutes, put more than 32 minutes on Bobet, and finished more than an hour up on the tenth place finisher.

This incredible victory convulsed Italy into celebrations, such that it temporarily forgot its divisions and drew back from civil conflict due to the exploits of this singular, indomitable man who had reclaimed his position as victor of the Tour a decade after his first win.

But he never made a yellow wristband about it

Like so many others who lived through the war, Bartali never spoke about his participation in this heroic resistance to fascism and the Holocaust. When asked about his silence, he would say only this: “I was no hero. Those who gave their lives, they were the heroes.” Others–particularly the Jews who owed their lives to Bartali’s heroism–disagreed.

Today is the first day of the 2012 Tour de France. We’re at the edge of our seats, waiting to see who will be crowned our newest Tour hero. Which man will conquer the field? Which one will conquer the clock? Which one will conquer the mountains? Which one will cross the finish in Paris wearing yellow?

We’re right to call them heroes in the limited sense of “champions.” We’re right to admire their heroic exploits in the physical sense.

But heroes cut from the same cloth as Gino Bartali, a man who combined physical prowess with profound courage? Heroes cut from the same cloth as…Buck Davidson?

No.

Never.

Sex, Lies, and Handlebar Tape

June 2, 2012 § 5 Comments

Yes, that’s really the name of a book. It was ranked #50 by Cycle Sport magazine in a listing of the greatest cycling books of all time.

I don’t know about you, but “great” is a pretty big word. The most interesting cycling books of all time? Okay. The 50 cycling books I’ve been given for Christmas/birthday because no one knew what else to get me? That’s fine. The best cycling books of all time? Uh, okay, maybe. But “great”? Great cycling books? Is there even one? Has there ever been a page, or a paragraph, or a sentence that was ever written about cycling that qualifies as “great”?

Great is a heavy word when attached to “book.” I’m thinking Joyce. Dickens. The complete words of Shakespeare. Idyssey. Oliad. The Socratic dialogues. Goodnight Moon. You know, the shit that’s going to still be read long after Romney gets elected and we all have to wear magic Mormon underpants.

So, I can save you some effort, some heavy lifting, and some spare change.

“Sex, Lies, and Handlebar Tape” by Paul Howard is not a great book. It’s not even a good book. If the standard is “great,” we’d have to dig down pretty deep into the “crappy shit thrown together by a fanboy posing as a writer” pile in order to properly peg this one. Still, if you happen to be a jocksniffer or a fanboy posing as a writer, this book is worth a read. Which is another way of saying I, who am both, enjoyed it.

The perhaps next to greatest cyclist of all time

The greatest is Merckx, followed by Fausto Coppi and/or Jacques Anquetil. This book is about Anquetil.

Jacques Anquetil was French. I told George Pomel that I was reading about Anquetil and he immediately corrected my pronunciation. It’s not “an” like in “flan,” but rather “an” as in “angioplasty.” So, as Knoll would say, there’s that.

Anquetil was from Normandy, where, we learn at the end of the book, it was pretty common for fathers to fuck their stepchildren and raise the child/grandchild as their legitimate offspring. Who knew? I thought we invaded the goddamned place to lock up all the Camembert cheese and kick out the fucking Nazis, but apparently it was also to preserve the rights of the father, kind of like in Tennessee, where “My pa’s my grandpa.”

Anquetil was a lusty old dude. He fornicated a lot before settling down to the quiet life of a child rapist. He fornicated with a married gal named Jeanine who already had two kids. She divorced her husband, married Pere Jacques, and took her two kids to live with him. Their names are Alain and Annie. Time comes and goes and Annie starts looking kind of pert to goaty ol’ Jacques. So, with Jeanine’s agreement, he starts fucking little Annie. She’s eighteen, and he’s raised her from childhood. They have a kid.

After twelve years, Annie decides that having ol’ Turdy France come wallop her in the bed before going into the next room to sleep the rest of the night with her mom isn’t working out for her. So she splits. Pere Jacques gets pissed. In order to make her come back and start fucking him again, he starts fucking the wife of Annie’s brother, Alain. Alain’s not cool with that, so he splits. Amazingly, Anquetil’s tactic of fucking the runaway bride’s sister in-law doesn’t coerce Annie to come back. Women.

Pere Jacques humps Dominique for a while then croaks. It’s not often that someone will fuck off and die quite so literally. But he did.

Misrepresentation

Happily, Anquetil’s sordid bedroom arrangements and child raping are left til the end of the story, and make up only a small part of the book. Unhappily, the title promises “Sex, Lies” first, and “Handlebar Tape” last, so we think we’re getting, like, two-thirds 50 Shades of Grey fuckpiece and one-third boring cycling shit, but wind up instead with three-fourths dreary recounting of Anquetil’s cycling career and one-fourth of his lurid evilty.

Like every champion before pro cyclists became coddled pussies, Anquetil’s story is interchangeable. He was born a peasant. He got a bike. He ripped everyone’s fucking legs off. He took more drugs than a Palmdale tweaker. He whupped ass in a bunch of famous races. He time trialed off the charts. He suffered like a dog. He raced in freezing rain. He had horrific crashes. He raced in blinding heat. He climbed. He sprinted. He was a weird dude.

Things that made him different

Fanboys and jocksniffers love to make their boy out to be different, point to his early upbringing, or his huge VO2 max, or some anomalous characteristic or physical quality that made him the champ. Fact is, they’re all freak motherfuckers who can keep suffering after everyone else quits. Pretty simple.

The real distinctions have squat to do with athleticism, and Anquetil was no different. He ate freaky shit during, before, and after races. He drank beer during races. He was a complete alcoholic. He partied like a madman until the wee hours, and still would get up and kick the snot out of Poulidor. He liked farming and animal husbandry and fucking his children and their spouses.

Great cycling book? Nope. Quick read about one twisted bastard? Yep.

Enjoy. Or not. By Paul Howard, available on Amazon as a Kindle download.

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