Gino Bartali

The house where Gino Bartali was born in Ponte a Ema, Florence

Gino Bartali was born in Ponte a Ema, Florence, Italy, the third son of four children of a smallholder,[5] Torello Bartali. He was powerfully built, with a broad nose and a boxer's face.[6] He earned pocket money by selling raffia to makers of covers for wine bottles. He began work in a bicycle shop when he was 13. He started racing at 13, became a promising amateur and turned professional in 1935 when he was 21. He was Italian champion the next year. On 14 November 1940, Bartali married Adriana Bani in Florence. The wedding was celebrated by Cardinal Dalla Costa and was blessed by Pope Pius XII, to whom Bartali donated a bicycle.

Bartali won a stage of the 1935 Giro d'Italia and was King of the Mountains, the first of seven times he won the title in the Giro. He was 20. In 1936, before he turned 22, he won the Giro and the Giro di Lombardia, although his season was marred when his brother, Giulio, died in a racing accident on 14 June.[7] Bartali came close to giving up cycling.

He was persuaded to return and in 1937 won the Giro again. His reputation outside Italy was that he was yet another Italian who could not ride well outside his country. There was some truth in the claim. The writer Tim Hilton said: "Bartali was essentially an Italian cyclist, a champion who rode within sight of his own people, and was uneasy when the Tour de France travelled north of Paris. He never disputed the northern classics."[8]

Stung by the claim, he rode the Tour de France in 1937. He got off to a bad start, losing more than eight minutes by the third stage and more than ten by the Ballon d'Alsace, a mountain in the Vosges. There he came back to life and led by 1m 14s over the rest and by enough over the leaders that he took the leader's jersey that night in Grenoble. But that was the end of his race. He and two helpers, Jules Rossi and Francesco Camusso, were riding across a wooden bridge over the river Colau when Rossi skidded. Bartali rode into a parapet and fell into the river.

Roger Lapébie wrote: "In the valley that leads to Briançon, I saw the accident to the maillot jaune, Bartali. The narrow and bumpy road ran along the foot of a rock. Suddenly Rossi, who was leading, took a bend badly, braked and his back wheel hit the parapet of a bridge. Bartali, who was beside Rossi, couldn't get clear and I saw him fall over the bridge and into the little river three metres below."[9] Camusso pulled him out. Bartali was cut to his arm and knee and had trouble breathing because of a blow to the chest. He rode on to the end of the day, often pushed by his helpers. He finished 10 minutes behind the rest but kept his lead.

He got through the Alps, by then having lost his jersey, and retired in Marseille. In one account, before he dropped out, he notified the organiser, Henri Desgrange, who said: "You are the first rider to come to see me before dropping out. You're a good man [un brave garçon], Gino. We'll see each other again next year and you'll win."[3] However, Bartali later claimed that the Italian Cycling Federation forced him to withdraw, perhaps because of his political opposition to Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime. “When the doctor didn’t want me to race, ‘they’ made me race; when I should have withdrawn, they made me continue; when, after the four difficult stages, I was getting better, they sent me home,” he said.[10]

The 4-speed bicycle Bartali rode to victory in the general classification of the 1938 Tour de France

He did return in 1938 and overcame the teamwork of the Belgians, the cold and rain and a puncture on the Col de l'Iseran. He won the hardest stage, from Digne to Briançon, by more than five minutes. The radio commentator Georges Briquet, after he had seen the crowds of Italians greeting Bartali with green-white-red flags said: "These people had found a superman. Outside Bartali's hotel at Aix-les-Bains, an Italian general was shouting 'Don't touch him – he's a god.'" A public subscription was started in his name in Italy, and Benito Mussolini was among the contributors.

The approaching war led Italy not to send a team in 1939.

Bartali c. 1945

Bartali won the Giro d'Italia twice before the war – in 1936 and 1937 – and once after it (1946). He won classics such as Milan–San Remo, the Giro di Lombardia and the Züri-Metzgete. His most famous victory was the 1948 Tour de France.

Bartali used bicycle training as a cover for secret efforts to rescue Jews.

Bartali earned respect for his work in helping Jews who were being persecuted by the Nazis during the time of the Italian Social Republic. He appears as a character in the 1978 novel, The Assisi Underground: The Priest who Rescued Jews, and in the 1985 American television film adaptation, both based on the real-life account by Father Rufino Niccacci.

It emerged in December 2010 that Bartali had hidden a Jewish family in his cellar and, according to one of the survivors, saved their lives in doing so.[16]

Bartali used his fame to carry messages and documents to the Italian Resistance.[17][18] Bartali cycled from Florence through Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche, many times traveling as far afield as Assisi, all the while wearing the racing jersey emblazoned with his name. Neither the Fascist police nor the German troops risked discontent by arresting him.

Giorgio Nissim, a Jewish accountant from Pisa,[17] was a member of DELASEM,[19] founded by the Union of the Israelitic Communities to help Jewish Italians escape persecution. The network in Tuscany was discovered in autumn 1943 and all Jewish members except Nissim sent to concentration camps. With the help of the Archbishops of Genoa Pietro Boetto and Florence Elia Dalla Costa, the Franciscan Friars of Assisi and others, Nissim reorganized DELASEM in Tuscany and helped 800 survive.

Nissim died in 2000. His sons found from his diaries that Bartali had used his fame to help. Nissim and the Oblati Friars of Lucca forged documents and needed photographs of those they were helping. Bartali used to leave Florence in the morning, pretending to train, ride to Assisi where many Jews were hiding in the Franciscan convents, collect their photographs and ride back to Nissim.[4][20][21] At Assisi Bartali was in direct contact with Rufino Niccacci.[22] Bartali also used his position to learn about raids on safehouses.

Bartali was eventually taken to Villa Triste in Florence. The SD and the Italian RSS official Mario Carità questioned Bartali, threatening his life.[21] In spite of any threats, Bartali did not reveal what he had done. Even after the war he never boasted his merits; he used to say: "Some medals are made to hang on the soul, not the jacket."[23]

Bartali continued working with the Assisi Network. In 1943, he led Jewish refugees towards the Swiss Alps himself. He cycled, pulling a wagon with a secret compartment, telling patrols it was just part of his training. Bartali told his son Andrea only that "One does these things and then that's that".[21]

In June 2012, a book about Bartali's wartime activities, Road To Valor by Aili and Andres McConnon, was published.[24]

In 2013, Yad Vashem awarded Gino Bartali the honour Righteous Among the Nations.[25] He is a central figure in the 2014 documentary My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes.[4] In 2007, the script for a movie based on Bartali during World War II, called Lion Man of Tuscany was on the Black List, a survey of the "most liked" un-produced scripts in Hollywood.[26]

In 2017, research by Michele Sarfatti questioned Bartali's efforts to save Jewish lives, referring to the very limited sources and contradicting that Bartali would have described this in his diaries.[27] In 2021, Marco and Stefano Pivato corroborated this stance by Sarfatti, calling the whole story 'invented' ('una storia inventata').[28][29] In 2021, an interview with Sergio Della Pergola, an Israeli-Italian academic who was involved in Yad Vashem’s investigation of Bartali’s role during the war, was published in the Corriere della Sera. Outlining some of the evidence regarding Bartali’s efforts during the war, he disagreed with the argument put forth by Sarfatti and Marco and Stefano Pivato. He was quoted as saying: “To question whether Gino Bartali risked his life to save Jews is like denying that the Earth is round.”[30]

Bartali was a good climber and a pioneer of derailleur gears. His style was unusual: he rarely danced on the pedals and often stayed in the saddle throughout a 15 km climb. When others attacked, he stayed in the saddle but changed up a gear, to a sprocket three teeth smaller.

He rode smoothly on mountains but every now and then freewheeled, always with his right foot lowered with his weight on it. Then a second or two later he would start pedalling again.

Bartali's feat of winning three consecutive mountain stages (13, 14 and 15) in the 1948 Tour de France has never been equalled. It is one of the most astonishing accomplishments in the history of road cycling. It would be 50 years before anyone again won three consecutive stages, when Italian cyclist Mario Cipollini did so in the early (flat) stages of the 1999 Tour de France, winning four consecutive sprint finishes in stages 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Bartali's rivalry with Fausto Coppi divided Italy.[13] Bartali, a conservative, was venerated in the rural, agrarian south, while Coppi, more worldly, secular, innovative in diet and training, was a hero of the industrial north.

The lives of each came together on 7 January 1940 when Eberrardo Pavesi, head of the Legnano team, took on Coppi to ride for Bartali. Bartali thought Coppi was "as thin as a mutton bone", but accepted. Their rivalry started when Coppi, the helper, won the Giro and Bartali, the star, marshalled the two men's team to chase him. By the 1948 world championship at Valkenburg, both climbed off rather than help the other win. The Italian cycling association said: "They have forgotten to honour the Italian prestige they represent. Thinking only of their personal rivalry, they abandoned the race, to the approbation of all sportsmen." They were suspended for two months.[31]

The thaw partly broke when the pair shared a drink bottle during the climb of the Col d'Izoard in the 1952 Tour[32] but the two men fell out over who had offered it. "I did," Bartali insisted. "He never gave me anything."[33] Their rivalry was the subject of intense coverage and resulted in many epic races.

When professional cycle racing resumed in 1946 after World War II, Bartali narrowly beat Coppi in that year's Giro, while Coppi won Milan–San Remo. Bartali won the Tour de Suisse twice, another Milan–San Remo, and the 1948 Tour de France – a full ten years after his last victory. Coppi took victories in the 1947 Giro d'Italia, the Giro di Lombardia and the Grand Prix des Nations.

Despite the rivalry, perhaps heightened by Coppi's victory in the 1949 Giro, Bartali supported Coppi's bid in the 1949 Tour de France. The two Italian teammates destroyed the race as a contest in a mountainous Alpine stage over the Col de Vars and Col d'Izoard. When Coppi had a puncture on the Izoard, Bartali waited for him, then Bartali did the same and Coppi waited. On the final climb to Briançon, Coppi allowed Bartali to win (on his 35th birthday) and take the yellow jersey. But Coppi assumed the maillot jaune the following day after Bartali had a puncture with 40 km of the stage still to race. Coppi retained the lead to Paris, while Bartali took second place.

The 1950 Tour de France saw him lead the Italian team again, with Coppi electing not to contest the race, but having been threatened by frenzied fans, the entire Italian team resigned from the race.

Bartali always suspected that Coppi took drugs. On the hairpins of the Col di Bracco, during a stage of the 1946 Giro from Genoa to Montecatini Terme, Coppi drank from a glass phial and threw it into the verge. Bartali drove back after the race and found it. He said:

With the meticulous care of a detective collecting evidence for fingerprinting I picked it up, dropped it into a white envelope and put it carefully in my pocket. The next day I rushed round to my personal doctor and asked him to send the phial to a lab for analysis. Disappointment: no drug, no magic potion. It was nothing more than an ordinary tonic, made in France, that I could have bought without a prescription.[34]

I realised that I should have to try to outsmart him and I devised my own investigation system. The first thing was to make sure I always stayed at the same hotel for a race and to have the room next to his so I could mount surveillance. I would watch him leave with his mates, then I would tiptoe into the room which ten seconds earlier had been his headquarters. I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything. I had become so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage. I would work out, according to the traces of the product I found, how and when he would attack me.[34]

Bartali with wife Adriana Bani and sons Andrea and Luigi Bartali in 1963

Bartali grew up in a religious family in Tuscany, and his belief earned him the nickname "Gino the Pious". He prayed before meals and resented when teammates swore. In contrast, Coppi grew up in Piedmont in the north and was not religious at all. Bartali was proud that Pope John XXIII had asked him to teach him to ride a bicycle.[6] He made no secret that he supported the Catholic-leaning Christian Democratic Party but his personality ensured that he was forgiven by the rival communists.[6] Tim Hilton wrote: "Bartali was a genuinely religious man, making his devotions public and, in return, becoming the Vatican's favourite sportsman – he was personally blessed by three popes. He would set up shrines in his hotel bedrooms when he rode the Giro and the Tour de France, and, on some mountains, children from summer camps sang canticles as he pedalled past, a priest conducting their infant worship."[8]

Bartali was frequently pessimistic. One of his customary phrases was "Everything's wrong; we'll have to start all over again."[6] The best the historian Pierre Chany could say of him was that while he often boasted of what he had done on mountains when nobody was there to see him, he had the grace never to tell the story differently.

Bartali lived at 173 via Chiantigiana, Florence in a home full of souvenirs. His wife died in 2014 aged 94.

Bartali stopped racing when he was 40, after being injured in a road accident.[5] By then he had lost much of his money. His wealth was "uncertain", said René de Latour.[11]

Bartali had a heart bypass operation and then died of a heart attack in May 2000, having received the last rites 10 days earlier. He left behind his wife, Adriana, two sons and a daughter. The prime minister, Giuliano Amato, sent condolences. Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, called him "a symbol of the most noble sportsmanship." The Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) called for two days of mourning and silence was observed before sports events.

Gino Bartali

• Legends of Italian sport - Walk of Fame
• 69500 Ginobartali, asteroid
• Cycling records
• Yellow jersey statistics
• Pink jersey statistics
• List of Grand Tour general classification winners
• List of Tour de France general classification winners
• List of Tour de France secondary classification winners
• List of Giro d'Italia general classification winners
• Individuals and groups assisting Jews during the Holocaust
• List of Righteous Among the Nations by country
• History of the Jews in Italy
• List of Italians

• Buzzati, Dino (1998). The Giro D'Italia: Coppi Versus Bartali at the 1949 Tour of Italy. Boulder, Colorado: Velo Press. ISBN 978-1-884737-51-0.
• Foot, John (2011). Pedalare! Pedalare!: A History of Italian Cycling. London: A & C Black. ISBN 978-0-7475-9521-2.
• McConnon, Aili; McConnon, Andres (2012). Road to Valour: Gino Bartali – Tour De France Legend and World War Two Hero. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-85999-4.

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• Gino Bartali at Cycling Archives
• Gino Bartali at ProCyclingStats
• Gino Bartali at CycleBase
• Gino Bartali at Cycling Archives
• Gino Bartali Cycling Museum (in Italian)