Fausto Coppi died at 8.45 on 2 January 1960, struck down by malaria contracted in the Upper Volta and mistaken for pneumonia in the Tortona hospital. Since then, the Campionissimo is remembered at the beginning of each year. What falls in 2013 is the 53rd anniversary of his death, but it is also the first to arrive in a cycling that after the Armstrong case, with the retroactive conviction for doping that deprived him of the seven Tours won on the road, seems to put doubt, if not invalidate, a hundred years of golden books. Because since there is cycling there is doping: today in its most sophisticated forms of the epo, once they called the forbidden additive bomb. And unlike our days when it is enough to admit having used it to be convicted, in Coppi's time it was possible to talk about it without great taboos. Everyone remembers, because it is often re-proposed in television amarcords, the duet of Coppi and Bartali at Mario Riva's Musichiere, the flagship Saturday night broadcast of Rai at the time. Paraphrasing the refrain of “Come Pioevava”, Fausto hummed: “I've won many tours of Italy, without using stimulant drugs…”. And Gino then replied: "Giri d'Italia yes he won, but he took it, oh he took it!".
It was the autumn of 1959, only a few months before the fateful tour in Africa, a fascinating mix of sport and hunting that intrigued Coppi, marking his fate. For Bartali and Coppi it was also an opportunity to announce on TV the "strange couple" for the new season with the now forty-year-old Campionissimo who would race under his great rival, in San Pellegrino, the team created and directed by Bartali. But fate wanted history to always remember them as adversaries, antagonists in everything, even on doping. “Bartali swore he had never taken drugs. A Bartali who swears is believed. Anyway, his business. For me if I found, in agreement with a trusted doctor, something that would make me go without my body suffering damage, I wouldn't hesitate to use it". So said Coppi in an utterance on the "bomb" picked up by Rino Negri, the historic signing of the Gazzetta dello Sport, and re-proposed in the special magazine that the "rose" dedicated in April 1980 to the memory of the Campionissimo. Why Bartali refused to take drugs was explained by two of his old followers like Corrieri and Soldan to Paolo Alberati, a passionate cyclist and author of two books on Coppi and Bartali: "Gino had tried the bomb once and had sent him over . He was already nervous about him: from the stimulant drugs he received more of an annoyance than an advantage ”.
Coppi felt the weight of calling himself Coppi. “I'm Coppi if I win a lot, especially if I win when no one expects it. This is why I say that if it were possible to find a medicine that is not harmful to the heart and nervous system, I would not hesitate to take it in order to win a lot, always. Here, I would love to be a chemist to be able to make the great discovery”. Today the forbidden word is epo, which oxygenates the blood. So what was in the "bomb" contained in a flask, kept in a jersey pocket close at hand just in case? The basis was well-sweetened, small coffees, added with pills of stimulants, from simpamine to the more expensive methedrine. Alberati in his "Fausto Coppi: a man alone in command" reports a testimony according to which Coppi himself, at the end of a Giro della Campania that he was already dominating, was seen pulling out a plastic bottle. He drank it and flew to the finish line, disappearing from the eyes of his rivals now on the ropes, who begged him to at least give up that help. Maybe it was just coffee because, as Coppi himself explains in the chat about stimulants, “for someone like me who is used to drinking only mineral water for months, it's enough to have two small coffees to stop sitting. When, on the other hand, wine and coffee are drunk continuously, then yes, it takes mule doses for the bomb to work".
In this regard, Coppi recalls having seen a magazine of medicines when he entered the hotel room of a Belgian masseur by mistake during the 1949 Tour. A doctor is always behind, when such treatments are given. And there are those who do them and almost never win. Strychnine does not turn men from crooks to champions. Just as a tube of simpamine does not change a draft horse into a foal”. Coppi's statements that brought back to the present day should make us reflect on the haste with which characters such as Pantani and, in recent months, Armstrong himself have been demonized and destroyed. You can't win Giros and Tours all the time just thanks to the epo. All the more so if for seven Tours – this is the case of Armstrong – we have undergone a barrage of checks without ever being positive. This is why the retroactivity of the punishment, even if it is exemplary for cycling to come, appears abnormal. Because in fact it calls into question the order of arrival of over one hundred years of racing given that not even doping control is able to intercept the increasingly sophisticated manipulations of doctors and sorcerers. And it all needs to be explained how since 1966, the year of the first anti-doping control, up to today Armstrong has been part of the (less and less numerous) list of runners that has passed unscathed through the gauntlet of urine and blood analyses.
In Coppi's time there were no controls. But he started talking about it so much that he made one for a test during the course of the Rome-Naples-Rome, a motor cycle race in stages characterized by stretches covered behind derny. “Remembering it makes me laugh out loud”, says Coppi speaking of that check after sterilized containers had been placed in each athlete's room where they could pee. “They found me almost alcoholic because the body fluid was not mine but that of a masseur who had lent himself as a joke to urinate for me. Ridiculous. I am a professional and I do what I want. If, on the contrary, you treat me as an amateur, reduce my taxes as well". More than enough admissions nowadays to send even a very champion who climbed into the highest empyrean of the immortals to hell one cold and foggy morning in early January 53 years ago.
This is to say how much Coppi was overrated, and idolized only because he died young. Bartali did not take drugs, he won, and he is also Righteous among the nations. But what are we talking about?