Eighty-one starters, eight finishers. Seems like explanation enough to understand why the Giro d'Italia's 1914 edition in widely regarded as the most difficult, most "fearsome" of all. Filled with 300 to 400 kilometer long stages, severely inclement weather, decrepit roads, hostile opponents and their supporters, there is little wonder that the race, firmly ensconced in a sport built around legend, borders on the extraordinary. At the finish, the grande finale of a terrible ordeal taking place on Milan's Velodromo Sempione, the "cheering acclaim died in the spectators' throats as one by one, the eight riders hobbled onto the presentation stage.'Tache Durando and his teammate Luigi Lucotti had to be held upright. Unhealed wounds from their terrible crashes on the previous stage had left Clemente Canepari and Ottavio Pratesi almost unrecognizable. The winner was a grime-etched skeleton [who might have just been found] crawling out of a collapsed mineshaft."
Ah yes, the English do have a certain way with words. Or maybe it is just the sound of them to our ears on this side of the world that makes them unique: "I began to understand why the 1914 pundits had decreed this stage the most forbidding: there were five ups for every down... the few towns I passed through were cursed with dauntingly steep high streets that I would gladly have pushed the bike up. But never did, because every one of them was dotted with witnesses, groups of locals idling in the shade with their arms folded, watching the world go by. And paying especially close attention when that world was one hundred years old, squeaking past on wooden wheels wearing a funny hat and Child Catcher goggles."
During an overnight stay at "the largest hotel for pensioners in southern Italy," Moore observed, "these people had been born into the almost medieval world of Calzolari-era southern Italy, and had since lived through some of the most profound changes any human is ever likely to experience; so much locked up in those heads, with the key now thrown away. I'd have smothered them all with a pillow, but it was pushing nine and I had a long ride ahead."
There are a lot of histories of particular races out there you can read. What raises this one above those many others is the way Moore moves back and forth between the race of 1914, and his own race along the same route undertaken some one-hundred years later. That alone might have proved daunting enough for many, but not satisfied with that challenge Moore made matters much worse by completing the ride on a one-hundred year old Hirondelle, painfully cobbled together, with wooden wheels, custom cut cork brake pads and whacks from a wrench. Part history, part travelogue, and all good stuff.
Moore, Tim Gironimo!: Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy New York: Pegasus Books Ltd, 2014
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