* * * * *

In 1930, a non-appearance fee was paid by the Giro organisers. Alfredo Binda had by then established a stranglehold on the corsa rosa, winning in 1925, 1927, 1928 and 1929, in all of them riding for Legnano. It wasn’t just that Binda kept winning, it was the manner of his victories. In 1927 he had won twelve of the fifteen stages, in 1928 seven of twelve and 1929 nine of fourteen. In all, that’s thirty-three out of forty-one stages in three years. Giro boss Emilio Colombo was getting more than a little bit bored by il campionissimo. More to the point, La Gazzetta dello Sport‘s readers were getting bored by il campionissimo: circulation was down. So a plan was hatched between Colombo and his sidekick Armando Cougnet on one side and Legnano owner Emilio Bozzi and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi, on the other: Binda would be politely asked to bugger off.

Alfredo Binda (Source: Cycling Hall of Fame)

Bozzi was willing to play ball because Binda taking a dive made commercial sense: another Binda victory wasn’t go to help sell many more bikes. But, at the same time, Bozzi didn’t want to simply surrender and allow Maino or Atala or Bianchi to step in and bag an easy victory. Here Pavesi came to Bozzi’s assistance, promising that he had a talented young rider waiting in the wings who could, quite possibly, profit from the absence of Binda. Pavesi was also concerned that Binda was having life just a little too easy, and had stopped taking cycling as seriously as he should be (or, at least, as seriously as Pavesi thought he should be).

With everyone else on board, it was time to pitch the deal to Binda. He listened to what was being told to him. And he agreed that yes, he was strangling the Giro and that yes, that was unfortunate. It would be best if he stayed away. You can imagine the sigh of relief this must have elicited. Only then Binda delivered an upper cut of sheer elegance. He demanded that, if Colombo really wanted him to stay away, he’d have to pay a non-appearance fee: the equivalent of the first prize, plus six stage wins, plus the bonus Bozzi would have had to pay him if he won. All in, the thick end of 22,500 lire. And even there, Binda claimed, he was being exceedingly generous, as failure to win the Giro would cost him a packet on the post-Giro critérium circuit (even then, riders needed the appearance fees paid on the critérium circuit). Colombo swallowed hard but saw he had little or no choice in the matter. The deal was done. Colombo, having stared down the demands for appearance fees in 1924, caved to the demand for a non-appearance fee. Once again commerce triumphed principles.

At which point appearance fees re-enter this story. Up to now Binda hadn’t taken a tilt at the Tour de France, preferring the Giro. It is said that the reason for this was that Legnano had no business interests in France, but this isn’t entirely true: they were there in force in 1924, and Ottavio Bottecchia’s two victories for Automoto demonstrate clearly that the Italian media gave the French Tour ample coverage, so long as one of their own was winning. The main reason Binda hadn’t bothered with the Tour is more likely to have something to do with that post-Giro critérium circuit; having won the corsa rosa and then filled his boots with the round-the-houses races and track appearances, it’s highly unlikely he was ever in much of a state to tackle the Tour. The fact is, few Giro winners had the legs to tackle the Tour, as we’ll see when we come to look at the 1924 Tour itself, which was graced by the presence of the reigning Giro champion Giuseppe Enrici.

The post-Giro critériums sapping Binda’s strength would not, of course, be the case in 1930. So with Binda now sitting out the Giro, and the Tour having just switched to national team format, Henri Desgrange – it’s claimed – saw an opportunity to get the best Italian rider of the day riding in his race. He offered Binda a generous appearance fee to ride the Tour.

It’s said by some that the reason Binda eventually pulled out of the Tour, ten stages in, eleven stages to go, is that he’d bled Desgrange dry and there was simply no more money to pay him to continue. If you look, though, at the 1930 Tour, you see a possible alternative reason: alongside Binda on the Italian team was Maino’s Learco Guerra, a rising star. When the Italian squadra snatched the maillot jaune on the second stage of the race, it was Guerra who wore it, not Binda, who was twelve seconds off yellow and in third place. The hills were yet to come and he was more than capable of clawing back time once the road went upwards. So Binda had nothing to worry about. Until he lost more than an hour after suffering a major mechanical on the road from Bordeaux to Hendaye, just before the race reached the mountains. That was his race for yellow done for. Time for him to turn to consolation prizes.

The next day, Hendaye into Pau, the campionissimo took the stage win. The same again the day after, Pau to Luchon. And on the third day – Luchon to Perpignan – he retired from the race, with his compatriot Guerra having finally surrendered the maillot jaune and eleven minutes to André Leducq. When the race made it back to Paris, Guerra was just fourteen minutes off Leducq’s pace, and stood standing on the second step of the podium.

It took a lot of spinning to explain Binda’s abandonment of the race, especially with his teammate in yellow and in need of support. Hence, perhaps, the legendary stories of Binda having bled Desgrange dry. The Italian cycling federation tried to claim that their campionissimo was saving himself for the Worlds (which, in fairness, he did go on to win). But many, many years later Binda finally offered his own reason: Colombo had welshed on the Giro deal and the agreed 22,500 lire non-appearance fee had failed to materialise. Even so, Binda was still proud of his ‘victory’ in that 1930 Giro, as he explained to Pierre Chany:

It was my best Giro. I didn’t just get the prizes without riding, but I took up about ten contracts on the track in France, Germany and Belgium. The records say I won the Giro five times, but I consider that I won it five and a half times.”

The appearance fees issue was put to rest – sort of – after the war, with the establishment of the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo, a precursor of the old Super Prestige Pernod trophy and today’s World Tour. To encourage the big teams to send their best riders to all the races making up the season-long competition, the organising journals – L’Équipe in France, La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy and Les Sports and Sportwereld-Het Nieusblad in Belgium – dangled the carrot of generous travelling expenses under the noses of the teams. Today, Pro Teams in the World Tour races are guaranteed a minimum appearance fee of €7,500 each, with the ASO raising that to €51,443 at the Tour de France. The teams don’t think it’s enough and – as in 1924 – are still agitating for more.

The deal hammered out for the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo races clearly wasn’t the end of the issue. The Tour de France may have been able to attract the cream of the peloton, but the two other Grand Tours – the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia – suffered a little in the shadow of other races, especially the Tour. Too often the Giro was used just as a training ride for the Tour, no more important – for some riders – than the Tour de Romandie which itself served as a leg-loosener for the Giro. So sometimes the Giro organisers had to take out the cheque-book and entice the best riders to put in an appearance.

Appearance fees weren’t the only thing that had the Giro organisers reaching for their cheque-book. Sometimes certain riders – certain Italian riders – needed a little bit of help when it came to ensuring that the maglia rosa stayed in Italy. The stories here are legion, although the facts supporting them are few. But it does seem that the Giro organisers paid for the right result on several occasions. (And sometimes they didn’t even pay, they just helped in other ways, such as cancelling stages and turning a blind eye to infringements of the rules.)

Other times, extra money was spent to liven a race up: consider, for instance, the 100,000 wager La Gazzetta‘s Rino Negri had with Roger de Vlaeminck over how many stages he could win at the 1975 Giro. And, of course, the issue of disappearance fees was also on the agenda that year. When Eddy Merckx‘s Molteni squad was pulled from the 1975 corsa rosa just before the start, the official reason given was that Merckx had taken ill at the Tour of Romandie. Some suspected that Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa, had paid the Belgian off. Italy, at this stage, was so bored with the Cannibal’s reign of terror in the Giro – five victories, plus that near victory in 1969 – that RAI had stopped covering the race live. With Merckx gone and Torriani delivering a corker of a race in 1975, RAI returned to the corsa rosa the following year. Whatever money Torriani had spent on that 1975 Giro, it was a wise investment.

Chucking out money to the odd team or rider here or there was relatively easy to do. Paying off everyone in the race is of a different order of magnitude. Especially given the precarious financial position of the Giro and of its organising journal, La Gazzetta dello Sport. Which, in 1977, was taken over by the RCS group. One of the grand ironies of this take-over was that La Gazzetta was now part of a stable of newspapers that included the Corriere della Sera, that newspaper whose guns La Gazzetta had spiked back in 1908 with their pre-emotive announcement of the Giro d’Italia. And the paper to which La Gazzetta had needed to go cap in hand in order to ensure they had sufficient finances to actually run the inaugural Giro in 1909.

The RCS group had started life in the 1920s when Angelo Rizzoli created a small publishing company, Rizzoli & Co, later to become Rizzoli Editore. In 1974 Rizzoli took over Corriere della Sera and the newly-merged company became Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera. By the end of the seventies, with La Gazzetta now part of the company’s publishing empire, the future should have been bright for RCS.

Things went tits up for RCS in the eighties when they found themselves caught up in the Banco Ambrosiano and the P2 scandals and – in 1982 – went in and out of bankruptcy. The 1982 Giro itself was very nearly cancelled. Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa,  had to stand personal guarantor of its debts. Torriani was by now into his sixties and had been running the Giro for three decades. He certainly didn’t need the headache, but he wasn’t going to sit back and watch his race – and it would be fair, at this stage, to call it his race – to be ruined by the financial incompetence of others. Knowing his own shortcomings, Torriani called in a man to do the jobs he himself couldn’t do. That man was Carmine Castellano and, together with Torriani, he set about saving the corsa rosa.

The Giro was saved, in the end, by the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry. Well, the American Coca-Cola corporation, which stepped up to the plate. It wasn’t their black gold that the men from Atlanta showered on the Giro, it was one of their other brands, Sprite (about to be launched in Italy), which became the drink that saved the Giro. (If you think that Coke entered cycling when their bidons began appearing at the Tour de France after 1985, think again. You can even date Coke’s interest in cycling to earlier than 1982: back in 1968 it was their money which had been used in one of the failed attempts to get a young Eddy Merckx to ride the Tour.)

Scroll forward to 2000. In the post-Festina years the Giro suffered heavily from an association with doping, not just through stars like Marco Pantani being laid low by controversy, but also through the Italian judicial authorities making their presence felt at the Giro, raiding hotel rooms and tickling collars with alarming regularity. You would imagine that the teams had enough on their plates at the time but – surprisingly – revenue sharing was again high on their agenda. A group of teams – through the Assogruppi, the Association of Italian Sporting Groups, headed by Moreno Argentin – demanded a share of the Giro’s TV and merchandising revenues. And they figured they knew just what it would take to grab the race organiser’s attention: strike!

Rather than boycotting the race itself – clearly someone had learned a lesson from the 1924 Giro – this time the Italian teams decided they would refuse to participate in their media duties: post-race interviews and podium ceremonies were to be boycotted. Nor would they wear any of the race leader’s jerseys, including the maglia rosa. This they announced on the eighth stage. Moreno Argentin made his position clear:

They are prepared to talk […] but they never talk of the congestion of television rights and advertising. They want to see how strong we are. This is the only sport in the world in which ninety-five percent of the costs are covered by sponsors and five percent by television rights. Riders are paid by us and without riders, there would be no cycling.”

On the tenth stage of the race the Assogruppi took action. Stage winner Ivan Quaranta (Mobilvetta) and maglia rosa wearer Francesco Casagrande (Vini Caldirola) were no-shows on the podium and refused to talk to journalists from La Gazzetta or RAI. Polti’s direttore sportivo Gianluigi Stanga, speaking on behalf of the Italian teams, had this to say:

Bicycle racing changes. Twenty years ago, TV rights were not a topic, but today I think that it’s normal that the teams – and their sponsors who invest in them – get a say in where the money goes.”

 

The reason the dispute was limited to the Italian teams was that they believed foreign teams were being paid more than they were to ride the Giro. This sort of complaint was typical of the Spanish teams and riders in the Vuelta, especially in the sixties and seventies. Riders regularly complained about the vast sums being lavished on foreign teams in the form of appearance fees, especially when they fielded half-strength squads or just used the Spanish Tour as a warm-up for the Giro. Or even used the Vuelta as a way to make money, selling their services to the highest bidder. Pedro Delgado complained about this aspect of the Vuelta in his autobiography:

Apart from getting paid a good starting fee by the organisation, [the foreign teams] would accept ‘offers’ from the team of an escaped rider in return for not chasing him down. The system of these strong teams, especially the Dutch, was to only allow solitary breakaways, letting them build up a considerable leeway. These teams, filled with powerful road-men, were so dominant they could close down the escape in the final kilometres unless they found some other ‘interest’ in the stage.”

But the fact was the Vuelta needed to pay appearance fees in order to attract the stars of continental European cycling: in the years before and after Franco’s death, Spain was not high on people’s must-visit lists. How much the Giro needed foreign stars – and whether or how much they paid for them – is debatable.

RCS Sport responded to the Assogruppi’s actions with more words. They pointed out the long history of the race. They pointed out how the profits made on the Giro subsidised other RCS Sport events. Then they tried to kick the issue upstairs to the UCI:

The situation demands a careful analysis, in which the organisers and rider representatives must debate responsibly. After that we can perhaps change things. RCS Sport does not believe that such a serious problem can be resolved through a unilateral imposition of a solution, without assessing all of the information and comparing accordingly. The organisers have tried every effort to invite the Assogruppi to the discussions, but emotion seems to have prevailed over logic.

Before answering negatively to the ultimatum given to us by the Assogruppi, we want to verify our own position in the dispute and are seeking UCI president Hein Verbruggen’s opinion. We hope, however, that the Giro can continue as normal, and we would like to start the debate at its conclusion, rather than coming to a hasty compromise.”

The promise of talks, though, was sufficient for the Assogruppi to back down and life in the 2000 Giro returned to normal, or what passed for normality in the Giro in those days. What came of the subsequent talks between Assogruppi and RCS Sport isn’t clear, but nothing really changed, except for the UCI amending its rules with regard to travel expenses and participation allowances.

Appearance fees at the Giro became an issue again when the un-retiring Lance Armstrong made his return to the peloton, with the corsa rosa joining races like the Tour Down Under and the Tour of Ireland in the rush to hand over big bags of swag to the American in order to get him to put in an appearance at their races.

Then we come to last year, and the return to the centre of the stage of the appearance-fees issue, once again linked to TV revenues. At the Tour we had that little strop some of the AIGCP teams pulled, refusing to cooperate with ASO on certain media duties, specifically the issue of in-car race coverage (ironically, one of the points on the AIGCP’s ten-point plan to improve cycling). That doesn’t seem to have endeared them greatly to Marie-Odile Amaury and the attempts to get ASO to hand over a share of their profits – or even engage in talks over handing over a share of their profits – made little progress.

This week’s announcement from Jonathan Vaughters, that the AIGCP and RCS Sport were in advanced negotiations with regard to the issue of revenue sharing at the Giro, suggests that the AIGCP have adopted a different tactic in their negotiations: it’s easier to talk to someone who’s willing to listen and has something to gain from what is being proposed. On the surface, the notion of the Giro sharing a slice of their TV income with the teams makes sense. Michele Acquarone, interviewed by Daniel Friebe, has acknowledged that, over the last few years, the Giro has stood still while the Tour de France has marched forward. This, he knows, has to change:

Now we have to make up ground, and we can do it by trying to convince the biggest stars to come to our race, but it’ll still be their decision. Our biggest weapon in that battle for hearts and minds is the audience; the more people are watching, the more stars will want to come.”

 

The converse of that is equally true: the more stars who take on the Giro, the more people will watch the race. The Giro, after years of going toe-to-toe with the Vuelta over who can find the toughest climbs, is now living up to its marketing slogan: the hardest race in the most beautiful place. But, in audience share, it is still a league below the Tour. A revenue-sharing deal that’s structured around teams bringing their ‘A’ game to the Giro would help the race as much as it would help the teams. The Tour’s status in the minds of ordinary sports fans as the great bike race could even, finally, be challenged.

Acquarone, Bisconti, and Vegni in Milan at the Giro unveiling (Source: Pedalare Tricolore)

But Acquarone has also indicated that he is willing to play a long game with the Giro, and will not necessarily rush to bribe the biggest stars of the day to race the Giro:

What we can do, the only thing, is to build up the biggest possible international audience and grow our race so that our team is ready when a huge star comes along and captures the imagination again. We haven’t had that pied piper effect for the last few years, that excitement, and yet the race has grown, so that at least shows we’re moving in the right direction.”

On the issue of the proposed revenue-sharing deal with RCS Sport, though, it would appear that Vaughters may have jumped the gun to some extent. He himself did indicate that no deal was actually on the table, that the two sides were merely in discussion:

I’m very pleased with the negotiations with RCS and hope to have a deal that’s mutually beneficial at some time in the near future. I’ve been really happy with how RCS and Michele Acquarone has treated the teams. We’re really excited about the possibility of this partnership.”

Now, though, it is being reported that no deal is likely to be reached in the short term. Acquarone has indicated to VeloNews that talks are more likely to take place in the off season, November and December. Acquarone has also indicated that he was surprised to hear an announcement from Vaughters so soon and that any deal would be tied to future TV deals, not current ones. And here one needs to take a step back and look at the RCS Media group as a whole. The group may have turnover north of €2,000 million, but in 2011 they reported losses of more than €300 million, compared to a profit of €7 million in 2010.

A deal with RCS Sport would, of course, open the door to deals with other race organisers and, eventually, ASO. However, what those race organisers have to gain from such a deal needs to be considered. For the smaller events, some form of revenue-sharing deal that guarantees teams will bring their A squads would help generate more revenue from TV rights, a portion of which could be shared with the teams. But what’s in this for ASO?

TV rights for ASO events are currently sold in a package that includes the Tour as well as Paris-Nice, the Critérium International, Paris-Roubaix, the Flèche-Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Tours, and other ASO events. A race like Paris-Nice could, perhaps, benefit from the teams taking it more seriously, but is there much to be gained at Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège or even the Flèche-Wallonne? Or take the Critérium du Dauphiné – ASO are still trying to bed that race down having only taken it over in recent years, and the level of prize money being paid there suggests it is not yet profitable. But serving as it already does as one of the major pre-Tour warm-up events, can the teams offer ASO more at the Dauphiné?

Consideration also needs to be given to the fact that ASO’s current deal extends through to 2015. If RCS Sport tie a revenue-sharing deal to future TV deals, you can expect the same from ASO. Which suggests no deal with ASO is likely to be forthcoming within the next year or two.

A lot has changed in cycling since Italian teams tried to hold a gun to the heads of the Giro organisers in 1924 in an effort to gain a greater slice of the cake. Down through the years progress has been made on the issue of appearance fees and the teams have managed to extract a larger slice of the cake from race organisers. Whether we’re really on the cusp of a new deal, or whether we are seeing a repeat of 2000 – talks that ultimately go nowhere – well, only time will tell.

The Giro d'Italia, circa 1924

In the 1920s, cycling had but two Grand Tours. The Spanish were only slowing getting into gear, in 1924 launching a tour of the Basque Country. A Tour of Spain itself was still a long, long way off. For the two Grand Tours that did exist, the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, a comfortable formula had established itself: racing days alternating with rest days.

The racing days themselves were mammoth affairs, the shortest about the length of the longest stage in modern Grand Tours, the longest more than 400 kilometres. Riders would start in the dead of night, racing over roads that were little more than rock-strewn dirt tracks, to finish in the mid-afternoon, often in crowd-filled vélodromes, hopefully in time for the journalists covering the event to get their stories off so fans could spend the next morning reading about what had happened the day before. And fans did have to wait until the next morning to find out what happened, it was the 1930s before the Giro and the Tour went multimedia, with the arrival of radio.

The percorso of the 1924 Giro went like this:

Alfonsina Strada, legend has it, was officially entered in the Giro under the name Alfonsin Strada, with the big reveal – He’s a she! – coming after the race had set off. The Italians love their polemica and really know how to stir it. Certainly the column inches Strada generated for La Gazzetta easily helped make up for the lack of big-name riders. And helped to sell lots of newspapers. Here was a point that the teams and their stars had overlooked with their attempt to extort more money from the race organisers: La Gazzetta was faced with a new rival, the Corriere dello Sport, and circulation was down. And, consequently, so too was profit. Not only could La Gazzetta not afford the extra costs the teams wanted to impose upon them but they also desperately needed a circulation boost. The scandals – a lack of stars and the Devil in a Skirt – gave them just that.

In both her Giri di Lombardia, Strada had finished at the back of the field. Little more of her was expected in the corsa rosa. Even La Gazzetta acknowledged, from the start, that this would be the case, saying:

Alfonsina doesn’t challenge anybody for victory, she just wants to show that even the weak sex can do the same as strong men. Might she be a vanguard for feminism that demonstrates its stronger capacity in order to demand the rights to vote in local or national elections?”

La Gazzetta could present her as an icon of feminism, but the truth was they were using Strada to create a spectacle, to give the tifosi something to get excited about in the absence of the likes of Costante Girardengo (Maino), Giovanni Brunero (Legnano), and Ottavio Bottecchia (Automoto). And a spectacle is exactly what Strada gave the Giro. La Gazzetta, describing Strada and the crowd that cheered her passing, had this to say of the woman “with a short baby haircut and even shorter shorts from which the hems of her jumper in particular protruded:”

She pedalled with self-confidence and cheer, like a schoolboy playing truant. The public that lined the streets in the passing villages immediately noted her with exclamations of wonder, the women in particular perhaps scandalised to see her like this […] hardly representing their sex.”

But, for Strada, the Giro was not just about spectacle. Every day – well, every other day – she still had to get from A to B. At the end of the first stage, 300 kilometres from Milan down to Genoa on the Ligurian coast, Strada was an hour off Bartolomeo Aymo’s stage-winning pace (eleven hours two minutes and three seconds, nearly ten minutes faster than second placed Federico Gay, of Alcyon). In the last three Giri, Aymo had finished third, second, and third (the first two with Legnano, the last with Atala) and already looked set to secure another podium finish as a minimum. Rolling home in fourth on the day, 18’39” down on Aymo, was the winner of the 1920 Giro, Gaetano Belloni, accompanied by his Legnano team-mate Giuesppe Enrici. That was the best Belloni could do in the 1924 Giro. As for Enrici, who’d stood on the bottom step of the podium in 1922, his first proper season in the pro peloton, well he was down, well down, on the day. But far from out.

Giuseppe Enrici in the 1924 Giro (Source: BikeRaceInfo.com)

For Enrici, the second stage was about pulling back some of that time lost on that first day. At the end of the second stage – 307 kilometres from Genoa to Florence – Gay had taken the stage, just ahead of Enrici, with Aymo ceding seven minutes and finishing down in fifth. The peloton itself was already whittled down to just sixty-five riders, thirty-five riders already no longer part of the race. Strada, a real stayer, wasn’t among the thirty-five, she was still riding on when others had fallen by the wayside. Slowly riding on, yes, but still riding and not always the last one home: arriving into Florence she was fifty-sixth and just over two hours behind Gay. The time differential hardly seemed of consequence to the tifosi. Of that day’s racing La Gazzetta noted:

In only two stages, this little lady’s popularity has become greater than all the missing champions put together.”

 

On the 284 kilometre run from Florence to Rome Strada was two and a half hours off the pace set by Gay, who again won the stage. Aymo was forced to abandon the Giro early, leaving Gay to take the lead, with a fourteen minute advantage over Enrici. The Giro would now be a straight fight between an Alcyon rider (Gay) and a Legnano rider (Enrici).

On the 249 kilometre sprint from Rome to Naples Strada was again more than two hours behind the stage winner, Zanaga. Gay put another couple of minutes into Enrici, extending his overall lead out to sixteen minutes. La Gazzetta, in its reporting of that day, noted how much attention Strada had received during the Giro’s stay in Rome:

“There was the usual hullabaloo around Alfonsina who arrived at the checkpoint in a new bright outfit. This woman is becoming famous. Yesterday some receptions were held in her honour. The good Romans gave her flowers, a new jersey and even a pair of ear rings. She is radiant.”

Back in those days Grand Tour stages typically started where the previous stage ended. In the 1924 Giro this was true, with the exception of the fourth and fifth stages: on the rest day between the two the riders had to travel south from Naples to Potenza, about 150 kilometres as the crow flies, by-passing along the way Mt Veseuvius.

Nothing much changed on the last of the southward bound stages, the run down to Taranto from Potenza. Ditto could be said – or not said – of the ride north up to Foggia. But the next two stages – into the heart of the Apennines, Foggia to L’Aquilla and L’Aquilla to Perugia – were where the 1924 Giro was won and lost.

On the first day in the Apennines Enrici put more than seventeen minutes into Gay, overturning his deficit and taking the overall lead with a margin of just one minute. The next day Enrici again won the stage and this time Gay ceded more than thirty-nine minutes to his rival.

As for Alfonsina Strada, well her Giro officially ended on that second day in the Apennines, 296 kilometres of racing that would have made a Flandrian weep: shitty roads and shittier weather. Strada crashed and thrashed her handlebars. A broom handle was used to effect emergency repairs (broom handles were often used in those days to effect emergency fork repairs – early cyclists were a resourceful crowd). But by the time Strada reached Perugia – four hours behind Enrici – the control was closed. Strada had been caught by the cut off. Colombo really wanted Strada to get to the finish in Milan – hell, she was selling newspapers – but he was overruled by the men in blazers, the commissaires declaring that rules is rules. Strada was off the 1924 Giro d’Italia.

The Apennines behind them, the remaining riders then faced a gentle sub-300 kilometre haul up to Bologna, followed by the mammoth 415 kilometre leg taking them eastward to Fiume on the Dalmatian coast, now in present-day Croatia but then still a part of the Kingdom of Italy. Into Bologna Enrici finished second, behind his Legnano team-mate Arturo Ferraro, with Gay ceding another eight minutes on the day. The fight back was not on. Into Fium it was Romolo Lazzeretti (Jenis) who took the stage, beating Legnano’s Ferraro and Alfredo Sivicci in a straight sprint. Gay tossed away another nine minutes.

From Fiume it was westward-ho and home to Milan via Verona, staying clear of the Dolomites, for a finish in the Vélodrome Semplone. Into Verona, Ferraro again took the stage win with Gay second on the day in a bunch sprint. And then it was Milan again, the end of the road, the Vélodrome Semplone. In a hotly-contested sprint, Giovanni Bassi – one of the proper isolati in the race, a man used to riding without team support – edged out Gay, only for both riders to be demoted for an irregular sprint, the victory then going to Legnano’s Sivocci, the seventh stage won by a Legnano rider. Enrici – born in Pittsburg but Piedmontese to the bone – took the title. A third place in his first season, a win in his third, boy but did that guy have a bright future ahead of him.

Half an hour after Bassi and Gay had battled for the final stage win, the Vélodrome Semplone again erupted in applause: Alfonsina Strada had just raced in, battling on despite her exclusion from the race. Following Strada’s disqualification in Perugia, Colombo had had a quiet word with her. There was business to discuss. She was helping him sell newspapers. Yes, here she was, battered and bruised, beaten by the race. But it didn’t have to end there. She could ride on, shadow riding the Giro, apart from the race but still a part of it. And for this service she would be paid, handsomely. While Colombo had refused to meet the teams’ demands for appearance fees, he was more than willing to pay Strada to just stay on her bike and keep the punters happy. There’s principles and then there’s commerce: commerce usually trumps principles.

So Strada rode out the remaining four stages, alongside two other riders who’d also been turfed off the race (in early Tours Desgrange had also allowed riders officially out of the competition to continue racing, on a daily basis). It’s claimed that Strada was the highest-earning rider in that year’s Giro, pocketing 50,000 lire for her efforts (remember, the overall prize fund was 100,000 lire).

That Strada was a draw for the fans is evident in the fact that, even when she was finishing way down on the leaders, the tifosi still awaited her arrival at the end of each stage, cheering her home. At Fiume, the race’s tenth stage, that mammoth 415-kilometre haul down the Dalmatian coast, by which time Strada was officially off the Giro but still shadow riding it alongside the peloton, the crowd waited for her to arrive before they left. Strada’s luck hadn’t improved: as in the Apennines she’d again crashed and arrived at the finish in a bad state and well down on the front runners. The tifosi didn’t care and showed their appreciation of her effort by lifting her off her bike: proving, if proof were needed, that sport isn’t just about winning. The next day, Fiume to Verona, a 366-kilometre haul that the peloton tackled at a sedate twenty kilometres an hour, Strada was just seven minutes down on the main bunch.

Strada’s popularity during the race was such that she spent a lot of time handing out photographs and signing autographs. The King, Victor Emmanuel III, sent her an official communication, congratulating her. Even Il Duce, Mussolini, wanted to muscle in on the act, declaring that he wanted to meet the Queen of the Cranks.

The following year the Darling of the Giro attempted to enter the corsa rosa again but – as with the post-War Giri di Lombardia – Colombo and Cougnet didn’t need her and the big teams and their star riders didn’t want her: to be upstaged by second-string riders was one thing, but to be upstaged by a woman was something entirely different. The Giro was still in dispute with the teams – Bianchi and Maino were still shunning the race – but the Queen of the Cranks had been usurped by Colombo and Cougnet’s new saviour: Emilio Bozzi.

As well as his Legnano squad, Bozzi – and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi – now had the Wolsit outfit (after the second world war he would add Frejus to his portfolio of bike brands). The Wolsit and Legnano teams of 1925 were really just one team, with one team car to support them both. And what a team they were: Bozzi and Pavesi lost Enrici to Armor and Aymo to Alcyon but gained Costante Giradengo – the first campionissimo – from Maino. And they also gained a rider from La Française, a kid called Alfredo Binda. You’ll be hearing of him again before this is out.

Alfonsina Strada was the story of the 1924 Giro, a publicity coup for the race organisers in their fight against the revenue-sharing demands of the teams and the competition they faced from rival publishers. Enrici was a worthy winner of the race, a solid rider, but Strada’s fame has lasted far longer than his. Elsewhere in the 1924 cycling season – at the Tour de France, to be precise – it was to be the reporting of a French journalist, Albert Londres, that would last longest in public memory. But before turning to them let’s take a look at Strada herself, and what happened to the revenue sharing demanded faced by the Giro organisers.

Next: How Strada spent her 50,000 lire.

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Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada), which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

* * * * *

The reason Emilio Colombo and Armando Cougnet invited Alfonsina Strada to ride the 1924 Giro d’Italia was simple: the big teams were pressing the Giro organisers to pay appearance fees simply for starting the race. The Giro was refusing their request. So the big teams were threatening to boycott the Giro.

Appearance fees were – still are – a part of cycling. If you can’t count on the stars to willingly ride your race, sometimes you just have to cross their palms with silver in order to ensure their presence. When Lance Armstrong returned to the peloton in 2009, his palm was greased generously by the organisers of many races, including the Giro d’Italia. But there’s a world of difference between paying off a star or two to grace your race with their presence and having to pay off whole teams who should be entering your race as a matter of course. There is also a world of difference between buying in a star now and then and having to fork out for both stars and bit-part actors every single year.

One can presume that, once the teams had won their battle with the Giro d’Italia, they would soon turn their attention to La Gazzetta‘s other races, particularly Milan-Sanremo and the Giro di Lombardia. Colombo and Cougnet were in no mood to meet these early revenue-sharing demands. The Giro was already paying generous prize money. When it was launched, the race was trumpeted (hyperbolically) as the richest in the world, with a prize fund of 25,000 lire. By the mid-twenties, that was up around 100,000 lire annually between 1923 and 1926. In the same period, the Tour’s prize fund had grown from 25,000 French francs in 1909 to 100,000 in 1924. (Exchange rates in 1924: approx 87 French francs to the pound, 19 to the dollar; 102 lire to the pound, 23 to the dollar.) As far as Colombo and Cougnet were concerned, they were already being more than generous when it came to paying people to ride the Giro. In the pages on La Gazzetta dello Sport, race director Cougnet accused the teams of “behaving like spoilt theatre actors.”

This, of course, wasn’t the first time the teams at the Giro could be accused of behaving like spoilt theatre actors, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Bianchi, in particular, had a reputation for throwing strops at the Giro. In the second race, 1910, the whole Bianchi squad had withdrawn on the second stage, for reasons unknown. And 1922 saw one of the best strops in Giro history.

It’s a long and somewhat convoluted story, but at its heart is the simple rule that technical assistance was, back then, outside the rules. So Legnano’s Giovanni Brunero was clearly breaking the rules when, having flatted, he took a wheel change from teammate Alfredo Sivocci (who then took a wheel change from teammate Pietro Linari, who took a wheel from the next Legnano rider to turn up, Franco Giorgetti, who had to wait for Ruggero Ferraro in order to get a crossbar to the next control station).

Maino, who were expecting Costante Giraradengo to do the business for them, and Bianchi, who were resting their hopes on Gaetano Belloni, both leaped at the chance to get a serious threat like Brunero turfed off the race. They both complained about his illegal wheel change. The commissaires listened to them. Brunero was out. Legnano appealed. Not for nothing was their DS, Eberardo Pavesi, known as l’avvocat. Pending his appeal, Brunero was back in the race. It was like an Italian hokey-kokey.

It took the Italian cycling fed another two stages to decide Brunero’s fate: a 25-minute time penalty. With the hills still looming and Brunero a scalatore of some skill, that time penalty was little more than a slap on the wrist. Realising they were about to get their arses kicked again – Brunero had won the previous year – both Maino and Bianchi used the affair as an excuse to pull out of the race, muttering loudly about the unfairness of it all as they left.

With the teams having incidents such as these in their past, and now threatening to not even take the start unless they got what they wanted, you can see why Cougnet was minded to call them spoilt theatre actors.

The teams, of course, couldn’t imagine Colombo and Cougnet not bending to their will. They themselves had been there at the birth of the Giro: Atala got word that Bianchi, along with the Corriere della Sera, intended to launch a Tour of Italy, and took the news to La Gazzetta dello Sport, who then gazumped their rivals by pre-emptively announcing the birth of the Giro d’Italia.

From the outset the Giro had declared itself a race for teams, unlike the Tour de France, where Henri Desgrange was fighting a long and losing battle with the mighty marques. The Giro had even once been run purely for teams, in 1912, when (technically) there was no individual winner. But while that race was won by Atala, it was Carlo Galetti who was the real star and still gets the credit for the victory. La Gazzetta quickly realised that the tifosi cheered for riders, not teams and reverted to individual winners thereafter. Even so, the teams, figured they had the weight of history on their side and stuck to their guns: appearance fees, or else.

Colombo and Cougnet were having none of this and dug their heels in: no appearance fees, no matter how big the stars. The race made the stars, not the other way round, a point many race organisers had proved down through the years, especially Pierre Giffard (at the 1891 Paris-Brest-Paris) and Henri Desgrange and Géo Lefèvre (at the Tour). If the stars of the day didn’t want to ride their race, then Colombo and Cougnet would just have to create new stars to replace them.

The teams continued to withhold their stars, figuring Colombo and Cougnet would cave, that they simply had to be faking their moral indignation. They weren’t. Thumbing their noses at the teams, Colombo and Cougnet called on Strada. The Queen of the Cranks was in and the stars were out.

That the teams were willing to pass up the biggest publicity opportunity of the season demonstrates that they did at least believe in what they were arguing for, that this wasn’t just about petty posturing and silly name-calling. The fact is, cycling was turning into a very expensive sport, and the people who funded it were being bled dry by the demands it was putting on them.

Back at that first Giro in 1909, Atala hadn’t just spiked the guns of Bianchi in the birth of the race by taking the news to La Gazzetta. They had also snatched Luigi Ganna from under Bianchi’s nose, topping the 200 lire a month Bianchi were paying him with an offer of 250 lire. Ganna signed on the dotted line and then went on to win the inaugural Giro for Atala. (Ganna actually finished the race 37 minutes behind Bianchi’s Giovanni Rossignoli – who was still racing in 1924 – but the early Giri were based on points, not time, and the Bianchi rider placed fourth on GC.) The next year it was an Atala lock-out on the Podium (Bianchi had thrown a hissy-ft and left the race), with Ganna finishing third, behind Eberardo Pavesi and Carlo Galetti. Bianchi had to wait until 1911 before they got their first Grand Tour victory, they having lured Galetti away from Legnano (who had lured him away from Atala) by offering him yet more money. A year later Atala upped the ante and had Galetti back on board. In Italy in those days, the best riders were very mobile and regularly changed teams.

Throughout the sport, salaries had spiralled before the war as teams, awash with cash from a booming bicycle trade, outbid one and other for the stars of the moment. The world was rich and the riders reaped the reward. The war brought all that crashing down. Coming out of the war, the main French marques – Alcyon, Automoto, La Française, Labor and Peugeot – banded together under the title La Sportive, which was ruled over by the man they called the Marshal, Aphonse Baugé. No longer capable individually of financing strong teams, collectively they were able to exert a stranglehold on French cycling and keep the lesser lights of the French bicycle industry in their proper place. Most riders signed to La Sportive rode for expenses, only a select few receiving a salary. Even for those who were paid monthly, what they received was tiny compared with what was being paid before the war. Henri Pélissier, for instance, was earning 3,000 francs a month before the war at Peugeot. After the war La Sportive were paying him just 300 francs a month.

La Sportive lasted for three years, before being broken up in 1922. Or partly broken up: the member marques created a cartel, setting salary and budget caps. For a cartel to work, though, two things need to happen: the members need to abide by the rules; and the cartel has to be strong enough to strangle non-members before they can become a threat. In France, La Sportive’s members failed first at the latter, the Pélissiers helping JB Louvet rise to power, and then at the former, when Automoto broke ranks – and the salary cap – and outbid Louvet for the services of the Pélissiers. By 1924, the French cartel had more or less crumbled.

In Italy at this time Bianchi and Atala were relatively weak on the road, their best riders having been lured away from them. But they still carried political clout. The real teams of the moment were Maino and Legnano. The argument with the Giro organisers over appearance fees was being led by Bianchi and Atala and was supported by Maino. Legnano … well Legnano managed to hedge their bets by both supporting and not supporting the boycott.

The man behind the Legnano marque was Emilio Bozzi. He had bought the Legnano marque from Vittorio Rossi shortly after the end of the war. In 1924 he was one of the rising men of Italian cycling. And with Pavesi as his DS he was writing the name of Legnano into Italian cycling’s history books. In 1924, Bozzi and Pavesi were fielding a team of champions: in their pay at this time were the winners of the 1920-22 Giri – Gaetano Belloni (1920) and Giovanni Brunero (1921 and 1922) – as well as Pietro Linari, who was Italy’s sprinter par excellence. They also had Giuseppe Enrici, an American-born Italian who, in his first season just two years earlier, had finished on the bottom step of the Giro’s podium.

Bozzi and Pavesi withheld Brunero, a two-time winner, from the Giro. Were they supporting the boycott? Obviously that position could be argued. But the reality is that Brunero was being saved for a serious tilt at the Tour de France, which so far no Italian rider had been able to win (the best Italian riders typically having ridden the Giro before the Tour). A large number of Bozzi’s riders did turn up for the Corsa Rosa, including Belloni, Enrici, Bartolomeo Aymo, Arturo Ferrario, Alfredo Sivocci, Ermano Vallazza, and Adriano Zanaga. Belloni wouldn’t figure in the race after the opening stage but Aymo, Enrici, Ferrario, Sivocci, and Zanaga would all feature prominently.

Also absent was one of the stars of the 1923 Giro, Ottavio Bottecchia, who was riding for the French Automoto squad. Automoto had signed the Italian the previous year partly because they were making a move on the Italian market, and having a native rider in their ranks would help them get column inches in the Italian press. But they were still a French team at heart: the Tour was their race, not the Giro.

In the absence of the major stars – Girardengo, Brunero, Bottecchia – La Gazzetta sought to encourage individuals to enter the race. Technically, all the riders in the 1924 Giro were isolati, riding without the support of a team network, but many riders – including the lads from Legnano – were still sponsored and the sponsor would still get a boost from whatever success they could achieve in the race. But, without the major riders from the mighty marques, the Giro organisers still needed to find a way to entice the lesser lights of the sport to enter their race. Other race organisers before them had already faced similar problems in cycling’s short history.

Back in the nineteenth century, Véloce Sport organised the first Bordeaux-Paris race, a 575 kilometre jaunt for the two-wheeled stars of the day. The real stars of the day happened to be British, and they managed to knobble the opposition early by insisting they wouldn’t race against professionals. The British sense of fair play, the fabled Corinthian Spirit and all that what, what, what? Hardly. The British just knew the power they held over Véloce Sport: if they demanded that the race exclude pros, Véloce Sport would bow to their will. They also knew that their real opposition – the French riders – all rode as pros. Defeating them before the race even got underway was far, far easier than defeating them on the road. And once the French riders were barred from riding their own race, the British were able to sign them up and set them to work on pacing duty (most early races featured some form of pacing: Paris-Roubaix was still being paced as late as 1909, and – of course – pacing was a feature of Bordeaux-Paris right through to its demise in the 1980s).

When Pierre Giffard at Le Petit Journal saw the success of Bordeaux-Paris, he decided to launch his own race: Paris-Brest-Paris, a mere 1,200 kilometres of pedalling. But Giffard had seen the way the British riders had bent Véloce Sport to their will and he decided he wasn’t going to let the teams and the riders hold him over a barrel. Giffard figured he actually held the upper hand: he was a media man who didn’t just believe in the power of the pen, he knew full well the power of the printing press. He appealed to one of his readers’ most base instincts: patriotism. Paris-Brest-Paris would be a French race for French riders. Giffard then proceeded to talk up the fact that rank amateurs would probably outride the stars of the day. Not only did this ensure that the stars of the day would have a point to prove, but it also encouraged a lot of amateurs to suffer delusions of grandeur. Paris-Brest-Paris’ entrants topped 600, with 200 of them actually turning up for the start. And at the end of it Charles Terront – one of the French pros the Brits had sought to knobble in Bordeaux-Paris – won the race. As he steamed over the Porte Maillot, 10,000 people cheered his progress. Giffard had played a blinder: the public loved his race and a real star had won it.

Skip the story forward a couple of decades. When Géo Lefèvre hit upon the bright idea of the Tour de France, L’Auto Vélo had to face up to the fact that their race might be too tough for the stars of the day, most of whom rode short distances on the track. Not a problem, they decided, they would make the men who did ride it into stars. But they still had to entice enough men to get on their bikes for such a crazy endeavour as a race around France. In the end, the only way they could do this was by lowering the entrance fee, shortening the race, and raising the per diem that was being paid to all participants.

History, then, was affording Colombo and Cougnet at least two examples for dealing with their problem: patriotism and filthy lucre. Neither was really a runner in 1920s Italy, so they found a third way: they figured that the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. As part of their lure they published details of how much food they were providing for participants: chickens (600), other meat (750 kilograms), eggs (7,200), bananas (4,800), bottles of mineral water (2,000), and butter (50 kilograms) along with assorted bread, jams, biscuits, chocolate, apples, and oranges.

On a daily basis, each rider was getting 250 grams of meat, a quarter of a roasted chicken, two sandwiches of prosciutto and butter, two jam sandwiches, a hundred grams of biscuits, 50 grams of chocolate, three eggs, two bananas, and a litre of mineral water. Today, you might question whether you’d be willing to ride to the shops for such fare, but in 1924 Italy, that was a veritable feast for the cycling classes. The Giro got its desired number of entrants. Ninety riders, all officially riding as isolati, would leave Milan on May 10th, with Alfonsina Strada among them.

Next: The 1924 Giro gets underway.

* * * * *

Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada). , which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

Those three books, along with Benjo Maso’s Sweat of the Gods: Myths and Legends of Bicycle Racing (Mousehold Press), are the main sources for the above.