Listen to “BARTALI – A Bicycle War” on Spreaker.
I confess my ignorance. I confess that I always knew who Bartali was, but I did not know exactly how immense this cycling champion was and how defining him only in the sphere of cycling is, all in all, reductive.
I confess that I was a victim of the habit of defining each person by what they do and not by who they are. That one is a doctor, that one is a teacher, that one is a soccer player that one is a cyclist. The beautiful podcast entitled “Gino Bartali – A War on a Bicycle,” written and acted by Andrea Martina, restores a human dimension of him that is finally complete: no longer “only” that of the cycling champion – as if it were little and reductive – but above all that of the human and social dimension.
Because Bartali was not only a-if not the strongest-cycling champion Italy has ever had but he was a politically and socially engaged man, and he was so in an era as terrible and deadly as the fascist era but, at the same time, in a time when the right and wrong sides were very well defined. And Bartali, by definition, upbringing and spirit, knew from the beginning that his was the right side. And history proved him right.
A sportsman and his time
When one thinks of cycling heroism, his and Coppi’s are the two names that inevitably come to mind, immediately.
You say cycling and you immediately think of him because those stories and those victories are linked to the concept of the golden age of cycling. Of champions there have been others and there will be others but there is in every epic one story more powerful than the others, and it is often the origin story, the one to which all those that follow refer for comparison. Any champion who came after Bartali or Coppi-at least in the collective imagination-has always had to contend with these sporting heroes and has had to, willingly or unwillingly, live and compete in the shadow of these great centuries-old trees.
Bartali is one of the polar stars of this universe: over the decades he remains the brightest and for the future he will always remain a reference system, a direction to follow.
His star is even brighter because Bartali will forever remain a champion who made his life a shining work, and I’m not just talking about sports. That one is well-known and is made up of countless Giro d’Italia and Tour de France wins, dozens of more or less well-known races won, hundreds of thousands of kilometers covered in training, between career highs and lows, rises after defeats, recoveries and triumphs. But his parallel story and the real pillar of his life is his monumental figure built in opposition to the most powerful and feared Italian of the time-Benito Mussolini.
Gino Bartali could not like Mussolini for a thousand reasons: by family upbringing, by inclination of spirit, and by political faith. But unlike many sportsmen who live their careers and do not want to meddle with anything else, he wanted to put his competitive parable at the service of an ideal that was social rather than political. The energy coursing through his muscles was that of his will, but it was also an awareness of his social role and civic importance-Bartali knew full well that his victories were not just sporting achievements but something more. They were political statements, they were enterprises that had an importance beyond the pure competitive context and stood out in the larger, social one.
At a time when every public gesture was political and when the private life of a particular citizen such as a sports champion was a political statement, every stance he took was not just the word of citizen Gino Bartali but the expression of a political side that, though a minority, was proud and found a voice to be heard.
His existential and sporting story is interesting even if situated in a very different context from today’s: at that time every gesture was, as they say, public and the responsibility of the champion was not only to win a race or a Tour but to do so on behalf of a nation. His every action was projected onto a much larger background than the individual sporting event and the individual athlete and became a media event cleverly used by the regime to prove a point. And Bartali at that game was not in it. When he won the first Giro d’Italia in 1936 he was received by Mussolini for well-deserved recognition by the regime. At that official appointment Bartali showed up in a non-black shirt, taking a definite political stance.
The tale of a life, not just sports
One of the many merits of this podcast, written and acted by writer and screenwriter Andrea Martina, is that it restores a much deeper portrait of Bartali than simply a sporting one. Bartali, in Martina’s writing, is not only the sporting champion but he is the champion of the spirit, he is the simple man aware of his social role who sees himself as an instrument of something greater to which he consciously vows, loading on his shoulders and legs the weight of actions greater than a heroic climb or a final sprint.
The words with which Martina recounts it are human and in many stretches of great emotion: for her ability to recreate the nodal moment of a race, for the lightning-fast manner in which in a few strokes she reconstructs actions that are the culmination of thoughts and reasoning. A champion’s career can be read in his victories and defeats, but the third dimension of his human existence, his depth in short, can only be recovered by reading his life in the much broader fresco of a nation that was defining itself even within the context of a regime and a devastating war. Bartali stands out on this landscape as a much more stable fixed point than others, like a true north star.
On September 23, 2013, he was declared a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the official Israeli memorial to Holocaust victims located in Jerusalem. Mention was earned for the relays he made carrying documents in his bicycle frame that saved countless Jews.
Of all the significant and beautiful things that can be said about his human and sporting figure, this seems to me one of the most shining: Bartali was a Just, that is, a man who knew how to choose the side of reason and heart. And that heart drove him to win: for himself, for an ideal, for Humanity.
Listen to the interview with Andrea Martina on Fuorisoglia:
Listen to “S03E09: Storytelling with Andrea Martina” on Spreaker.