HELLO MAESTRO. FAUSTO COPPI HAS RETURNED TO THE PEACE OF HIS HILLS
IN-DEPTH | 29/12/2024 | 12:16 di Gianpaolo Ormezzano We propose the reading of a very young GPO, just 24 years old and not yet hired by Tuttosport (he would be hired after this piece), sent to Castellania for the funeral of the Champion. It was January 5, 1960, and his writing was already that of an absolute champion.
How beautiful these hills are, with their sharp lines etched against the blue sky, with snow sprinkled here and there, in patches miraculously preserved by the frost, with orderly rows, severe farmhouses, withered trees protecting themselves from a benign but sly winter.
They are beautiful and very beautiful, and this morning we walked on them with Fausto Coppi. For him, it was the last walk, the most important one. Closed in a coffin, he was heading towards the San Biagio cemetery, which is nothing more than a palm of land enclosed by an ancient and thick wall, occupied by a hundred tombs. But everything is lilliputian on these marvelous hills. Castellania, Fausto's hometown, seems placed there by God in distraction, a handful of houses, four hundred souls in few walls. Who knows what secret drives men to live up here.
Perhaps, a love of the land so profound that, if everyone understood it, we would deny ourselves, as we have been forged by the breath of civilization and progress, a degenerate imitation of the breath with which God gave life to the first man. What hills! And what a walk, with the sun warming our blood. The dew becomes water, and it flowed through the streets tattooed by car tires, noisy rivulets, as if it were spring. These were the roads where Coppi pedaled as a child. People were on the sides, so many people, an absurdity for such a small village, gathered at the bottom of a valley that can only be reached by climbing from Villavernia, climbing very high, until the road becomes a mule track and a car with a broken engine can mean chaos. Amid the people (how many were they? Twenty thousand, perhaps.
Certainly many, and we would have wanted someone who considers sport a mad phenomenon of exaltation to be there to explain such sadness), amid the people passed Coppi's coffin, carried on the shoulders of riders and followed by relatives whose inquisitive gaze, by professional necessity, our colleagues wanted to discriminate, taking into account one's civil status, the other's affection. We contented ourselves with X-raying the coffin, and inside we saw Coppi, long and immense as he had appeared to us on his deathbed. Shortly before, we had greeted him, and his face had appeared to us for the last time behind the glass of the small open window on the coffin: it was a face completely different from the one seen in the funeral home in Tortona, a white and shapeless face, as if nose, ears, and eyes had been stuck on the flesh just recently.
Coppi was no longer himself, perhaps because he had always been life, and a powerful life, an unparalleled athletic effort. Suddenly, in the room of his poor and sober house in Castellania, the thought of him as he was assaulted us, and the contrast that until that moment we had not perceived, or had rejected, overwhelmed us in all its crudeness. That Fausto was truly dead, heading towards peace, towards the immobility that so contrasts with his body made precisely for movement and strength, was told to us by the crowd, the tears, even the sad custom of strong and prolonged handshakes with which we greet each other when, discovering old friendships in similar circumstances, we have nothing important to say beyond silence. Coppi passed through the people, and seemed to cleave the crowd that once, in races, shielded his path, asked a bit of him by leaning out in front of his bike, and then reveled in the wind left by his passing. Here, this was Fausto's last race, first and alone as always. We looked at Gismondi, whom Coppi snatched from hunger and offered to the world, strong with hopes and calories.
Gismondi was playing the domestique once again, holding back the crowd, ordering a halt to the bearers of five hundred wreaths, restarting the procession. The coffin passed in front of the Bianchi car with license plate MI 50882, the car that followed Coppi in a hundred races and a hundred victories. We asked ourselves, we who are taught to dispel rhetoric, permission to be sentimental. Coppi was racing his last race, up there was rest, with his father and with Serse and with Dina he would begin a dialogue that we cannot understand. Someone was holding flowers, and did not know what to do with them, as the entire procession was already buried in flowers.
No one was ashamed of crying, everyone was happy and proud of their sadness. Some spoke of misfortune. The old men of Castellania said that Fausto had paid for books and taxes for the village children, so they could go to school. The daughters of Maria chanted, the procession was long, infinite, the coffin seemed to bounce on the shoulders of the bearers like a cork in a stormy sea. Cars with license plates from all over Italy clogged the road. All dialects were spoken, many were foreigners. A friend asked me a question that means everything: "Can you realize what Coppi meant to all these people?". It was at that moment that the myth took shape, and was embodied in a man with a long nose and rubber legs: a man who, to be defeated, had to be attacked by surprise.
Articolo pazzesco! Anche in considerazione della verde età che Ormezzano aveva all'epoca. Di lì a pochi anni avrebbe scalato le vette del giornalismo, toccando la poesia. Ricordo che fu uno dei redattori dell'enciclopedia "Il Pedale d'Oro" in 5 volumi (qualcuno la ricorda?). L'unica cosa che non mi vede d'accordo con questo maestro del giornalismo è la frase su Coppi e Merckx. Secondo me, Eddy è stato il più grande e il più forte di tutti i tempi.
Considerazione
29 dicembre 2024 17:42italia
Che articolo !!! Incredibile, suggestiva prosa !!!
seankelly
29 dicembre 2024 21:41stargate
Articolo di grande bellezza e purezza, scaturito da un animo capace di vedere in profondità i sentimenti della gente, il significato delle azioni, dei gesti e delle parole. Abbiamo perso un immenso cantore del ciclismo, e non solo. Quanto alla frase che ricorda seankelly, mi pare che Ormezzano abbia definito Coppi "il più grande", Merckx "il più forte". A prima vista potrebbe apparire una distinzione persino incomprensibile, ma il grande giornalista credo abbia voluto esprimere un giudizio di natura sociologica. Coppi, al di là della grandezza di atleta, ha rappresentato molto per l'Italia, specie se consideriamo il periodo in cui si è espresso ai massimi livelli: dopo guerra, con fame e preoccupazioni che la facevano da padroni. In quest'ottica, concordo con GPO. Cordialità. (Alberto Pionca, Cagliari)
Stargate
30 dicembre 2025 10:48seankelly
Concordo al 100% con la tua interpretazione della famosa frase. Ritengo anch'io che la giusta interpretazione sia esclusivamente di natura sociologica.
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