The Backpedal #5 - Coppi
Getting into the swing of this now aren’t we? So what have we got this time?
A magnificent book called Coppi: Inside the Legend of The Campionissimo by the great Herbie Sykes.
Pretend I’ve only been watching cycling since Team Sky was invented in 2010 - who is Coppi?
Coppi is Fausto Coppi. One of the greatest cyclists of all time. His career spanned 1938 to 1958. He won the Giro five times and the Tour de France twice, as well as three Milan-Sanremos, five Lombardys and a Paris-Roubaix. He was Eddy Merckx before Eddy Merckx existed and he would have been even better had his career not been put on pause for the Second World War when he was aged between 22 and 26. His career often gets described as one half of one of the greatest rivalries in cycling history - the other half was Gino Bartali.
OK, give me some modern context
To bring Coppi and his achievements into the modern era, things he did back in the 1940s and 1950s are only now being emulated because Pog is so good. Coppi was the first rider ever to win two Grand Tours in the same year. It was relatively rare in his day for any teams or riders to take part in more than one, but in 1949 Coppi won the Giro and the Tour, thereby creating the concept of this ‘double’ which Pogačar did this year for the first time since Marco Pantani in 1998. Pogačar also won the Tour of Lombardy for the fourth time in a row. This was only the second time that a rider had won any of the five monuments on four consecutive occasions. The only other rider to do it was Fausto Coppi, also at Lombardy from 1946 to 1949.
Right, so he was quite good at cycling his bicycle. What page have you landed on?
One of the best things about this book is that it isn’t just a hagiography of one of the best cyclists ever. It’s not Herbie Sykes himself telling us who Coppi was. Coppi died in 1960 when he was still only 40 years old. However plenty of his teammates lived on long enough for Sykes to find them, visit them and get them to tell him all about Fausto Coppi.
The page we’ve landed on is 284 which is a page given over to just one of these gregarios. This one is named Walter Almaviva. You’ve probably never heard of him. That’s precisely the point.
Almaviva’s best result was a second place in the 1959 Giro dell’Appennino, a race that is still going and was won this year by Jan Christen, the 20-year old Swiss rider who is one of several current next Tadej Pogačars.
But what about Almaviva?
Almaviva grew up within 10 kilometres of where Coppi was from, Novi Ligure. He knew and loved and adored Fausto Coppi. He would sometimes run into him on training rides and be asked to join him. Almaviva forged his own way into professional cycling but soon Coppi came calling and wanted him to part of his team. Before the arrangements could be made, Coppi moved teams himself from Bianchi to Carpano. Almaviva thought the deal was off and such was his deference to Il Campionissimo, he never plucked up the courage to go and chase Coppi for that place on his team that he’d promised him. So it never happened.
Later, Coppi approached him and asked him again to join his new team. Almaviva couldn’t believe it and said ‘why didn’t you ask me sooner?’, because Almviva had already signed for a different team. Coppi’s reply was ‘I didn’t want you to feel like you were obliged to sign for me’.
That’s harsh on Almaviva, anything else we should know about him?
No, not really. And again, that’s precisely the point. If you Google Walter Almaviva you will find next to nothing. The grand total of English language words written about this rider are in this book because Herbie Sykes bothered to go to Novi Ligure and talk to him.
This bleeds into a wider point about cycling ‘content’ and the inevitable takeover of AI-written articles. I have absolutely no doubt soon that we will begin to be fed articles which were not written by a human. These articles are only possible because there is source material on the internet to feed off (and yes, plagiarise). The more auto-articles we get, the less demand there will be for the real thing and the less real thing there will be for the robots to feed off and the act and pursuit of writing will eat itself. Someone somewhere still has to travel somewhere and see things and talk to people. Otherwise the robots won’t have anything to plagiarise.
It is books like this and writing like this which are so important. And will only become more important as we increasingly get AI shoved down our gullets from all directions.
This writing is even more poignant and important in this instance because Walter Almaviva is no longer with us. Two years after this book was published, he died. As have so many others from that era who are no longer available to speak to people like Herbie Sykes.
You really hate AI don’t you?
Not at all! I don’t hate it. I think it’s fascinating and I think its uses can revolutionise and improve so many things. But not writing. AI can fuck off away from writing. The reason great writing is interesting is because the writer has seen something you haven’t. Has lived and experienced and smelled and touched. If it’s just a ream of facts you want, then great, let AI do it’s thing. If it’s writing you’re after, spare me the algorithm, please.
Anything else before we go?
Well, whenever I think of Herbie Sykes I think of the time I was interviewing him for a thing I was doing with GCN, and mid-interview my daughter fell down the stairs.
It was being recorded so I have the footage of me hearing it happen and then running out of the room. Enjoy!
And as usual, don’t be a bollocks, leave a comment! How do you feel about the prospect of AI-written articles?
