The greatest stage in Giro d'Italia history was an event more imagined than witnessed; such were the ways cycling was digested in 1949. The mammoth stage from Cuneo to Pinerolo was not broadcast live on television but was instead immortalised in Mario Ferretti's radio commentary and Dino Buzzati's newspaper account.
As the stage drew to a close, Ferretti gravely told listeners that there was un uomo solo al comando – one man alone in front – and that his jersey was celeste, and that his name was Fausto Coppi. The following day in Il Corriere della Sera, Buzzati wrote of how watching a vanquished Gino Bartali struggle on the Col d'Izoard put him in mind of Hector being slain by Achilles.
"Is the comparison too solemn and glorious?" Buzzati asked, before deciding that the gods made their own importance. "But what purpose would our so-called classical studies serve if the fragments that stayed with us didn't form a part of our own small lives?"
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Coppi's impresa on the 1949 Giro is perhaps his most storied and almost certainly his most significant. His 192km solo raid on the road from Cuneo to Pinerolo not only saw him dispossess Adolfo Leoni of the maglia rosa, it also marked the moment the torch passed definitively from Bartali to him.
The 254km leg was punctuated by five mountain passes, and Coppi led over them all, starting with the Colle della Maddalena, and then proceeding by way of the Col de Vars, the Col d'Izoard, Montgenevre and Sestriere. Come the finish in Pinerolo, after over nine hours on the bike, he had a lead of almost 12 minutes on Bartali, and a 23-minute buffer in the overall standings.
The Giro had never seen a feat like it and, ever since, the Cuneo – Pinerolo stage has come to be the outsized yardstick by which all future tapponi were measured. The severity of the stage was such that the Giro has only once replicated it in full, in 1964, when Franco Bitossi took the honours.
Montoso
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