The Eagle of the Canavese: Franco Balmamion and the Giro d'Italia - Softcover

I met several of the domestiques of the day too, the great unheard (and very often unpaid) foot soldiers of the road. Though they never won bike races their stories were for the most part more interesting, their careers more admirable, than those of the moneyed, celebrated stars of cycling lore, not in spite of but because they didn't win.

Ultimately though this is the story of Franco Balmamion, of how he prevailed in the most brutal of all post war grand tours. It's a story hitherto neglected by the cycling "community", but, in my opinion, no less extraordinary for it.

I hope you enjoy the book.

The Italian cycling community, parochial and romantic (the country in microcosm, in fact) fondly recalls not only the Coppi/Magni/Bartali Giri but Gaul's wonderful triumphs of 1956 and 1959, sandwiched as they were by those of the irrepressible Nencini and the dazzling, fluent Baldini. Vito Taccone's astonishing feat in capturing five mountain stages at the 1963 Giro is the stuff of Giro legend, whilst the mid-60s are synonymous with the emergence of an outstanding generation led by Zilioli and Motta, Gimondi and Adorni.

Lost somewhere amidst all the revelry and myth-making is the story of a rider not possessed of Gaul's virtuosity, Taccone's gambling instinct, Nencini's belligerence. He never annihilated the peloton as Adorni did in 1965, never time trialed with Baldini's immense grace, nor beguiled the sporting public as the swashbuckling Pantani would in the late-90s. Where Nino Defilippis helped himself to nine Giro stages, Franco Balmamion won successive maglie rose without once crossing the line first, not that winning stages ultimately has anything to do with winning stage-races. While Gimondi, Moser and Defilippis quite properly found fortune basking in the afterglow of their exemplary careers, Balmamion slipped quietly away from cycling, into the company of his own and into the world of family and work. This cyclist, whose Giro record surpassed all but the very best, whose extraordinary mental and physical courage in winning the 1962 edition was at least the equal of anything achieved by any of the above, remains an obscure, forgotten figure. How, then, has cycling contrived to disregard the achievements of a rider who, with a fair wind and a fraction of the support offered to Gimondi, might well have won, not only a third Giro, but also the Tour de France? How?

Italy, it goes without saying, is a beautiful, eclectic country. Though railing endlessly against the state is evidently a national obsession, the Italians, unlike say the English, in general retain a profound attachment to and pride in their Bel Paese, their `beautiful land'. In Italy, style - or at least the appearance of style - invariably trumps crude, prosaic substance. This overly developed sense of the aesthetic is made manifest not only in the ways Italians dress, present and behave themselves, but in the food they eat, in the products they design, in the municipal buildings and cities they inhabit. Conversely, it's one of the reasons why the Banks and public offices are so hopelessly unwieldy, the politics so impenetrable and compromised, why the police are so immaculately turned out, so utterly officious and incompetent. The Italians, for whom the collective is everything, even have a collective verb for the creation of all things bright and beautiful. To create the correct impression is fare bella figura, literally `to make a beautiful figure'. Though subjective, the bella figura is applicable not only to the design and outward appearance of a person or object, but to a behavioural code broadly speaking, mannered and conformist. Most of the Italians I know, for all their complaining and gesticulating, in spite of their gift for plain old fashioned loudness, are essentially conformist by nature.

Herein, or rather hereout, I believe lies the reason for Balmamion's continued anonymity. Unusually for a high profile professional athlete - and to his eternal credit, - Franco Balmamion was unequivocally and unashamedly no bella figura. That he made no bella figura on the bike should come as no great surprise, for the bella figura, to the best of my knowledge and his, never hindered him unduly in his quest to ride his bicycle over big mountains more quickly, more often than the next man. That Balmamion was amongst the best Giro riders of all time was not due in any way to his ability or otherwise to look sophisticated in a sharp suit, or to dazzle journalists with his loquacious insights into stage-racing tactics. He saved his formidable cycling intellect for cycling, specifically for winning bike races. The bella figura never counted for a great deal in the Lanzo Valley. You couldn't bank it, and it certainly never helped anyone win the Giro d'Italia. Cycling's beauty lies not in the colour of a fast moving peloton, nor in the mesmeric fluency of elegant pedal strokes. The true beauty of the sport, the real bella figura, is to be found elsewhere, in the ugly, human brutality of sufferance.

Though he clearly enjoys reminiscing about his cycling career, Balmamion conscientiously avoids referring to his own achievements, so much so that when pressed he relates them purely as matters of fact. This is no false modesty on his part, for Franco knows he was an exceptional racer, particularly in confounding the cycling cognoscenti when returning to the top of the sport in 1967. I think he simply finds the idea that his career might bestow upon him some degree of celebrity embarrassing, unfathomable, distasteful even. For eleven years between 1961 and 1972 Franco Balmamion, the silent champion of Nole Canavese, was simply a racing cyclist, intermittently brilliant, for the most part very good, sometimes by his own admission mediocre. For three weeks in the early summer of 1962, despite overwhelming odds to the contrary, he was the best, the hardest, the bravest cyclist in Italy. But still just a cyclist, no more and no less.