Drugs
Gino Bartali took to raiding Coppi's room before races :
"The first thing was to make sure I always stayed at the same hotel for a race, and to have the room next to his so I could mount a surveillance. I would watch him leave with his mates, then I would tiptoe into the room which ten seconds earlier had been his headquarters. I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything.
I became so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage. I would work out, according to the traces of the product I found, how and when he would attack me."
Coppi was often said to have introduced "modern" methods to cycling, particularly his diet. Gino Bartali established that some of those methods included taking drugs, which were not then against the rules.
Bartali and Coppi appeared on television revues and sang together, Bartali singing about "The drugs you used to take" as he looked at Coppi. Coppi spoke of the subject in a television interview:
- Question: Do cyclists take la bomba (amphetamine)?
- Answer: Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it's not worth talking to them about cycling.
- Question: And you, did you take la bomba?
- Answer: Yes. Whenever it was necessary.
- Question: And when was it necessary?
- Answer: Almost all the time!
Coppi "set the pace" in drug-taking, said his contemporary, the Dutchman, Wim van Est. Rik van Steenbergen said Coppi was "the first I knew who took drugs." That didn't stop Coppi's protesting against others using it. He told René de Latour:
"What is the good of having world champions if those boys are worn out before turning professional? Maybe the officials are proud to come back with a rainbow jersey. but if this done at the expense of the boys' futures, then I say it's wrong. Do you think it normal that our best amateurs become nothing but 'gregari'?"
Coppi named four riders among the best in the world as amateurs but who failed as professionals despite predictions made for them. "If they sue me for defamation," he said, "all the better. The facts will be brought to light and this may mean a change in our methods."
Read more about this topic: Fausto Coppi
Famous quotes containing the word drugs:
“There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.”
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (b. 1926)
“To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off.”
—C.E. (Charles Edward)
“If we became students of Malcolm X, we would not have young black men out there killing each other like they’re killing each other now. Young black men would not be impregnating young black women at the rate going on now. We’d not have the drugs we have now, or the alcoholism.”
—Spike Lee (b. 1956)