Ottavio Bottecchia - Professional Racing

Professional Racing

His 5th place finish in the 1923 Giro d'Italia, the leading 'isolate' (rider without a team) attracted the leading French rider, Henri Pélissier, who asked him to join his professional team, Automoto-Hutchinson, in 1922. Pélissier had just left the J. B. Louvet team after an internal row and had taken another rider, Honoré Barthélemy, with him. Automoto was a French company that also sold in Italy. Automoto saw the chance not only of winning the Tour de France but of having a further Italian rider to stimulate foreign sales. Henri Pélissier said he had seen Bottecchia ride the Giro di Lombardia and Milan – San Remo and the team signed him. The new recruit arrived, said the writer Pierre Chany, with a skin tanned like an old leather saddle and creases to his face deep enough to be scars. His clothing was ragged and his shoes so old that they no longer had any shape. His ears stuck out so far that the Tour organiser, Henri Desgrange referred to him as "butterfly".

It was as a professional that Bottecchia learned to read, taught by his friend and training partner, Alfonso Piccin. Together they read the Italian sports daily, Gazzetta dello Sport, and clandestine anti-fascist pamphlets protesting at the rule of Benito Mussolini.

In 1923, he came fifth in the Giro d'Italia. That same year, he won a stage in the Tour de France and came second overall. He led the Tour from Cherbourg after the second stage and wore the yellow jersey of leader as far as Nice. There he passed it on to Pélissier, who won with the prediction: "Bottecchia will succeed me next year." Such was the reaction in Italy that the Gazetta dello Sport asked a lire from each of its readers to reward him. Mussolini was first to subscribe.

In 1924 he won the first stage of the Tour and kept his lead to the end, the first Italian to win. But here is the first of the mysteries in his life. Bottecchia wore the yellow jersey throughout the race except for the stage closest to Italy, which went from Toulon to Nice. That day he wore his team jersey, one of several in the peloton and therefore less obvious. The Tour's paperwork vanished when it was taken south from Paris in 1940 to escape the German invasion of the second world war and none of the newspaper reports of the period explains Bottecchia's decision.

One theory is that he was afraid of being mobbed on the road by Italian fans, who would have delayed him or inadvertently knocked him off his bike.

Another theory is that he wanted to avoid Mussolini's Black Shirts. Reading anti-fascist tracts to become literate suggests anti-fascist leanings. Bottecchia's tyres had been punctured before the start of some stages and fascist opponents could have been behind it.

A further theory is that Bottecchia had made uncomplimentary remarks about an earlier Italian champion, Costante Girardengo, and that he worried fans would take revenge.

Bottecchia wore the yellow jersey again after Nice and all the way to the finish. Reports say that he sang as he rode:

He wore his yellow jersey all the way to Milan in the train - travelling third class to save money.

He won the Tour again in 1925 with the help of Lucien Buysse, who served as the first domestique in Tour history. Accused in 1924 of winning without trying, Bottecchia won the first, sixth, seventh and final stage. He was never the same after that and dropped out, "weeping like a child", during a thunderstorm in 1926. Buysse emerged the winner. The writer Bernard Chambaz said:

The unpleasant hand of destiny fell on his shoulders. It was as though the misery of his origins had caught up with him. Dark thoughts and a presentiment of the future haunted him. He abandoned the Tour of 1926 on a stage which those who were there described as apocalytpic because of the cold and the violence of the wind. He went home, unhappy. He no longer had the heart to train. He feared that he'd been 'cut down by a bad illness'. He coughed and he ached in his back and his bronchial tubes. The following winter, he lost his younger brother, knocked down by a car.