As a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia and two-time winner of the Tour de France, Gino Bartali was the greatest cyclist Italy had ever produced up until that time. But it was by winning the 1938 Tour de France that he really established his legacy. An awful lot rode on Bartali’s success: Mussolini was eager to prove that eugenically the Italians were on a par with Hitler’s “master race”. Of course, Hitler had already been humbled two years earlier: forced to look on as Jesse Owens sprinted his way into first place—and into the history books—in the 1936 Olympic Games. But this didn’t matter for Mussolini; to his mind, by winning the Tour, Bartali would prove Italian eugenic superiority and improve the country’s standing in world sports.
The Tour de France champion was expected to dedicate his win to Il Duce. But he didn’t want to associate himself with Mussolini’s fascist regime, so, taking a massive gamble, he refused. He had his reasons. The regime would publish its Manifesto della Razza (“Manifesto on Race”) mere months after Bartali’s victory. This publication emphasized the Italians’ Aryan origins, and set the precedent for a series of persecutory Italian race laws which prohibited marriage between Jews or Africans and Italians, legalized the confiscation of Jewish property and barred Jews from working in certain professions. The laws were broadly unpopular. But to openly criticize them could prove fatal, as another prominent cyclist, found dead by the side of the road, had found out.
Although war broke out the next year, life went on mostly as normal for Bartali and many others living in Italy. But things went from bad to worse after September 8, 1943, when, following the Allied landings in the South, Italy switched allegiance. Mussolini was freed from prison and reinstated as a puppet ruler, causing the mass exodus of those who had opposed him or stood to suffer under his new regime. This included the Jewish population, for whom life had been far from easy since the late 1930s. However, with German forces occupying Italy from Autumn 1943, they now faced the very real prospect of deportation to one of the many concentration camps across Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. Bartali now felt compelled to act.
As a young man working at the bike shop, Bartali had become close friends with Giacomo Goldenberg, a local Jewish man. After the implementation of anti-Jewish laws, Bartali sought out Goldenberg’s family and offered to harbor them first in his apartment and then, when things became to dangerous, in a neighboring basement. There they would stay until Florence’s liberation in August 1944. Bartali was taking an incredible risk; the crime, if discovered, would have earned him (and, in all likelihood, his wife and young boy) a bullet in the skull. What’s incredible is that Bartali never spoke publically about what he did; the story coming to light only as researchers started sifting through his diary in 2010, 10 years after his death.