Bartali had several run-ins with the Nazi occupiers. But when stopped, he would ask that they didn’t touch his bicycle as it had been delicately calibrated to maximize speed. On one occasion he was arrested by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the paramilitary thugs of the fascist regime, and taken to the Florence’s Villa Triste; a villa which —in fitting with its name “the Sad Villa”—had a macabre reputation as a place of torture and execution. There, Bartali was given an ultimatum: avoid certain convents during his training or there would be serious consequences.
With the war’s conclusion, Bartali had his first chance to defend his title in the 1947 Tour de France. He didn’t win, but he returned the next year to take the yellow jersey, becoming the first—and so far only—man to win the tour after a 10-year hiatus. And his win was, perhaps, as important for Italian national history as it was for the history of cycling: at a time of serious political unrest, his victory in the 1948 Tour de France gave the country the morale boost it needed and quite possibly averted a civil war.
He may have been Italy’s undisputed cycling champion during his youth, but Bartali was largely overshadowed in his later years by Fausto Coppi: Italy’s other preeminent cyclist with whom he had a fierce and publically captivating rivalry. Bartali retired in 1955, aged 40, after suffering a career-ending road accident. He spent the rest of his life in Florence, living off modest wealth in the company of his wife Adriana, his two sons and his daughter. And it was here in his beloved city where he died of a heart attack in May 2010, aged 85,
As a man, Gino Bartali was as reticent as he was reverent, never once boasting about his achievements. He also refused interviews, saying that he had been driven entirely by his conscience and did not want his actions to be documented. This meant that his actions were only recognized posthumously: Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center in Jerusalem) awarding him the honor “Righteous Among the Nations” in September 2013. When asked about his father’s modesty, Andrea Bartali quoted his father as saying: “You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it you’re taking advantage of others’ misfortunes for your own gains.”
He may have been the Vatican’s favorite sportsman, and a hero of the Italian South, but Bartali never saw himself as a hero. And nor did he want to be remembered as one, wishing instead that any recognition he might have been related to his sporting achievements rather than his wartime actions. “Real heroes are others”, he said, “those who have suffered in their soul, in their heart, in their spirit, in their mind, for their loved ones. Those are the real heroes. I’m just a cyclist.”
Sources For Further Reading:
Holocaust Encyclopedia – Gino Bartali
National Post – Tour de France winner Gino Bartali quietly used fame to save Jews in Fascist Italy
Haaretz – Yad Vashem Names Egyptian First Arab Righteous Among the Nations
DISRAELI DOCUMENTS – Gino Bartali – 1938 Tour De France Stage 10 Photo