Further Feuds

by Mitchell Beazley, William Fotheringham 

A Century of Cycling: The classic races and legendary champions

The most vicious Giro, however, was that of 1987, the “race of knives under the table”, as one Gazzetta writer put it. The Carrera Jeans team was jointly led by Roberto Visentini, a volatile playboy from a rich family who had won the race the previous year, and Stephen Roche of Ireland. Given his record, Visentini considered that Roche should act as his domestique, after which the Irishman would get his chance in the Tour de France, but the Dubliner had other ideas. 

Roche led the race early on, before Visentini took the maglia rosa from him in the time trial to the Republic of San Marino. Two days later, in the first stage into the Dolomites, to the ski station at Sappada, Roche marked an attack from two lesser riders and found himself in the lead. This left the Carrera manager, Davide Boifava, in a quandary: should he leave Roche in front, which risked him taking the maglia rosa from his Italian co-leader but would mean the other teams had to chase, should he ask him to wait for the bunch, or should he order Carrera’s domestiques to chase him, in defiance of any logic? 

Visentini would not stand for the first option, so Boifava asked Roche to slow down and wait. The Dubliner refused, so Boifava said the team would have to chase him, producing the famous reply from Roche. “Well, Davide, you tell them to keep something under the saddle [in reserve] because they’ll need it later.” 

“His team-mates didn’t want to chase, but Visentini was screaming at them, and the team car came up and told them to chase,” recalled Robert Millar, who would go on to finish second in that Giro. “Then they stopped riding [at the front] and it was the most chaotic thing I’ve ever seen. All the cars were coming up and talking to the teams – ‘You ride, you don’t ride, we’ll pay, you’ll pay.’ We [Panasonic] didn’t ride because they didn’t offer us enough money.” 

Eventually Roche was brought to heel, but immediately after the race was blown apart by an attack from the world champion Moreno Argentin – he of Ardenne Classics fame. He had a score to settle with Visentini, who had said that Argentin would be two hours behind by the end of the three weeks., so when Argentin saw the maglia rosa in trouble, he had no hesitation in upping the pace. 

As they drove up the final climb, the radio reporters repeated the words: “Roberto Visentini è letteralmente crollato – Visentini has collapsed.” The stress of the whole day caught up with him on the long drag to the finish, and he lost eight minutes in as many kilometres, with not a single Carrera domestique by his side. He was livid when he crossed the line, pointing to the television podium and shouting, “There’s a few guys going home tonight.” 

Only a midnight visit from the sponsor kept Roche in the race: the boss of the jeans company could work out that the Irishman was a more likely winner than the Italian. The team was divided, with the Belgian Eddy Schepers taking Roche’s side, as did the French mechanic Patrick Valcke. The rest, all Italians, would help Visentini. 

The polemica continued to the finish in Saint-Vincent, a week and the whole of the Dolomites away. More to the point, Visentini’s home region of Brescia was a short drive from all the mountain passes. Schepers had had to threaten Visentini’s fans to keep them away from Roche at the finish in Sappada, but worse was to come. 

On the mountains they spat at the Irishman, threw screwed up balls of pink Gazzetta at him and bradished pieces of raw meat to show what they wanted to do to him. He rode through the corridor of baying tifosi with Schepers on one side, and Millar on the other, Millar was not his team-mate, but he had served the same apprenticeship at the ACBB amateur club in Paris, and was happy to put one over on the Italians. 

And the papers lapped it up, as the pair made their cases through the press. “Visentini talks at the start, Roche answers at the finish,” wrote Angelo Zomegnan in Gazzetta. Visentini’s allegations were outlandish. “Roche has too many allies. All of Fagor [a French team] are working for Roche. He’s bought van der Velde [a Dutch climber] as well. The guys at the top of the standings all attack, then look to see where Roche is,” complained the Italian. 

“As a rider, Roche is good, as a man I’ll say he’s shown what he really is: completely two-faced,” he moaned in an interview entitled “Visentini: why I hate Roche”. “Why?” asked Zomegnan. “One day he smiles at you, the next he shafts you,” answered Visentini, adding, apropos of the foreign coterie within Carrera, “They’re a right trio, after the stages they get together in a hotel room and have seances.” Roche’s answer was simple, and explains why the Italian public ended up taking his side: “Roberto fell off in the Tour of the Basque Country [a spring stage race] and hit his head. He sometimes gets the wrong end of the stick.” Millar recalled that by the end of the race, Visentini had made himself so unpopular that when Roche punctured close to the finish of a stage, not one rider pointed this out to his arch enemy. Six weeks later, Roche would win the Tour de France, and at the end of the summer, he would equal Merckx’s triple of Giro, Tour, and world championship.