It Wasn’t a Betrayal, Just Business

by Barry Ryan
The Ascent: Sean Kellty, Stephen Roche and the Rise of Irish Cycling's Golden Generation
Gill Books

Carrera Jeans, based in Caldiero on the outskirts of Verona, was established by Tito Tacchella and his brothers Imerio and Domenico in 1965. By the mid-1980s, inspired by the success of another Veneto clothing empire, Benetton, they sought to boost their international profile by taking over the sponsorship of the Inoxpran cycling team. Although Boifava managed the sporting operations, the brothers’ interest extended far beyond signing off on the team’s budget each season. Tito Tacchella was due to visit the Giro when it hit the high mountains in any case, but after watching on television as one Carrera rider divested another of pink, he brought his trip forward in order to pass Salomonic judgement on the power struggle. 

A helicopter was ordered to transport him to Sappada immediately, but somewhere above Treviso, Tacchella was compelled to turn back by air traffic control. Ronald Reagan was holidaying at the five-star Villa Condulmer Hotel in Mogliano Veneto ahead of the forthcoming G7 summit in Venice, and a no-fly zone was enforced over the area for the duration of the president’s stay. It did little to disabuse Tacchella of the importance of his own diplomatic mission. A man didn’t need to read Patrick Kavanagh to understand Homer had made the Iliad from such a local row. Tacchella’s journey to Sappada became a three-hour trek by car, and it would be after 10pm before he arrived at the rather less glamorous Hotel Corona Ferrea. 

Carrera’s hotel was located near the finish in Sappada, and Roche had been all but shooed there by press officer Gianfranco Belleri, who hoped the Irishman would remain cloistered silently in room 14 until his bosses decided precisely what it was they would do with him. Roche had managed to speak briefly with a small group of reporters before Belleri whisked him away from the podium, however, and he later granted audiences to Angelo Zomegnan of La Gazzetta dello Sport and British reporter John Wilcockson at the hotel. ‘Your man won’t talk to me,’ he told Wilcockson of Visentini. ‘He just goes red in the face and walks away.’ 

Visentini’s recollection is that Roche didn’t even dare approach him that evening in Sappada, preferring to remain quarantined in his bedroom while his fate was decided. ‘He was nowhere to be seen that night, he didn’t show his face,’ says Visentini, who seems to avoid even breathing Roche’s name when possible. ‘I think he stayed up in his room to eat, the same with his mechanic.’ 

Roche, Valcke, Schepers all feared that they would be sent home for their combined show of insubordination that afternoon, and they endured an anxious wait, first for Tacchella to arrive in Sappada, and then for the outcome of his summit with Boifava. In reality, the fact that Roche had the pink jersey meant that they need not have worried. The team would row in behind him. ‘They couldn’t really send me home because Roberto had lost five minutes,’ Roche says. 

Visentini laughs joylessly at the idea that the Carrera management ever entertained the notion of pulling the maglia rosa from the race. ‘The directors were never going to take that decision. It didn’t work like that because Carrera was only interested in winning the Giro.m full stop,’ he says. ‘I counted for zero. And the others counted for zero. All that counted was winning the Giro. The sponsors just wanted to win the Giro above all, and they had the maglia rosa. They weren’t going to send him home.’ 

Boifava confirms as much. ‘No, no, no, no, no. We never spoke about sending Stefano home. Never. Absolutely not. My job was to win the Giro, basta,’ he says. ‘The main thing was that Carrera, who were spending billions of lire, won the Giro, whether it was with Roche or Visentini.’ In short, it wasn’t a betrayal, just business. 

The following day’s stage was the tappone, the toughest leg of the Giro, a 214-kilometre trek to Canazei by way of the Passo Sella, Passo Pordoi and the Marmolada, though Schepers does not recall being daunted by the mighty Dolomites so much as by the opprobrium directed at Roche from the roadside. ‘On the Marmolada, I went and asked the police on the motorbikes to protect Stephen and keep the public out of the road, in case they tried to hit him, but he was very visible in the pink jersey. That really stands out,’ Schepers says. ‘I can still remember riding at his side, with Stephen staying in the middle of the road all the time so that the public couldn’t touch him. It really felt like it was la guerra up there.’ 

Roche extended his lead in Canazei – Breukink was now in 2nd place, 33 seconds down – but his abiding memory from the day is of spectators calling for his head. ‘On the hills, they were taking wine in their mouths and spitting it at me as I came past, and they were punching me as well,’ he says. In his 1988 autobiography, The Agony and the Ecstasy, ghostwritten by David Walsh, Roche complained that one Italian newspaper had labelled him a ‘traitor’, while others were reporting only Visentini’s side of the story, but a scan of the archives shows relatively few traces of chauvinism among the home media. 

Indeed, in his column in Il Corriere della Sera the day after Sappada, the three-time Giro winner Felice Gimondi came out strongly in support of Roche. ‘I know that Visentini’s fans have endured a great disappointment, bit it would be unsporting – uncivilised even – if they took that out on Roche, a rider who took advantage of a certain situation and who merits everyone’s respect,’ Gimondi wrote. ‘Let’s accept the verdict of this corsa rosa.’ Interviewed on television, Gino Bartali was equally even-handed: ‘For me, it’s not a betrayal.’ 

Their thoughts were echoed by the veteran journalist Mario Fossati in la Repubblica. ‘You can’t say that Stephen Roche betrayed Roberto Visentini,’ he wrote. ‘Roche behaved just as the ambiguous ethics of this old sport allowed him to do.’ If the Italian press revelled in the polemics engendered by the Sappada affair, it was not due to jingoism, but simply because it allowed them to cast Roche and Visentini as a latter-day Coppi and Bartali, and dust off the Homeric allusions of old. For the sala stampa, the drama was simply a welcome infusion of colour in a Giro that had risked playing out in greyscale. 

The fans’ attacks weren’t all that Roche had to fend off on the stage to Canazei, as Visentini looked to test his mettle by accelerating repeatedly when the road climbed, and by taking some erratic lines through corners when it descended. Roche later claimed that Visentini deliberately tried to cause him to crash on one of the descents that day, and for once, their respective accounts tally. ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Visentini says matter-of-factly. ‘I went very close to him. I wanted to put him off the road.’ 

Despite Visentini’s ongoing belligerence, the rest of the Carrera team quietly rowed in behind Roche, with an emissary visiting his room in Sappada to outline the Italian riders’ point of view. ‘Davide Cassani came to explain why they had chased him. It was a lot more difficult for the Italians to do what I did. They were part of the organisation and they couldn’t disobey Boifava’s orders in the way I was able to,’ Schepers says, 

In the mountains in the final days of the race, Roche found a useful ally of circumstance in the shape of his old Peugeot teammate Robert Millar, even though the climber was racing for Breukink’s Panasonic team. They combined most obviously on the final mountain stage to Pila, with Millar taking the stage and moving up to 2nd overall, while Roche definitively distanced Breukink. At a time when Anglophone riders in the peloton were rare, Millar’s contribution was reported in the English-language specialist media as an example of the camaraderie prevalent among the so-called ‘Foreign Legion’, but the truth was a little more nuanced. 

‘I didn’t ride against Roche at the Giro would be the best way of putting it. I was there to serve [Phil] Anderson and the Breukink, so my involvement in the GC race was merely coincidental,’ Philippa York says now. ‘I got called up at the last minute, because it was never on my race programme so I was disinterested in being there.’ The Scot was also eyeing the exit at Panasonic at the time, jaded from navigating the oscillating moods of the domineering manager, Peter Post. The informal non-aggression pact with Roche was the beginning of the process that saw both riders move to Fagor in 1988. ‘I suspected I was leaving Panasonic and that Giro helped make a decision of where to go. I thought riding with Stephen would be a better choice than the other offers,’ York says. ‘Big mistake.’ 

This most explosive Giro, and the ire of Visentini’s most ardent supporters, had fizzled out before Roche capped his overall triumph with an emphatic win in the time trial to Saint-Vincent in the Alps on the last day, and the final standings barely hinted at the true story of a fraught race. Roche’s eventual margin of victory was a generous 3:40 over Millar, and more glaringly, Visentini’s name was absent from the overall standings altogether. He suffered a fractured wrist in a crash on the penultimate stage, and he didn’t even start the Saint-Vincent time trial. 

While Roche drove through the night with Schepers to celebrate his Giro triumph quietly at his house on the outskirts of Paris, Visentini was already at home at his villa above Lake Garda, brooding over his future in the sport. Although he lingered in the peloton until 1990, it was a flickering existence; his career effectively died at Sappada. On retirement, Visentini gladly faded out from the cycling milieu altogether to concentrate on running his family’s undertaking business. In the quarter of a century since, he has never admitted to the merest nostalgia for the impalpable world he used to inhabit in cycling. 

Schepers maintains Visentini is the only rider who has failed to attend any of the periodic team reunions organised by Carrera in Verona. Visentini, for his part, is bemused by the very idea that anyone might expect him to show up. ‘Why would I go to a Carrera party? To see the guys who made me lose the race?’ he asks. ‘I’ll gladly go and spend time with friends and enjoy myself, but a party with the guys who made me lose the Giro d’Italia? Come on.’ 

Visentini’s thoughts on Roche and his account of the 1987 Giro, meanwhile, are blunt, ‘He’s always talked bollocks,’ Visentini says, more in weariness than in anger. ‘He’s always said false things. He’s not reliable.’