Centurions

To celebrate the 100th edition of the Giro d’Italia,Cyclist looks back at the people who have made Italy’s Grand Tour arguably a more demanding, more exciting and more beautiful race than its French neighbour.

- Colin O'Brien

The Giro d’Italia was born one hot August morning in 1908, in a small office in Milan. Tullo Morgagni, editor of the Gazzetta dello Sport, was in desperate need of cash to keep the lights on at his struggling newspaper, and he’d just been given the kind of tip that could transform the publication’s fortunes. Morgagni sent a brusque telegram to his cycling correspondent, Armando Cougnet, demanding he return to the Lombard capital at once. Eugenio Camillo Costamagna, the paper’s owner, received his own communiqué, and promptly ended his vacation.

‘Without delay,’ announced the message from his editor, ‘necessity obliges the Gazzetta to launch an Italian tour.’

Morgagni’s haste was well warranted, having learned from Angelo Gatti, the owner of the Atala bicycle factory, that his rivals at Bianchi were planning a nationwide cycle race in conjunction with the Touring Club Italiano and the Corriere della Sera newspaper. Spotting an opportunity to get one over on the competition, Gatti had gone to the Gazzetta with the information, knowing that they could ill afford to let their counterparts at the Corriere della Sera get their hands on a national bike race.

It would be of huge interest to the public, certainly, and a guaranteed boost to sales. And having seen what Henri Desgrange’s Tour de France had done for his publication, l’Auto, and the devestating effect it had on sales of what was at the time France’s biggest daily and Desgrange’s biggest competitor, Le Vélo, neither Costamagnanor Morgagni were in any mind to be caught off guard.