[3] He left school at age 13 to work for Domenico Merlani, a butcher in Novi Ligure more widely known as Signor Ettore.

He was touched when he heard of my passion for the bike and decided that I deserved a real tool for the job on which I had set my heart, instead of the rusty old crock I was pushing around.

[4]Coppi rode his first race at age 15, among other boys not attached to cycling clubs, and won first prize: 20 lire and a salami sandwich.

From the start of the mountains in the Pyrenees to their end in the Alps, Coppi took back the 55 minutes by which Jacques Marinelli led him.

[15] Coppi won the Tour by 28m 27s and the organiser, Jacques Goddet, had to double the prizes for lower placings to keep other riders interested.

Informed observers who saw both ride agree that Coppi was the more elegant rider who won by dint of his physical gifts as opposed to Merckx who drove himself and hammered his competition relentlessly by being the very embodiment of pure will.

[18]In 1955 Coppi and his lover Giulia Occhini were put on trial for adultery, then illegal in Italy, and got suspended sentences.

He had already been hit in 1951 by the death of his younger brother, Serse Coppi, who crashed in a sprint in the Giro del Piemonte and died of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Coppi, said Chany, was "a magnificent and grotesque washout of a man, ironical towards himself; nothing except the warmth of simple friendship could penetrate his melancholia.

Raphaël Géminiani said of Coppi's domination: When Fausto won and you wanted to check the time gap to the man in second place, you didn't need a Swiss stopwatch.

[23] Bartali, conservative, religious, was venerated in the rural, agrarian south, while Coppi, more worldly, secular, innovative in diet and training, was hero of the industrial north.

The writer Curzio Malaparte said: "Bartali belongs to those who believe in tradition ... he is a metaphysical man protected by the saints.

Their rivalry started when Coppi, the helping hand, won the Giro and Bartali, the star, marshalled the team to chase.

[24] The thaw partly broke when the pair shared a bottle on the Col d'Izoard in the 1952 Tour[n 2] but the two fell out over who had offered it.

Shortly afterwards he made his successful bid for the hour record at Vigorelli Velodrome: the roof of the building still had large holes after Milan had been heavily bombed a few weeks earlier.

According to Coppi's identification paper, he was captured on 13 May 1943 in Enfidha, 100 km south of Tunis, although he may have been caught the previous month by the British Eighth Army which was in and around the city at that time.

In November of that year he returned to Italy, arriving at a POW camp in Naples to work as a driver for the Royal Air Force.

[26] There he worked as a truck driver and as a personal assistant and handyman for an officer, Lieutenant Ronald Smith Towell,[26] who had never heard of him.

Palumbo wrote a newspaper article appealing for help: Coppi then received a Legnano racing bike from a Somma Vesuviana carpenter.

In addition he had distanced himself from Mussolini's government during his time in British custody, which often resulted in beneficial treatment compared to those who had continued to profess their loyalty to the Fascist regime.

[28] Coppi's beloved, "The Woman in White" was Giulia Occhini, described by the French broadcaster Jean-Paul Ollivier as "strikingly beautiful with thick chestnut hair divided into enormous plaits".

Reporters pursued them to a hotel in Castelletto d'Orba and again they moved, buying the Villa Carla, a house near Novi Ligure.

Its president, Bartolo Paschetta, wrote on 8 July 1954: "Dear Fausto, yesterday evening St. Peter made it known to me that the news [of adultery] had caused him great pain".

[29] In December 1959, the president of the Republic of Upper Volta (now known as Burkina Faso), Maurice Yaméogo, invited Coppi, Raphaël Géminiani, Jacques Anquetil, Louison Bobet, Roger Hassenforder and Henry Anglade to ride against local riders and then go hunting.

[32] In January 2002 a man identified only as Giovanni, who lived in Burkina Faso until 1964, said Coppi died not of malaria but of an overdose of cocaine.

Angelo also told me that [Raphael] Géminiani was also present... Fausto's plate fell, they replaced it, and then..."[33] The story has also been attributed to a 75-year-old Benedictine monk called Brother Adrien.

He told Mino Caudullo of the Italian National Olympic Committee: "Coppi was killed with a potion mixed with grass.

[34][35] A court in Tortona opened an investigation and asked toxicologists about exhuming Coppi's body to look for poison.

Coppi's life story was depicted in the 1995 TV movie, Il Grande Fausto, written and directed by Alberto Sironi.

I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything.I became so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage.