Mellow Velo said:
This slur about Coppi, takes the biscuit. It is so disrespectful of a terrible time and its hardships, not to mention showing appalling ignorance about a rider who Armstrong can't hold a candle to.
I'm afraid this crank must join an elite few on my ignore list.
(until he goes the way of all such trolls)
I didn't want to get into this but you leave me no choice, you fricking hypocrite.
The claim make was the his time as a WWII prisoner was part of the reason his bones were allegedly brittle, which a absolutely, provably not be true. Cases of Allies starving Axis prisoners are rare if they exist at all.
"He was kept in a prisoner of war camp, where he shared plates with the father of Claudio Chiappucci, who rode the Tour in the 1990s. He was given odd jobs to do. The British cyclist Len Levesley said he was astonished to find Coppi giving him a haircut.[23] Levesley, who was on a stretcher with polio, said:
I should think it took me all of a full second to realise who it was. He looked fine, he looked slim, and having been in the desert, he looked tanned. I'd only seen him in cycling magazines but I knew instantly who he was. So he cut away at my hair and I tried to have a conversation with him, but he didn't speak English and I don't speak Italian. But we managed one or two words and I got over to him that I did some club racing. And I gave him a bar of chocolate that I had with me and he was grateful for that and that was the end of it.[n 3]
The British moved Coppi to an RAF base at Caserta in Italy in 1945. There he worked for an officer who had never heard of him. Coppi was allowed liberal terms, the war being as good as over."
More about your cycling saint. He was a drug user.
"Coppi spoke of the subject in a television interview:
Question: Do cyclists take la bomba (amphetamine)?
Answer: Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it's not worth talking to them about cycling.
Question: And you, did you take la bomba?
Answer: Yes. Whenever it was necessary.
Question: And when was it necessary?
Answer: Almost all the time!"
The source for he above interview is; Archive extract from Quando Volava l'Airone, part of a programme called Format, Rai Tre television, 1998; and Cited Nouvel Observateur, France, 19 November 2008
"Coppi "set the pace" in drug-taking, said his contemporary, the Dutchman, Wim van Est. "
Source, Cycling, UK, 4 January 1990
The source for all of this is the Wikipedia page, the same Wikipedia page Race Radio literally copy pasted his information about Coppi from.
You can use gang insults against me all you want. I notice that the responses to what I wrote were long on personal insults, and extremely short on attacks of my facts.
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