Alfredo Binda Print, Vintage Cycling Poster, Italia Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

ALFREDO BINDA — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Alfredo Binda, 1925-1935.

In 1930 the organisers of the Giro d'Italia paid Alfredo Binda twenty-two thousand and five hundred lire, the equivalent of the winner's prize, on condition that he did not enter the race.

This is not a legend. It is a commercial decision recorded at the time, taken by a newspaper that owned a bicycle race and needed people to buy the newspaper.

Binda had won the 1929 Giro and taken twelve of the fifteen stages, including eight in a row. Readers had stopped caring about a result that was decided in the first week. The organisers concluded, reasonably, that the product was broken and that the problem was the best rider.

He took the money and rode the Tour de France instead, where he won two stages and then abandoned.

He won the Giro five times in total, a record he shares with Coppi and Merckx, and was world champion three times, the first man to win the rainbow jersey more than once.

His style is the thing contemporaries kept returning to. He had played trumpet in the band at Cittiglio and worked as a plasterer in Nice, and the descriptions of his riding are all musical: smooth, metronomic, apparently without effort. He climbed seated. He did not appear to suffer, which spectators found either sublime or infuriating.

The 1927 world championship at the Nurburgring is the race that explains the rest. Binda won by more than seven minutes on a circuit that had opened that year, in conditions that eliminated most of the field. He won it again in 1930 and 1932, the first rider ever to take the rainbow jersey more than once.

He also had the misfortune of being magnificent in an era that wanted drama, and of being followed by Coppi and Bartali, who supplied it.

After retiring he became the manager of the Italian national team and did the one job nobody else could: keeping Coppi and Bartali in the same squad, at the same table, aimed at the same finish line. He managed the 1948 and 1949 Tours with them, and the 1949 win by Coppi is partly his.

He died in 1986 at Cittiglio, where he was born.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.