The Coppi and Bartali Bottle: Who Hands What to Whom?

01A Sunday in July, around 12:30 p.m.

Sunday, July 6, 1952. Stage 11 of the Tour de France: Le Bourg-d'Oisans to Sestriere, 182 km. Fausto Coppi, winner at Alpe d'Huez two days earlier, wears the yellow jersey. He will win the stage, then the Tour, 28 min 17 s ahead of Belgium's Stan Ockers.

Around 12:30 p.m., Carlo Delfino writes in Tuttobiciweb, some twenty riders attack the long climb toward the Galibier. A photographer is there: Carlo Martini. He presses the shutter. The shot will go around the world.

02The third man, cropped out

The famous photo shows only two men: Coppi in front, Bartali right behind. According to Delfino, it appears on July 10, 1952, in Lo Sport Illustrato.

But it has been cropped. The original turned up by chance from a pack of photos that former track rider Marino Vigna, who had them from his father, entrusted to Delfino. “There were six of them,” Delfino says: Coppi, Bartali, Ockers, Gelabert, Spain's Ruiz, chasing a Frenchman off the front, Jean Le Guilly. Ockers, second in the Tour, was “cut out of history,” he says.

03The Galibier? Almost

Most accounts place the scene on the Galibier. Delfino locates it more precisely in the last hairpins of the Col du Télégraphe, which the race crosses that day before Valloire and the Galibier. Same road, same day: the Galibier remains the name history kept.

04The Coppi Bartali bottle: who gives it to whom?

This is the real soap opera. Bartali always claimed it was him, and denied ever receiving anything from Coppi, reports the Catalan daily Diari de Tarragona. The opposite version, with Coppi as the giver, circulates just as widely.

The image doesn't settle it. And it may not have been a water bottle. Vito Liverani, the dean of Italian photographers, who managed the use of the shot on behalf of Martini's wife, talks about a bottle of water, “probably the Perrier one.” He says he knows the answer. “Certo che lo so. Ma non ho intenzione di dirlo” (“Of course I do. But I have no intention of saying.”), he told Il Giornale in 2009.

05Caught live, or staged?

Second quarrel. For Delfino, it's a genuine snapshot, taken during the race. For Liverani, the photo was “created”: Martini supposedly agreed with both riders and the race director, then gave a bottle to a friend, who was to hand it to them as they passed. The two accounts contradict each other, and neither has been proven.

06The gesture replayed

In 2014, in Rivarolo Canavese, the sons of the two champions, Faustino Coppi and Andrea Bartali, replayed the scene, reports the local paper Il Risveglio. The water bottle had become a bottle of Erbaluce wine. The debate, for its part, remains open.