Ercole Baldini, Giro d'Italia winner and world champion, dies aged 89

Ercole Baldini, winner of the Giro d’Italia and Road World Championships in 1958, died at the age of 89 at his home in Villanova, Italy on Wednesday after a short illness.

Nicknamed Il Treno di Forlì – ‘The Forlì Express’ – Baldini’s gifts as a rouleur carried him to a sparkling series of successes on road and track in the late 1950s.

In his final year as an amateur in 1956, Baldini broke Jacques Anquetil’s Hour Record and later soloed to a remarkable victory in the road race at the Melbourne Olympics that December. Within two years, Baldini would claim a most dominant Giro victory and then power to the rainbow jersey at the World Championships in Reims.

Baldini was born in Forlì in 1933, the fourth of six sons. He started racing as a 17-year-old after impressing local professionals who encountered during his rides to and from school. His raw power was soon diverted to the track and in 1954, Baldini established an amateur Hour Record of 44.870km.

After a year of military service, Baldini enjoyed a golden 1956 season, his last as an amateur. In early September, he beat compatriot Leandro Faggin to the individual pursuit world title in Copenhagen, and on his return to Italy, Baldini opted to tackle Jacques Anquetil’s outright Hour Record. Before a crowd of 15,000 at Milan’s Vigorelli track, Baldini put more than 200 metres into Anquetil’s mark, establishing a new record of 46.394km.

In December, Baldini made the long journey to the Olympic Games in Melbourne, where he was in a class of his own in the road race. He broke clear alone with two laps remaining, cruising home almost two minutes ahead of Arnaud Geyre. The organising committee had mislaid its recording of the Italian national anthem for the podium ceremony, but the scattering of Italian émigrés in the crowd compensated by singing the Inno di Mameli after Baldini had been awarded gold.

Baldini turned professional with Legnano in 1957 and made an immediate impression in his Giro debut, winning the time trial to Forte dei Marmi and placing third overall behind Gastone Nencini and Louison Bobet.

Shortly afterwards, Baldini was crowned Italian national champion and at season’s end, he paired up with Fausto Coppi to win the two-up Trofeo Baracchi. The occasion was couched as a passing of the torch, and though physical issues meant Baldini didn’t endure long at the top, his flame burned brightly while he did.

Giro and Worlds in 1958

In 1958, Baldini was imperious at the Giro, winning two early time trials and then adding two of the race’s toughest mountain stages for good measure, including the tappone to Bolzano in the final week. He carried the maglia rosa to Milan with four minutes in hand on Jean Brankart and six on Charly Gaul.

While Gaul would go on to win that year’s Tour de France, Baldini opted to skip the race and prepare for the Road World Championships in Reims. Despite his status as Giro winner, Baldini found himself in the day’s early break on the second lap, bound by the instructions of Coppi, who was now serving as Italy’s road captain.

Out in front, Baldini linked up with his compatriot Nencini, three-time Tour winner Louison Bobet and Dutchman Gerrit Voorting in a four-man move that seemed destined to fail on the rolling course through the Champagne region.

As the others in the break began to falter, however, Baldini held firm. Bobet was the last man standing with Baldini, but not even he could match the Italian when he accelerated with a little over two laps to go. Baldini put more than two minutes into Bobet while André Darrigade won the sprint for bronze.

In the immediate aftermath of the race, the Italian press heralded Baldini’s victory as the fruit of a tactical masterclass the aging Coppi. Baldini himself knew the truth to be rather different, even if he shrugged it off.

“That’s what all the journalists wrote: Coppi’s great intuition, Coppi’s great strategy, Coppi’s great gift… It seemed that he had won the Worlds, not me,” Baldini told La Repubblica in 2019.

“Shortly afterwards, [Nino] Defilippis told me that Coppi, during the race, had admitted to him: ‘I sent him up the road to make him crack and now he’s going to end up winning.’ I’d suspected it myself and now I had the confirmation. But I stayed quiet: if I’d responded, with all the influence Coppi had in the press, I’d have been made to look like a fool.”

Baldini never scaled quite the same heights again, even though he placed 6th overall on his Tour debut the following season, winning the stage that crossed the Alps into Italy and Saint Vincent.

In the years that followed, Baldini was hampered by the lingering effects of appendicitis surgery, which didn’t help his natural tendency to gain weight, though he remained a redoubtable rouleur, adding the Grand Prix des Nations to his palmarès in 1960.

Baldini placed in the top 10 of the Giro and Tour again in 1962, and he claimed pursuit bronze in the World Championships in 1964 before retiring at season’s end after placing second at the Trofeo Baracchi in the company of a young Vittorio Adorni.

After retirement, Baldini worked for a time as a directeur sportif, most notably with SCIC in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he later served as president of the Italian riders’ association and of the Italian cycling league.

In 2016, Baldini was inducted into the Giro d’Italia Hall of Fame and in 2018, he was feted in Forlì to mark the 60th anniversary of his immortal 1958 season.  

Former Italian national coach Davide Cassani paid tribute to Baldini’s prowess as an athlete and humility as a man in the pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport on Thursday. “He was imposing, a bundle of muscles, with two shoulders like a wardrobe,” Cassani wrote. “But most of all, for us boys from Romagna, he was a god on Earth.”

Ercole Baldini was born in Forlì, Italy on 26 January, 1933. He died in Vilanova di Forlì, Italy on 1 December, 2022.