the perfect gregarious

Fausto Coppi consoles Andrea Carrea, embarrassed for wearing the yellow jersey in the presence of his leader.

Being gregarious is a profession.

Domestic called them the classics.

Van Aert is a champion and a magnificent herdsman, but Andrea Carrea was the perfect herdsman, always under the orders of his leader, Fausto Coppi.

Bombproof loyalty, so when he wore yellow at the 1952 Tour, on the podium he did not show a smile, but tears;

and he knelt before his boss, and apologized for the affront, although the champion did not reproach him, and encouraged him to wear with joy that sweater that he had gotten after responding effectively to an order from him.

Carrea was a humble guy who had worked in railway maintenance, pedaling the tracks to carry bricks.

When World War II came, he was taken prisoner and transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

There he survived as he could, thinking to put some food in his body, sleeping piled up with more than 300 prisoners, trying to escape from the frostbite.

The Nazi guards caught him stealing potatoes and put him in a hole, and he thought he would die there, but he was lucky: that day the war ended, and he had to return home, 40 kilos lighter.

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It took several months for him to return to his village, Gavi Ligure, in Piedmont.

He first walk to Berlin;

then with a stolen cart and horse on the way to Prague.

Andrea and his hapless companions ended up eating the horse.

When he arrived, his father did not recognize Sandrino, which was his family name.

In 1948, almost without forgetting the moral wounds of the war, Coppi's blind masseur, Biagio Cavana, signed him up for the Bianchi team after feeling his muscles.

"He is a cyclops," he sentenced.

Andrea Carrea became part of Coppi's angels, the champion's praetorian guard within the peloton.

Sandrino trained with Coppi every day.

They did 200 kilometers per day.

He became fond of hunting, like his boss, and they would go out together with the shotgun to walk in the fields.

In the ninth stage of the 1952 Tour, between Mulhouse and Lausanne, on July 3, Coppi ordered him to infiltrate a breakaway, which began to take time with the peloton, until reaching nine minutes.

At the finish line he won Diggelmans and Carrea, who finished seventh, went to the hotel.

A few minutes later, a couple of policemen knocked on his door.

He had to go to the finish line to receive the leader's yellow jersey.

He had dethroned his compatriot Magni, had displaced his boss Coppi.

He got a tremendous upset.

He feared the reaction of his teammates and that of Alfredo Binda, the Italian coach.

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pointed out: “He is seen as a child who has stolen a jar of jam and watches his father approach, fully aware of his guilt”.

But everyone was waiting for him with immense joy.

Coppi caressed him with a smile, only he exhibited a gesture of sorrow.

The next day, at dawn, Carrea picked up his boss's black ankle boots and polished them until they shone.

With them he won Coppi in Alpe d'Huez and dressed in yellow.

"That jersey wasn't mine," assured Sandrino, that the day he found out about Fausto's death, on January 2, 1959, he quit cycling.

Wout Van Aert is also the perfect domestique, although when he wears yellow he has no remorse.

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