It’s the Monday morning following Tadej Pogačar’s latest Lake Como promenade. The Slovenian’s fourth consecutive victory in Il Lombardia, in 2024, was his most consummate yet, and as chance would have it we’re just along the way in Monza. The Royal Villa here is one of the neoclassical jewels in the Lombard crown, and appropriately enough we’re in the company of an authentic cycling prince. A rider every bit as stylish – if not quite so insatiable – as cycling’s latest superstar.
In the early 1990s, Gianni Bugno was irrefutably the most romantic (and romanticised) rider of his generation. One of only four in history to have worn the maglia rosa from post to wire, Bugno’s 1990 Giro d’Italia victory saw him beat the time-trial specialists Lech Piasecki and Thierry Marie down in Puglia, and then run away with the thing à la Tadej. There were consecutive World Championships, a Milan-Sanremo won with a glorious attack on the Cipressa (not yet an exploit matched by Pogačar) and a Tour of Flanders so improbable it seemed almost mystical. There were many other victories too, 60 in total, and so little wonder that so many of the tifosi coalesced around him. Notwithstanding the fact that it all seems like yesterday, the man who once reignited Italy’s age-old passion for cycling has just turned 61. He remains immensely popular here, and the Giro has recently seen fit to induct him into its Hall of Fame. That’s entirely as it should be, and one way or another there seems a certain rightness about catching up with him.
Bugno is cycling aristocracy, then, but you wouldn’t know it from his demeanour. He’s just as self-effacing as ever, and just as uncomfortable talking about his accomplishments. All of which explains, at least in part, the widely-held notion that he’s somewhat enigmatic. I say in part because he also contrived to make the endurance sport of cycling look, well… easy. In that respect, too, he and Tadej Pogačar have a very great deal in common.
The World Championship wins in Stuttgart and Benidorm in 1991 and 1992 were entirely illustrative. While the likes of Indurain, Jalabert and Konyshev – the absolute cream of world cycling – turned themselves inside out after six and a half gruelling hours, he appeared barely to be trying. They were sprinting for all they were worth but he, the very epitome of Euro-cool with his hair gel and Bollé sunglasses, didn’t appear to be sprinting at all. There was a dismissive, almost perfunctory quality about the way he beat them, and all because he was Gianni Bugno and they weren’t.
Bugno during the 1992 Tour de France (Image: Jerome Prevost/TempSport/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
People assumed he ought to have won everything, everywhere, but Gianni being Gianni he couldn’t and didn’t. There were issues with descending, with insecurity and ennui, and overwhelmingly there were issues with Miguel Indurain. Back then the Tour routinely featured two massive individual time trials, and Bugno was merely very good at them. Indurain, on the other hand, was possibly the greatest tester who ever lived. In effect he began the Tour with a four-minute advantage, and he wasn’t really droppable in the mountains. Bugno finished on the podium twice, but gave up trying in 1994, the year he turned 30. In the age of Indurain, July in France was the cycling equivalent of the Rock of Sisyphus, so Bugno tried his hand at April in Belgium instead, and immediately found success, outsprinting the specialists Tchmil, Museeuw and Ballerini to win, by precisely one centimetre, a sensational Ronde. The wins were less frequent thereafter, but no less inspirational. Put simply, he was the kind of cyclist who made people fall in love with cycling. A bike rider who made people want to ride a bike.
Half a lifetime later and he’s still not learned to blow his own trumpet. He talks about his career purely as a matter of fact, as if his having been a great athlete was mere happenstance. Nor is he much for rancour, but today finds him unusually irked. Hold the back page, because Gianni Bugno feels the need to get something off his chest.
“I think another season or two like this will start to hurt cycling,” he says. “At the World Championship, Tadej was alone for two and a half hours, at Strade Bianche for two hours, at Lombardy for an hour, and so on. As regards athletic performance it’s fantastic, and it’s not his fault that the others can’t compete. For the true cycling appassionato it’s spectacular, but most people aren’t true cycling appassionati. They tend to watch the last 60 or 90 minutes of the races, and they want to see a contest. As of now, what they’re seeing is the same guy, on his own, and it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to win. Everyone understands that he’s a once-in-a-lifetime rider, but I’m not sure it’s going to be good for the sport in the long run.”
History repeats in cycling, and every emerging talent is measured against Eddy Merckx and/or Fausto Coppi. When Bugno emulated the former (and the campionissimi Girardengo and Binda) by wearing pink all the way round, he was subject to a few comparisons himself. Most were misplaced, but the consequences are worthy of examination.
Following that breakout 1990 Giro, Bugno headed for France without GC ambitions and won at L’Alpe d’Huez and in Bordeaux, the blue riband climbers’ stage and the blue riband sprinters’ stage. Elsewhere the upstart climber Claudio Chiappucci wore yellow for a week and threatened to unseat the great Greg LeMond. He didn’t quite manage it, but suddenly Italy had two brilliant riders, two singular personalities and, best of all, one juicy natural rivalry. Bugno was taciturn, ethereal and wonderfully aesthetic, Chiappucci pugnacious, earthy, physical and utterly without fear. For press and public alike it was a godsend, and everyone felt compelled to choose a side. Not quite Coppi and Gino Bartali, but not so very far removed.
“At the time I was young and focused on what I was doing, but with the benefit of hindsight I’m able to contextualise it,” he says. “The thing with Claudio was that we were totally different in just about every respect, and people were interested in us as people as well as riders.
“Italian cycling had been in a bit of a hole. The Beppe Saronni and Francesco Moser rivalry had sustained it through the early 1980s, but those two had retired and foreigners had won the last three Giri. No Italian had won Sanremo for six years, so one way or another there was a lot of frustration. Then we came along and suddenly there were victories and a rivalry. Italian cycling didn’t need ‘saving’, but personal rivalries have always been the thing which drives sport. In the end it was a bit exaggerated. I stopped reading the papers and tried to indemnify myself against it insofar as I could, but now I understand it better. There are livelihoods at stake, and cycling is a top-down business. There are mouths to feed.”
Context is everything here, because it determines the trajectory of the sport. The Coppi-Bartali soap opera had been rooted in the fact that they raced one another most weekends on the Italian domestic circuit. Likewise, three decades later, with Moser and Saronni. They detested one another, and their animus was manna from heaven for press and public alike. Merckx was toe-to-toe with Luis Ocaña, Roger De Vlaeminck and Felice Gimondi all year round, while the Jacques Anquetil-Raymond Poulidor spat enveloped all of 1960s France. It was so visceral – and so totemic – that it resonated beyond the sport of cycling. Pogačar and Vingegaard, on the other hand, is less of a rivalry in that same visceral way. They have a cordial, stage-managed coming together for three weeks in July, but beyond that they barely encounter one another at all, and it’s difficult to argue that it’s good for the sport. Vingegaard has never so much as started Strade Bianche, his Lombardy and Ardennes record is patchy for a rider of his ability, and it would be easy to surmise that they avoid one another on purpose. Meanwhile nobody else is able to live with Pogačar, and at this juncture the races are starting to assume a similar pattern. Everyone knows he’s going to drop the mortals of the peloton, so it’s essentially a question of when and how he chooses to do it. He’s winning as he sees fit, and that’s probably not going to put bums on seats, which Bugno acknowledges: “It needs for Vingegaard to come back to the level he was at before, and for them to race one another more often. More importantly, it needs sponsors which aren’t UAE and Visma to see their jerseys on TV, because they pay for exposure. If you’re getting more for your money with a Serie D football team than with cycling, there’s something wrong. It’s not for Pogačar to change the way he rides, but cycling needs an audience.”
In Italy they say that while Merckx was the best rider of all time, Coppi was the greatest. Merckx was more complete and more robust, and his appetite for winning was insatiable. Coppi was infinitely more graceful on a bike, and infinitely more fragile offit. At the apogee of his career, broadly the years 1946-1952, Italy’s greatest ever athlete failed to win the Giro on four separate occasions. Then the vicissitudes of his personal life were worthy of Tolstoy, and bike ownership was at record levels. His era also constituted the golden age of the cycling industry, cycling journalism and cycling as entertainment.
Pogačar seems to combine the best of each of them, and with the possible exception of the Hour Record there seems nothing he can’t do. The broader issue is that in relative terms, bike racing is much smaller now. On any given weekend it wrestles with hundreds of European sports events for an audience, and as sporting drama goes, watching one man on a bicycle – Pogačar – routinely handing out beatings doesn’t tick as many boxes as a proper rivalry. The complete absence of serious challengers will change in the fullness of time and ultimately he, like Coppi and Merckx, will pass into cycling legend. For now, though, it remains to be seen whether his dominion will portend a Coppi-style upswing or Merckxian retrenchment. Bugno reckons it will depend as much on his personality as on his athletic prowess.
“He seems quite curious about life in general, and I don’t see him as a Merckx or an Armstrong. They were bad losers, but he’s not,” he says. “If it becomes too easy, or too much of a routine, it will start to get boring. He’s already challenging himself to create new ways of winning, so it will largely be a question of motivation. I’m not sure he’ll still be doing this in his mid-30s.”
Cycling can become a job of work like any other, and there are all sorts of factors at play. Some guys fall out of love with the constant travelling, others with getting up and getting out each morning. Parenthood and evolving personal circumstances tend not to benefit performance, and for some the pressure of leadership can become burdensome. Bugno can attest to all of that and that’s why, tired of the goldfish bowl and of losing to Indurain and of being constantly asked about it, he stepped away from riding stage races for GC in 1994: “By the time I was 30 I’d started to hate it, and the only way for me to carry on was to do something else. Obviously my circumstances were different to his and I wasn’t as good as him, but if you’re doing the same thing over and over it can get boring.”
What, then, of the sexagenarian Gianni Bugno? While his racing rival Chiappucci is a natural storyteller and self-promoter, Bugno is by nature introverted. He freely admits that, at the height of his fame and popularity, he often pretended to be a truck driver in order simply to be left alone. When his career ended, he famously took to the skies and became a helicopter rescue pilot. There’s an assumption – or more accurately an urban legend – that it constituted literal as well as figurative escape. The theory went that he’d do anything to avoid talking about being Gianni Bugno. It’s a very seductive idea, but seemingly there was rather more to it.
“As a boy I’d had my heart set on the military, but then cycling happened and it was all-consuming,” he says. “I was fascinated by helicopters though, probably because I was being followed round by one for nearly 15 years as a professional cyclist. So I started learning during the latter years of my cycling career, and I found it challenging and interesting. By the time I retired I had my private license, and I was ready for it to become a job. However I wasn’t consciously trying to escape from cycling, and it wasn’t as if I abandoned the sport altogether. It’s just that I wasn’t suited to becoming a journalist or a sports director, and this was something I really enjoyed. I tried to be good at it, and the better I got at it the more rewarding I found it.”
Though he claims to have forgotten most of what he accomplished as a bike rider, the cycling public hasn’t. A career like the one he had is bound to attach itself, and you can’t just decide to stop being Gianni Bugno.
“It’s been a big part of my life since I was 12 years old,” he says. “It always will be. I worked for Shimano, I did 12 years as the riders’ representative, and I still like the atmosphere of a bike race.”
Condemned by post-Covid health matters to stop flying four years ago, he freely admits the transition hasn’t been easy. There was a brief dalliance with centre-left politics (he says he was asked to get involved by a friend before realising it was “useless”) but his pension contributions are all paid up and technically he’s a retiree. He’s pretty phlegmatic, but for the first time there’s time – quite a lot of it – to fill.
Thanks to Alessio, the footballing son who had a spell at Carlisle United, he’s a two-time nonno, a grandfather. Nonno Gianni still rides, but says he goes out when he feels like it. Sometimes he cycles in company and sometimes he doesn’t, and he’s adamant that riding a bike isn’t existential. Rather he feels the need to be active, and cycling happens to be the easiest way.
“Sometimes I’ll ride three times in a week, and then I won’t ride at all for a while. It’s not like I’m going to die if I don’t pedal a bike. Obviously it’s better that I have one, but there are other ways to stay fit,” he says.
There’s something quintessentially Bugno in that, because cycling has been trying – by and large unsuccessfully – to pin him down for nearly half a century. By the same token he recently accepted an invitation to guest-ride the e-bike Giro with Chiappucci, his old nemesis. While he admits to finding the glad-handing a bit embarrassing, it’s clear that he still likes being around cycling people. Not perhaps quite as much as they like being around him, but such is life. That’s what being a champion does, and that’s what it engenders.
“The e-bike Giro was Claudio’s doing, and it was fun,” he says. “For him, those things come naturally, and he finds himself when he’s in a group of people. He’s always off doing something PR or media-related, and he’s very skilled at talking about his experiences. He works for brands and does things like radio commentary, but I took a different path in life. Obviously we’re different, but we’ve come to appreciate one another and even to enjoy one another’s company. We’re often at the same events these days, and it’s become a friendship. That would have been unthinkable when we were fighting one another, but we both understand that we moved the sport forward. The other night we did an event in Trento with Indurain, and it was really good. He’s an excellent person, and people liked seeing us together.”
On the face of it you’d be hard pushed to imagine two individuals as different as Gianni Bugno and Claudio Chiappucci. They had different characters, different aptitudes as bike riders, completely different ways of interpreting the job. They fought tooth and nail, thrillingly, for the same things, and by definition they weren’t in the business of giving up. That’s precisely the point, because they’ve discovered that they’ve much, much more in common than that which divides them. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, and still more so in these troubled times.
