Michele Dancelli has died at the age of 83. Famous for his solo triumph in Milan-Sanremo he could climb, sprint and enjoyed many a breakaway too which all brought him more wins from the classics to grand tour stages, and all during an era crowded with champions.
Born in 1942 in Castenedolo, a town in the north of Italy near Brescia, Dancelli was one of seven children. Another child that had died soon after birth and there was more tragedy to come when his father died of pneumonia in 1943.
The family lived in a two room apartment and struggled. Dancelli told local newspaper Prima Brescia he had an uncle who slaughtered pigs and was able to pass them some meat from time to time.
He left school at the age of 12 to work as a builder and after saving his pay bought a bike to get to work. He started racing friends on weekends and got a taste for sport, boosted by seeing the Giro d’Italia go by. He started to upgrades the parts on his bike and soon entered competitions. Moving up the ranks via several clubs he had to decide which club to join, US Super Carpen or US Bober, both taking their name and backing from shoe factories in Castenedolo.
Dancelli claimed the Italian amateur or dilettante title in the summer of 1963 at the age of 21 with Bober. A contract with the Molteni team followed right away. For now this was was just a modest outfit sponsored by a salami maker capable of winning a Giro d’Italia stage here or there, and a long way from being synonymous with Eddy Merckx in his pomp. Weeks into his pro career he finished third in the Giro di Lombardia.
Dancelli got his first win in the next year, a stage in the Giro d’Italia and on home roads in Brescia. He told the press at the time he just tried to follow the leaders over the Passo Sant’Eusebio to please the crowd, without thinking of the win but this showed he could climb and sprint and as well as the win came the maglia rosa of race leader too. All this aged 22 meant promise and popularity.
In 1965 he was back in the maglia rosa on the opening stage of the Giro. Later in the season he won the Italian championships – awarded for the last time across a series of three races – where he surpassed Vittorio Adorni, that year’s Giro winner. He’d sported the tricolore jersey the following year to win the Flèche Wallonne after a long solo break.
Antoine Blondin was recycling Goethe’s “tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are” into “tell me who you have beaten and I will tell you who you are” in several of his L’Equipe columns at the time. But Dancelli would have been hard to label, at 64kg he could sometimes climb with the best, taking a Giro stage below the Marmolada (at Malga Ciapela as the road wasn’t paved beyond), and donning the maglia rosa when the race visited Mount Etna for the first time in 1967 plus he was second on the day of Eddy Merckx’s Mourenx masterpiece in 1969 by which time he’d won a stage of the Tour de France in the Alpine foothills just before too. But he could out-sprint the likes of Marino Basso and Eric Leman on his day too, plus he won several time trials.
Such versatility was impressive but also meant he was prone to being trumped by someone with better specialist skills on the day. In the 1972 Giro he never finished lower than 37th on a stage, had nine top-10s but no win. One of his biggest regrets was twice finishing third in the World Championships. But it was hard to see how to achieve the alchemy as when Vittorio Adorni won gold in 1968 and Dancelli took the bronze he was over ten minutes down. As well as Adorni, Italian cycling was crowded with talent at this time with the likes of Bitossi, Balmanion, Basso, Gimondi, Motta, Zandegu and Zilioli winning too.
He could win anywhere but enjoyed going solo. This led journalist Gianni Mura to label him “il sognatore nomade“, literally the dreaming nomad but think of a wandering daydreamer. When he won the Flèche Wallonne in 1966 he went clear so early his team manager drove up to ask what he was thinking of. He later told newspaper L’Unita that “liked to chased by champions” and also because it was better than being resigned to losing, settle for that and “why live this life when you might as well work in a bank” he said. But it was in 1970 that he made his most famous move.
Italy hadn’t had a home winner of Milan-Sanremo since Loretto Petrucci in 1953. The success of non-Italian sprinters led the organisers to try and engineer the outcome, literally when they added the Poggio climb in 1960. This just saw different foreigners win like Raymond Poulidor, Tom Simpson and Merckx.
In 1970 Dancelli was back with Molteni and won the season-opening Trofeo Laigueglia, then a warm-up held amid team training camps on the sunny stretch of coast either side of the Franco-Italian border. Dancelli knew the roads well as he would personally rent lodgings here over winter to train in warmer conditions. In March he rode Paris-Nice but was exhausted by the wintry conditions and he did not start the final stage. After transport to Milan, he rode the last 100km home to Castenedolo and that was all could manage before Milan-Sanremo, despairing at the lack of training. Among the 237 starters he had few hopes even if the sun was out.
He made the early 17 rider breakaway as the race crossed the plains. Among them Rik van Looy, Gerben Karstens, Italo Zilioli, Roger De Vlaeminck, Walter Godefroot, Eric Leman and Vuelta winner Rolf Wolfshohl, this was no chance move. The front group thinned on the Turchino pass where it held a five minute lead. Dancelli attacked with 70km to go in the streets of Loano and while De Vlaeminck tried to follow, Dancelli was left racing alone on the Via Aurelia. The team car came up, at various times offering encouragement, sugar cubes and even financial incentives if he could pull it off.
He won solo and collapsed in tears at the finish line. As Marco Pastonesi writes in Tuttobici “he taught us that tears can also be tears of joy. He taught us that crying can also be tears of happiness”. The tearful image stuck as he blurted out “they didn’t believe I was a champion“. The legend goes that all the carabinieri were sobbing too although images from the time show Dancelli swamped by a joyous crowd, including delighted policemen.
Dancelli’s mechanic was Ernesto Colnago and on the way back from Sanremo he met Gazzetta journalist Bruno Raschi in a restaurant. Raschi had written that Dancelli’s “bicycle had bloomed”, a play on Sanremo which is branded the city of flowers on account of the large horticultural industry and whose hothouses are still dotted over the Poggio today.
From their conversation came the ace of clubs logo used on Colnago frames ever since. Raschi suggested the ace to signify Colnago’s mechanical excellence while the club is called a flower in Italian. The wins of Pogačar today evoke Dancelli’s Sanremo win and could tempt fate but Merckx won the race many times with the logo, and Oscar Freire did too.
1970 was Dancelli’s golden year with four stages of the Giro too although no maglia rosa and pipped in the points competition by Bitossi.
He moved to the Scic team in 1971, leaving Molteni as Merckx arrived. A big signing feted for an even better year, “We’ll see an excellent Dancelli” exclaims the headline in Unita for the team launch. Only he crashed in Tirreno-Adriatico and broke his leg. Perhaps a light fracture as he was back racing by the end of April but he later regretted the rush to start the Giro in May and said he paid for this with the rest of his career. In 1972 he took two stages in the Tour de Suisse but these were his last wins and while he’d continue to place he’d retire at the age of 32.
After leaving the peloton he became a small landlord, living off the rental income from several houses he’d bought. He also helped to run cycle tours in Cuba. He married once and had two sons, then and a third with a Cuban woman. He later settled down with Susanna Ongaretti who died aged 67 shortly before Dancelli turned 80.
He’d raced his way out of poverty and when Prima Brescia asked what success meant, Dancelli replied “I was able to keep my promise to my mother” because had once pledgde to buy her a house with his winnings. He also enjoyed being recognised, particular as the Sanremo winner. He would pop up at the Giro to be feted on TV from time to time and “the day that Dancelli won” articles were staples of the Italian media in March as Sanremo approached. That win marked him, he told L’Unita that divorce had strained his relationship with his sons but added “and maybe, when someone asks them if they are the son of that Dancelli who won a Sanremo, they’ll be happy“.