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There were any number of examples that emphasized Magni’s toughness, but the race that fully cemented his reputation was his last Giro, in 1956, at age 36. He wanted to end his career with honor, but that was compromised when he crashed on a descent in his native Tuscany on stage 12 and broke his left collarbone. He finished the stage, refused to have a cast put on and vowed to continue, despite all the major mountain stages to come.

Stage 15 was a time trial up the challenging San Luca climb in Bologna. In his warm-up, Magni found he couldn’t pull on the bars with his left arm, so his mechanic Faliero Masi (who later built custom frames for the stars) fixed a length of inner tube to his stem and Magni gripped the other end of the rubber in his teeth to help him get up the ultra-steep gradient.

The next day, because of his weakened arm, he lost control when his front wheel hit a trench and he fell again on his left side. “I fainted from the pain,” he said. “When I realized I was being taken to the hospital [by ambulance] I screamed at the driver to stop.” Magni got back on his bike and the peloton slowed to let him return. He refused an x-ray [he was later diagnosed with a broken left elbow] and stayed in the race.

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