A Real Sports Hero

Every time cycling champion Gino Bartali swung his leg over the saddle of his racing bike from the fall of 1943 to July 1944, he knew the act could be a death sentence. Bartali, who won the Tour de France before and after World War Two as well as the Giro d’Italia and hundreds of one-day bike races, was part of an intricately organized but highly secretive circle in the Assisi area that smuggled false documents to Jews, allowing them to escape fascist-run and Nazi-controlled Italy. He carried the forged documents in the seat tube of his bicycle. If the hiding place had been discovered, it would have meant a mass execution of the Bartali family and possibly others involved in the smuggling ring.

I always knew of Bartali—you could not possibly not if you were a bike racer in Southern Ontario in the 1970s when many a race was called in Italian. He was, without question, one of...