Giro d'Italia 1946  |  Stage 12. Rovigo - Trieste   

The fourteenth leg was the trip from Rovigo to disputed Trieste that had caused so many misgivings when the route was announced. Sure enough, at Pieris on the road to Trieste there were Yugoslavs behind barbed wire blocking the way. Things turned ugly when the Yugoslavs starting throwing stones and in return, the armed guards who had accompanied the race opened fire. After diving for cover, nearly all the racers decided to quit the stage. But not all of them. The Wilier Triestina squad with Trieste homeboy Giordano Cottur managed to get an American army truck to take them closer to the finish line. Reports on this stage don’t completely agree, but about seventeen riders were escorted into Trieste under American protection. With only a few kilometers left to race, the team was careful to make sure that Cottur won the stage. Cottur was credited with the stage win and his somewhat arbitrarily assigned racing time of six hours was added to every racer’s General Classification time, effectively annulling the stage. In the aftermath of the stage, riots raged in Trieste for days. Trieste remained an international sore point until 1954 when it was officially made part of Italy. The Wilier Triestina team bikes were not actually made in Trieste, but by the Dal Molin factory in Bassano del Grappa. Eventually the bikes dropped the Dal Molin name and adopted the more famous racing team’s name and are still raced by top pro teams.