TUTTOBICI | 26/12/2024 | 08:21 di Gian Paolo Ormezzano How funny! How tragic! I always feel an urgent need - almost everything new, in the sense of rediscovered - to write about my cycling, a sort of enormous debt that grows and grows, and I don't know how to properly begin but I always start. I'm afraid of appearing dated, pathetic, nostalgic, forgetful, presumptuous like all those who, having lived their time thoroughly, do not accept comparisons, it was the best possible, and do not love revisitations or revisions under the banner of "but what can I still write beautifully, validly?". I find myself annoyed by my inadequacy, whether it's a sort of pain with tangles of overlapping keystrokes by my writing fingers, something admitted and even expected after the three covid I suffered with six intermediate vaccines, or often my failure to respond to others' needs. The other day from an Italian cycling city, perhaps the most cycling there is, they urged me to do "gymnastic" written memory exercises, to somersault through memories. I told them to forget it. Fear of forgetfulness, tiredness, exhaustion? Let's say fear of no longer being up to the narrative hypothesis, of what I saw, of what someone skilled would describe well. With human, landscape, social, and ultimately highly journalistic material, then. But the fear passes, and so I write. Here I am. I remember Vincenzo Torriani, the lord of the Giro d'Italia, after inviting me to a friendly but inquisitorial dinner at his home in Milan, discovered that I was good, perhaps foolish but good, and recruited me among his better-considered pages, also asking me for opinions on his near and far projects. I was extremely flattered and never accepted knowing that he did this with all the "new" ones. I also remember - and I will never forget, and therefore will always write about it - when he appeared to me like a snow deity in the white snow whirlwind from the car I was in, which had gone off the road on the snowiest mountain of the Giro, re-entering and blocking the race. He looked at me as if the fault was entirely mine and spread his arms in a sign of suffered forgiveness. It was a minor thing, the car was soon back on the road, the pink caravan was still far away, but Vincenzo made me feel like a profaner, blasphemer, iconoclast towards his race, his thing, his true home. I remember when in the press room I finished the service before everyone else, at the Giro as at the Tour, where - already written and rewritten but still nice to rewrite - the Franco-Italian singer of Egyptian birth would wait for me to speak to me in the language of her Calabrian fathers and grandfathers, among the lubricious jeers of ignorant colleagues. I was young, at the Giro I had not yet met anyone of her caliber or with her requests, so I would chat with her and then wait for colleagues to finish working, maybe bothering them while they were in the final dattylosprint of the article with my interlocution about the stage, getting many "go to hell", I did it for my interest in cycling, even if I couldn't explain it well. I remember when usually, in the evening at dinner with those colleagues, I would argue that the cycling we loved and embellished with our very committed prose was essentially the small geographical one of Italy-France-Belgium, with light German, Swiss, Dutch, Luxembourg, Spanish, Portuguese infiltrations, and I would say that when the true great athletes of the world would arrive, our local scorfani would be obscured. True athletes perhaps shaped by other sports in the Californian USA of swimming and athletics that I loved, athletes so different from their national cyclist pistards of the west coast, those from New York and Chicago of the Six Days. I was considered crazy and unbelieving and I was pleased with it, the only way to get noticed in a usual, consolidated group of classic suiveurs. All dead now, none of them here to finally give me reason, when now a Slovenia with four athletic cats is enough to rewrite all of cycling. I remember when a young boy sent by the pink newspaper to cut his teeth on the road, leaving the small volleyball stadiums (volleyball not yet born), was with me in the car, his name was Gianni Mura and he would ask me about France. I remember Mario Fossati talking to me about his supreme colleague Gianni Brera as a god but pedantic and sometimes even boring, of Gianni Brera when he talked to me about Mario Fossati as the best of all, but woe betide telling the shy one. I remember everything and well, at least I think. I don't remember if I asked myself this question then, recently become viral for me: but what am I writing, does anyone care? Perhaps even these lines fall into the dark circle of doubt about their persistent, vacant uselessness. Or perhaps it is, and has always been, from always, all and only a great beautiful game, which perhaps continues. A beautiful game that has lasted me a lifetime...
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