Luca Guercilena was not expecting so many people.

The humanity of the experienced team manager, and previously resolute sports director, captured in a sincere emotional moment in front of the audience gathered for the official presentation of From Zero to One, written together with our director Pier Augusto Stagi. We have previously discussed the book HERE, and what we're telling you is what happened last night at the Helios hotel in Monza, in the presence of about a hundred people including Italian Cycling Federation President Cordiano Dagnoni, champion Gianni Bugno, former national coach Davide Cassani, Marco Cannone and Fabio Perego, Giro d'Italia Director Mauro Vegni and Giro Women's Director Giusy Virelli, Stefano Zanini, Adispro President Davide Goetz, Serge Parsani and Paolo Sangalli, Europost commentator Riccardo Magrini, Olympic athlete Giovanni Lombardi, Italian national team manager Roberto Amadio, Gazzetta Race Director Stefano Allocchio, Davide Bramati, Andrea Morelli, Ermanno Rampinini and Claudio Pecci from Mapei Sport, Anna Calcaterra representing Mapei SpA, sisters Monica and Paola Santini, Adriano Baffi, Paolo Calabresi and Matilde Pozzi, and Dr. Marco Necchi, with whom Guercilena shared his Junior years and first entry into the Mapei world in the 1990s... and of course his family, to whom the work is dedicated: his "superhero" parents Daniela and Carlo, wife Laura, children Dennis and Alice. Video messages from Paolo Bettini and Antonio La Torre, great coach and Italian national athletics coach and Guercilena's teacher during his ISEF years, were also shown.

Not in the audience but seated next to the current "boss" of Lidl Trek, now his counterpart at Tudor, but for years his rider: Fabian Cancellara, who played the co-protagonist alongside Guercilena, also answering questions from Stagi and not sparing anecdotes.

"I started with Luca at Mapei and ended my career at Trek," Cancellara recounted. "It was emotional to share that 2016 when I decided to retire after the Rio Olympics. I didn't expect to achieve a big result, with Dumoulin and Froome as favorites, but while I was training, Luca kept looking at the data and telling me we were going to win the Olympic time trial. He was right: at one point during that time trial, he even asked me to slow down! Most importantly, he knew how to strike the right balance between severity and giving us moments of fun and relaxation when necessary."

"This book started to take shape when I was 'more on the other side than here'," Guercilena explained, with the only explicit reference to his illness, which is not present in From Zero to One. "The decisive push came from Marco (Cannone), and I asked Pier (Stagi), 'If we're crossing over, shall we cross over together?'"

The mountain pass was brilliantly conquered and overcome, and last night Luca Guercilena launched into a series of anecdotes, partly included in the book. His years as a young rider remembered with affectionate irony (for more, HERE a story by Giuseppe Figini), the Mapei family with the great maestro Aldo Sassi who made his contract as a wedding gift, his apprenticeship as a technician in the pioneering youth team with talents like Pozzato and Cancellara, the eve of a Junior race in Belgium lived at a post-funeral lunch, the sleepless night after Bettini's Milan-Sanremo win not for revelry but due to car troubles, the punishment inflicted on Davide Bramati and companions (returning to Italy by bus instead of plane) for withdrawing from the Tour of Poland due to bad weather despite orders to stay in the race, the trip to the US to see John Burke to convince him to take over the Leopard Radioshack personally, with the Trek patron first making fun of his overly elegant attire and then accepting the proposal, giving him the team manager role and providing management courses.

Finally, the pandemic period, having to invent a way to keep riders involved and prepared, while also finding a way to pay them and all employees. "A management success, but stress I would later pay for... For me, having people like Adriano Baffi and an entire staff who could excellently keep the team going was precious." But as we said, the book does not discuss the illness. It traces a life story that Luca Guercilena condensed at the end of last night's event in its most profound sense: a kid who rode a bike in Baggio, a western suburb of Milan, becomes a man who goes to discuss million-dollar budgets in a US super-company; an inspiration for those who might not be great on a bike but can succeed in many other ways, including in cycling itself.

You can buy the book from the website www.librodazeroauno.it.