The frenzied discussion about Conca and his carefree team dominating the Italian championship is becoming the summer hit, like Vamos a la playa and Summer is Ending. What still manages to surprise me is especially this: it seems like the fall of the empire, in other words the terrifying crisis paralyzing Italian cycling, was born right there, at the Italian championship. That is: we've been talking about it for a while, sure, but these apocalyptic and deadly tones are linked to the eccentric result. Before they were just boring chit-chat - the movement is finished, but finished how, look at how many medals our girls and track cyclists bring home - now it's a fire of Putinian tones. Which I, however, allow myself to comment on with a childish little question: if Conca hadn't won, would we be at this point?

I'll also answer myself: no. We would have filed away the Italian championship as one of the thousand seasonal passages and moved on as if nothing had happened. And never mind if Italian cycling, with or without a tricolor Conca (poor guy, imagine if such a victory must precipitate him into such a hullabaloo), and never mind if with or without Conca, Italian cycling is anyway in a state of most miserable agony.

So, rather than throwing more fuel on the fire, I would like to add a rather overlooked element of discussion in the current uproar. Shall we talk about the Italian championship? In simple words: Conca has ridiculed the movement, sure, Conca raced well and strong, sure, but the main problem is that nobody cares about this appointment anymore. And not just today. For a long time now, it has been an obsolete ritual that smells of mold, experienced with annoyance by riders and real teams, only to then start the band when you happen to win it. It's like the Italian Football Cup, which annoys everyone, except who wins it, because anyway it fills the trophy cabinet and maybe helps to cushion the effects of real failures.

I know this discussion is unpleasant and disagreeable, because there's always the national rhetoric of the tricolor at stake, but we don't change reality by telling ourselves nonsense. The Italian championship wasn't humiliated by Conca, not even by those who lost it in that way: we humiliated it with years and years of intolerance and annoyance, experiencing it like a tax deadline, filling out the 730 or VAT payment.

Then you believe that a gang of semi-amateur enthusiasts (I dutifully add semi because the amateur is me, with my belly, when I climb two hills, not these missiles without a gram of fat on their hips), Conca and his band are enough to create fireworks. And why not: by now that's a time-wasting race, not even marked in red in any team's seasonal programs. They go there like going to the dentist. Because they have to go. But no one dreams about it at night.

If Conca's victory must make us reflect, let's reflect on this too. On what it is, on what it has become, on what remains of the Italian championship. Without telling ourselves hypocritical lies, we could even more easily clarify why a Conca can win it. A few more years and I'll win it too.