When Raymond Poulidor won the Vuelta in 1964, he could count on an Italian domestique. His name was (and is) Gianni Marcarini. However, his number 25 jersey was rarely seen: on the fifth day, Marcarini finished outside the time limit. Still, a tiny part of that first place of an eternal second belongs to him.

Born in 1940, from Treviolo near Bergamo, distantly related to Italo Zilioli, Marcarini emigrated to France where he began his cycling adventure. Professional from 1961 to 1970. A domestique. First for Jacques Anquetil, then for Federico Martin, known as Bahamontes, and Poulidor. Very few victories: a stage at the Tour du Morbihan in France in 1964, another in 1967, and the Bretagne Classic Ouest-France in 1970, before it was called GP Plouay. Marcarini wasn't known for his endurance, as the 1964 Vuelta remained the only Grand Tour of his career. But he appears in the results of Paris-Nice, Quatre Jours de Dunkerque, Dauphiné, Milan-San Remo, Het Volk, and Paris-Roubaix, and could even boast of an eighth place at the 1964 Lombardy race won by Gianni Motta.

Daniel Mangeas, the official speaker of the Tour de France and other ASO races for about forty years, tells of the last stage of the 1960 Circuit des 3 Provinces, finishing in Louvigné du Désert. "From the lead car, it was announced that 7 km from Louvigné, two riders were in the lead, Jean-Pierre Genet and Roland Mangeas. Advantage: two minutes". Roland was Daniel's cousin. Then the nerve-wracking wait. Until "last kilometer, last turn, and surprise: Genet was alone. Then Gianni arrived. Finally, Roland". Victim of a puncture 5 km from the finish, cousin Mangeas had to stop, replace the tire, inflate it, and goodbye. A decade later, Marcarini and Daniel Mangeas met again at the popular Vernon circuit in Eure: Marcarini as a rider, Mangeas as a speaker. "Gianni was there with his famous black jersey. The previous year, he had won numerous prizes, being irresistible in sprints. Not wanting to repeat the same story, the organizers gave him the last bib number and made him start from the last row. To make things worse, they assigned a prize of a thousand francs, a considerable sum at the time, to whoever passed first at the end of the first lap. The circuit was 900 meters long. Gianni started last, jumped on the sidewalk, spectators stepped back, and while they looked surprised, Gianni had already won the finish line and almost collected the prize."

Marcarini lives in Hennebont, in the Morbihan department (site of two of his three victories), in Brittany, where, after stopping racing, he opened a cyclist's shop. But he never resisted the call of races, so much so that he's always at the races. No longer on two wheels (he's 85), but on four, those of a small truck he drives and parks, where he eats, drinks, sleeps, and also stores, transports, and sells jerseys, shorts, caps ("casquettes"), helmets, socks, tires, feed bags ("musettes"), miniature riders, even books, current and vintage collections, with some autographed pieces, a jersey of Felice Gimondi, another of Roger De Vlaeminck, yet another of Bernard Thevenet, who knows if he hasn't sold them in the meantime. He says he doesn't do it for a living, but "for pastime", therefore not for money, but "for passion, almost like a drug", explaining that "my wife would like me to stop and come home", but he retorts that "I have no desire to sit in an armchair watching TV", so he greatly prefers direct road sales to online sales (he has a website: www.cycles-marcarini.com), reveals that he keeps his earnings under the mattress, and declares that the one he just completed, from first to last stage, was his fortieth Tour. But judging by his vitality, there's a bet that it won't be the last.

"Once I met him at the Tour du Limousin," Mangeas confirms again. "I told him I would sleep at the Ibis Hotel, then asked where he would sleep, he replied at the Mercedes Hotel, I explained that I didn't know where it was, so he took paper and pen and drew a van, his van, a Mercedes".