Wake up at a time decided by someone else. Breakfast based on something decided by someone else. Training with times and distances set by someone else. Lunch with a menu decided by someone else. Massages and therapies established by someone else. Free time - the little that remains - following trends set by someone else, playstation, social media, techno music. Finally, sleep duration determined by someone else.

I've schematized it a bit like a nightmare, but it's not far from reality: welcome to the daily life of the modern athlete. Now that science and organization have taken over everything, a powerful coup resulting in a dictatorship, the young man knows at every moment what to do and who to listen to. He has the manager who takes care of his economic interests, has the nutritionist with the scale determining what and how to eat, has the trainer who dictates the times and intensities of training. There are the mental coach and motivator who perform psychological maintenance. I suspect there's even a sexologist telling him how and when to do things with his girlfriend, but this is just a personal hypothesis.

Finally, there's the race. In his ears, an earpiece to listen to how and when to move. In front of his eyes, without distractions, a computer to know how, how much, where to spend his energy. Everything is truly predetermined. There's not even a minute that escapes the control of Big Brother, a hyper-structured Big Brother who wants his good, especially his victories. A life under dictation.

In fact, the modern cyclist hands over the keys to the house of his own self to something or someone else. And in the long run, it becomes increasingly difficult to get them back. Because after all, it's also tremendously convenient to live (and do sports) this way: when you grow up perpetually in a stroller, with someone pushing it from behind and deciding where to go, who would want to get down, risking falling and scraping their knees (the metaphor is not mine: it's from Kant, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?", 1784).

Of course, the value and quality of the expert apparatus holding up this new world are not in question at all. We take for granted, without the slightest doubt, that the kids are in the best hands, so much so that the parents themselves can't wait to hand them over and entrust them. But. There's a but that maybe only I perceive, yet it persists annoyingly like a woodworm: but in this new world and this new way, is there still a slice of possibility that the boy can do something on his own, try on his own, experiment on his own, make mistakes on his own? Is the option that has fascinated and engaged millions of men in all times still contemplated, that is, using one's own head? When do these kids of today use their own head? Is it planned? Is it allowed? The impression - not even much of an impression - is that the individual freedom to reach one's own balance, one's own harmony, one's own wisdom, obviously playing with the chips of experience and error, is no longer contemplated.

Everything zeroed out, everything slotted into the scheme and protocol, 24 hours a day. Goodbye to that art of education that has always fascinated me, defined as maieutics, Socrates its greatest prophet: this art that does not consider the boy a container to dump a bunch of notions and instructions, but instead puts him at the center and creates the conditions for him to arrive alone, extracting them from within himself, at the best conclusions. We all know well how a conquest achieved personally, as a protagonist, is very different and much more solid than a conquest acquired parrot-like, poured from above, mechanically and passively. I ask: does anyone still see, in today's cycling, a space for growth and active participation of the subject, for a healthy personal autonomy that raises a aware protagonist, and not a little soldier, a gear, an executor?

Says a worried UCI President Lappartient: I see gloomy and depressed kids in the group. Really? I say softly, Mr. President: fine with exasperated stress, fine with the wear and tear of modern life, increasingly oppressive in today's cycling, but isn't it that we no longer provide our young people with even a minimal tool (I'll go big: even a book) to handle this ugly beast of stress better? Maybe it's too eccentric in this bubble of total scientific programming. Anyway, I won't give up. I'll throw it out there. If allowed, even just one book, I recommend the never-surpassed "1984" by Orwell. If only to know how a world like this ends up.

from tuttoBICI December issue