Milan, Vigorelli, 1987. Meeting, speed trial, women's category. Rossella Galbiati against Mara Mosole. Rossella, 31 years old, and Mara, 21. Rossella, the Lombard, and Mara, the Venetian. Rossella, already a world record holder (200 and 500 meters, flying kilometer and standing start kilometer), and Mara, already Italian champion in youth categories. Rossella, the young veteran, and Mara, the young prospect.

Speed is the perfect marriage between strategy and strength, between waiting and explosiveness, between energy and experience. One seizes the moment, one scorches the track. From spark to bonfire, that is the sprint. Sprints burn, they blaze, they singe. Even years later.

On Bike Show Tv, the program hosted by Danilo Gioia in an episode last December, Mara Mosole recalls that sprint: "At the Vigorelli I left half a leg behind because Galbiati couldn't pass me and made me fly off." There is no reply, there is no footage. The words are reported to Rossella Galbiati, who is keen to clarify: "Mara was in front, I caught up with her on the straightaway at double speed, Mara tried to lean on me, but found nothing but air, and fell. Alfredo Bonariva, who was then the sports director of Sanson, Mara's team, but who had also been my first sports director in the G.S. Bonariva, came to meet me and asked me what had happened. I explained it to him. And he agreed with my reconstruction of the incident. So much so that the judge found no irregularity and did not have to proceed with any punishment, not even a warning".

Parallel lives, those of Rossella Galbiati and Mara Mosole. Both road racers and track cyclists, both missionaries of women's cycling and ambassadors of civil rights, both still today witnesses of a sport profoundly changed but still so radically founded on pleasure and duty, fatigue and joy, chronicle and literature, thrills and cramps, joys and crises, where points of view and the commas of memory do not always overlap. Almost a paradox between the speed of the challenge and the slowness of history, between the precision of a stopwatch and the arbitrariness of a judgment.