Giro d'Italia 2003. The first stage, from Lecce to Lecce, 201 km. A flat course, predictable script, breakaway regrouping sprint finish. The sunny day persuaded us – Claudio Gregori, the driver Gigi Belcredi and the undersigned, in the "Gazzetta dello Sport" car unscrupulously labeled as the one for poets – to precede the peloton as always, but this time with a certain advantage. Objective: a swim in the sea. We find an accomplice, seduced by the maritime prospect more than by journalistic company: it is Candido Cannavò, our Director.

Gregori urges us on (heroic with Homeric citations), Belcredi pushes (practical on the accelerator pedal), Cannavò paws the ground (happy as a child). Having gained a safe distance from the peloton, we stop and rush forward, we equipped with swimming costumes, but not Cannavò. He wasn't the type, our Director, to surrender to difficulties or unforeseen circumstances, whatever they might be. Welcomed by the owner of the bathing establishment – Salvatore, if I remember correctly – with the same familiarity one feels for a childhood schoolmate, Cannavò is provided with a costume to wear and a changing room. And while Salvatore hops about promising a very quick fish dish, the Director dives in and joins us with a freestyle stroke in transparent, heavenly waters.

Perhaps our strokes are slow, or perhaps the peloton's pace is fast, the fact is that the group arrives sooner than expected. We sense it from the police motorcycles. There's nothing left but to swim to the beach and run onto the road as quickly as possible. We make it. The peloton is preceded by the race director's car, Carmine Castellano, who on this occasion hosts the charming Deanna Orienti, tasked with welcoming special guests invited to spend a day in the caravan at the Giro d'Italia.

And here's the scene: us, still-wet swimmers, naked except for our swimming costumes, waving frantically as the race director's car passes, and them, Castellano and Orienti, half their bodies in the sun sticking out of the sunroof, enjoying the panorama and landscape, the atmosphere and setting, the race and the riders. When the car passes in front of us, we even dare to shout "Helloooo" (Cannavò and Gregori) and "Counsellorrrr" (me). Castellano looks at us but doesn't see us, doesn't recognize us, not at first, so far outside our territorial and professional competence, so far outside our clothes and habitat, but he sees us immediately after, as if struck by doubt or second thought or a vision, he looks at us again and recognizes us, and puts his hands to his head, as if we had lost not only our clothes but also our minds.

I don't know if in that moment, and from that moment until this moment in all moments, I admired more Cannavò's complicity or Castellano's spontaneity. Cannavò, so instinctive, genuine, authentic, even in a swimming costume, and Castellano, so simple and dignified, always in jacket, shirt and tie. All of them (three, with Gregori, actually four, with Belcredi) first at the finish line of my heart. Forever.