Yesterday, taking a break from work, I got on my bike and reached a spot with no people on the climb towards Colle del Giovo for the Giro d'Italia's passage. Jonas Geens of Alpecin–Deceuninck, who was in the breakaway, threw me a water bottle.

A simple gesture that has always happened in cycling. A hand that opens for an instant while the body continues to climb under strain. An object that flies away from the group of breakaway riders and ends up in the hands of a fan standing at the roadside.

As a child I watched the races from improvised barriers, from walls, from the edges of climbs. I waited for hours for just a few seconds of passage. And those riders seemed to me like men belonging to another era of life: already complete, already distant, almost unreal in their suffering.

I watched them the way you watch heroes when you're a child: without measure.

There are passions that don't grow with us. They remain fixed somewhere in time. Cycling, for me, is one of those.

Today I'm almost thirty-one years old. Many of the riders who pass by are ten years younger.

Jonas Geens too. Born in '99.

Yet it was still the child in me, standing at the roadside watching them pass with the same wonder as all those years ago.