A Sunday. At the races. Positioned at the top of a climb – the best place for the spectator, who is somewhat sadistic, to evaluate and appreciate the rider, who is somewhat masochistic – Mondo scans the road. A rider appears. Mondo observes the rider. The rider staggers. Mondo wonders: "Who is that slowpoke?".

Mondo. Edmondo Andrenacci. But for everyone, including himself, only Mondo. A literal abbreviation, a cosmic magnification. Cycling was his religion, therefore faith, it was his history and geography, encyclopedic, it was his – in a single word, world. From Grottazzolina in the Marches, keeper of the keys to all the houses in the entire town, a Bartali devotee in the depths of his soul, and his soul was very deep, then a Moser admirer for his respect toward those who win alone by a large margin and not by slipping out of a wheel and winning in a sprint, he was so habitual, so much so that precise as a Swiss watch at noon sharp Mondo would put water on the fire, then a hundred grams of pasta, salad, barley coffee and a cigarette, one of sixty cigarettes a day, followed by thirty minutes of a nap to reappear, fresh almost like a rose, at the bar.

Only on another occasion did Mondo, transgressing his deeply rooted habits, defy fate and for a stage of the 1975 Giro d'Italia, the third one, the one that started from Ancona and climbed the hairpin turns of Pietracamela and ended on the Piani di Tivo, at the foot of Gran Sasso, Mondo joined a group of friends, positioned himself between the barriers, slipped among the billboards and enjoyed the solitary victory of Giovanni Battaglin, who was really pushing hard that day. Otherwise, using the excuse of guarding the keys to all the houses in all of Grottazzolina, Mondo preferred to have the stories of races told to him by protagonists and spectators rather than capture a moment at the edge of a hairpin turn.

So everything begins (or everything begins again) from that Sunday at the races, from that staggering rider, from that identifying question and especially from that neologism, between paradox and oxymoron, because it wasn't clear whether that rider appearing on the horizon was pedaling hard or easy, whether his pace was that of a climber attacking and assaulting or that of a sprinter defending and struggling. To the eye, to the touch, more the second hypothesis. Slowpokes on the road but also at the table, slowpokes at school and especially at work, slowpokes at home and even away on trips, slowpokes by nature or by reasoning or even convenience. So slowpoke would become familiar vocabulary, friendly slang, existential philosophy, spiritual category, rhetorical figure. And even a commercial brand.

"Slowpoke – explains Gianni Traini of Slowpoke – is also a memory, because you can't forget those who have 'pedaled' alongside us, at least for a stretch of road, infected by the same illness, the healthy strain of the pedal virus. That illness that doesn't need medicine to be cured, but needs a weekly dose, at least, of saddle and wind in your face, the sound of the bike gliding on asphalt, the melody of the chain running on the sprocket. The pharmacy, instead, is for those who are truly sick, but with fanaticism, who find themselves in the saddle of a bike without even knowing how, because for them the bike is worth a ball or a pair of running shoes. Because they pedal without poetry. Because passion has nothing to do with fanaticism".

(end of first installment – to be continued)