By Sophie
"Hi Giovanni, I imagine I'm speaking to you, I'm addressing you."
“When you see the quotation marks, I’m talking out loud to you.”
You asked me to send you my “Italian diary” of these three weeks of the Giro, which I am following with a critical eye, reporting materials for my thesis in sociology at the Sorbonne on “Sports mythologies and society of the spectacle – cycling”.
This first week has flown by nervously, moodily, in alternating phases. Leaden and rainy days under skies heavy with clouds and storms not only weather-related.
«I'll tell you right away that I feel very anxious about this Giro, Giovanni».
The first few days are a slow but steady and disturbing dramatic crescendo of dissonances, false notes, nervousness and controversy. Questions, doubts, gray areas. What happened to Kittel, what Viviani was thinking, what came to Puccio's mind, what did Frapporti mean, what does Anderlass mean, why Roglic doesn't drive me crazy. Like the first act of a late-romantic tragic-lyric opera, which empties you of certainties and fills you with pessimism.
And then Thursday came. The light. The big bang. And I understood that phrase you were saying to me in Bergamo dialect, and that I didn't even understand when translated into Italian: "inventing a Thursday!"
“What does that mean?” Patiently, taking it from afar, you explained to me: “Thursday is crazy day, Sophie.”
Seeing the first victory at the Giro of a Rosti jersey, boom, a cannon shot in the heart. And I understood: "Joy is the real luxury!"
"The crazy joy reserved for the truly crazy, who are always crazy in love."
So crazy with love and thirsty for love, that nothing and no one is ever enough. The truth is, Giovanni, that Masnada's victory was also a bit hard to digest for me, because of the things Masnada said in interviews, naively, or maliciously...
Ok, ok, let's get there slowly, let's start from the beginning.
Saturday, first stop.
I start my tour of Italy more or less parallel to the Giro, I have a series of appointments with “crazy” friends, as you would say. Among other things, I have to decide what kind of bike to buy to match my Rosti outfits (and not the other way around).
While the time trial that opens this Giro is being held in Bologna, I am traveling by public transport, I have to get to the island of Elba, then I will go to Rome, then next week I will return to the North, and I will come to the knitwear factory. A friend of mine is waiting for me in Elba, who has to meet a friend to organize the wedding of a friend who will be there for an m-bike race (Legend Cup). I will take advantage of the opportunity to try out a “real” mountain bike bike and route.
Warning: don't do like me and never go to Elba Island by public transport.
«The island of Elba is actually seven times further away than Dubai».
At one point I thought it was even unreachable.
Finally I arrive in Capoliveri, the square is invaded by stands and a crowd of tired but happy, muddy, proud athletes. My friend S. introduces me to her friend T. who has just finished the race. Tomorrow we will go for a walk together to see a tree house (built by a German who builds stages for rock concerts by trade) where the newlyweds will spend a very special weekend, a sort of primitive honeymoon.
At the finish line of the Legend Cup I see some hunks in Rosti gear around and I refrain from going to act silly. In the meantime in Bologna my insiders have finished the race, but they don't make themselves heard. Roglic in pink. Nibali not bad. I try to hear my sources again, the ones who should confess to me "what a rider really thinks about in a race".
Obviously everyone initially told me: «you don't think about anything, that is, you think about the race, your legs, your times, your opponents, your teammates, your bike».
All right. But in hours and hours on the pedals, what does your unconscious tell you? What references does a face, a landscape, a smell give you? Don't your problems of money, love, health pedal with you every moment? Can you really exclude everything?
At nine o'clock in the evening I get a long voice message from “pathetic”.
The “pathetic” is a no longer very young gregarious who after a life as a tombeur du femme finds himself on the other side, madly in love with a femme fatale who treats him as he has always treated others. With this Giro his aim is to “heal”, possibly “forget her”, and in any case free himself from this “kind of slavery”, lovesickness. Below is the transcription of his first contribution.
Everything starts well, everything is under control, I'm on schedule, I arrive at the Orfanelle curve, the climb to San Luca begins, and everything is still going well. The climb, the narrow road, the people on the sides like waves that part as you pass, faces, figures that appear in front of you, and then retreat. It happens halfway up the ramp, in the steepest part. A head of hair, a woman's profile, I know it's not her, it can't be her, but in that moment I see her, I see her again, and immediately I have this song in my ears and in my head - I meet you on the street and I become sad / Because then I think you'll leave / I'd like to be the dress you'll wear / The lipstick you'll use / I'd like to dream of you like I've never dreamed of you / I'd like to be the water in the shower you take / The sheets of the bed where you'll sleep – and it's as if I were somewhere else, like going back to that moment, the first time I saw her, exactly like that, a head of hair, a look in the crowd...
A mane of hair in the crowd, and it happens to me all the time, there are so many girls and women with hair like that, and every time I miss a beat, and even on the ramp of San Luca for an instant I lost my pedaling, I immediately saw that I was ruining everything even before starting, a disgrace, having withdrawn at the first stage, beyond the maximum time... because deep down the temptation was, there will still be, the temptation to withdraw, and so go and look for her, see her... even if I told myself, and I told her, that in any case we would not see each other or hear from each other or text each other for the entire duration of the Giro... I stood up on the pedals, more than anything to see better in front of me, like that day when I chased her mane of hair in the crowd going the wrong way under the arcades, and I only thought that at the finish line I would see her, she would turn around and smile at me... - I want to dream of you like I never dream of you / To be the ring you will wear / I would like to be the engine of your car / So suddenly you will turn me on / I would like to be the grave when you die / And where you will live / The sky under which you will sleep / So we will never leave each other / Not even if I die and you know it / You, you are never enough for me / You really are never enough for me -
Sunday, second stage.
Ackermann wins in the sprint and it seems like a movie I've already seen, but with something that doesn't add up. In my young ignorance, I must have synapses that are too automated. In my head, Ackermann was actually Kittel. The Teutonic superman who wins sprints by having giant pistons that make the connecting rods, i.e. the pedals, spin a thousand times. Kittel who every day takes up half a page in the Gazzetta, the best-selling sports newspaper in the world, the newspaper that has conceived and organized the Giro d'Italia since 1909. On this half-page ad Kittel invites you to "fight for your hair". Let's say he's one of the top testimonials for the Giro: but he's not at this Giro. Where has Kittel gone?
On the web I find the press release written by Kittel, and I am almost moved:
“At my request, Katusha-Alpecin and I have mutually decided to terminate my contract. Over the past two months I have had the feeling of being exhausted. I am currently unable to train or race at the highest level. I have decided to take a break and make time for myself, my goals and a plan for the future. It was a long journey to make that decision, which led me to ask myself many questions about how and where I wanted to go as a person and athlete and what was really important to me. I love cycling and the passion for this beautiful sport will remain, but I also know what is required of me and what is necessary to be competitive. Despite all the insecurities I am confident that I will find new challenges and possibilities. This is the biggest challenge of my career and I accept it.”
Tough questions for my professor:
"What's the point of a testimonial that invites you to fight, while in reality you give up?"
"What's the point of a superhero struck down by depression, like a common mortal?"
I don't know how to answer. On the one hand I say to myself: don't they have a plan B, a backup testimonial, these big sponsors who spend big money? Or perhaps, conspiracy theory, the depressed champion who retires is a more credible subject, more similar to the common man who has to fight for his hair? Difficult. In any case, situations like this signal that we are in a short circuit. They tell us that sponsors are needed to make the circus work. But the Kittel case resoundingly denies this certainty. There is something very sick deep down, there are increasingly too many athletes psychologically broken.
Monday, third stage.
The stage of VAR, sports video surveillance, the new frontier that is revolutionizing football, the real heavy load of the dominant videocracy.
Viviani is the first sprinter to be disqualified not by a jury but by technology. Unlike in football, where the VAR is a black room, at the Giro the VAR is a white van. But it was Viviani himself who self-denounced, perhaps in an attempt to pre-justify himself, in the interview with caldossimo:
"I'm sorry I accidentally touched..."
There we all thought: bye Elia! And in fact a few minutes later the VAR took away his victory, and in addition it bled him -50 points in the cyclamen classification. The images spoke clearly. You see Viviani who, coming out of Ackermann's wheel, moves exaggeratedly and ends up cutting off the path of the rider who was coming from behind, who has to stop pedaling so as not to hit him. Surreal situation, with the victory awarded to Gaviria, who is not there, and who does not like to win like this. Thinking back, the whole story seems like a well-orchestrated campaign to give credibility to the new technology. Italian race, Italian victory, Italian judges: what better occasion to launch the new product? Super partes!
In the evening I get a message from the “pathetic”. He says that the group is healing him. Riding in a group is salvation, he repeats several times.
You saw us Sophie, you heard the breathing, the rustling of the passing group; you felt the shiver, the lash, the disturbing power of this shapeless creature that compacts and stretches, frays and shatters and then recomposes itself, like a living, pulsating matter...
You should try Sophie, you who are so attentive to the inner life, what it means to be part of
of a swarm, a flock, what happens, what your body does, what is your intelligence inside
this mobile, pasty, elusive, launched mass, an entity without identity, who you are, where you end up, what you do, how you move in the group... this organism is equipped with its own form of life, and this form of life engulfs you, reduces you and amplifies you, you no longer exist, you are the group.
Tuesday and Wednesday, fourth and fifth stage.
Two days where everything happens. Rain, controversy, falls. And then the Anderlass bomb.
First controversy, our Frapporti, who was in the breakaway with a 12-minute advantage, and virtual pink jersey, and a fair chance of winning the stage. Very annoyed, at the end of the stage he declared: «It is not possible to continue like this».
"The group got back under thanks to the help."
In 5 kilometers the advantage is reduced to only 5 minutes. How could this happen? Frapporti and the other two in the breakaway were going 50 miles an hour, it was not possible that the group could recover so much.
"My teammates explained to me at the hotel why: in addition to the Rai motorbike in front of the group, a large car was positioned in front of it, which basically towed the group. My teammates told me that we were travelling at 75 km/h on a stretch that wasn't downhill, speeds that are impossible on a bike unless you're behind a motorbike."
Heavy words, which few have given weight, because the huge fall a few kilometers from the finish line then catalyzed all the media attention. Nibali risked a lot, saved himself with great skill, and at the finish line he pointed the finger at Puccio, who triggered the fall.
"My Giro d'Italia could have ended today," said the Shark.
"Puccio looks around... we were going 65 miles an hour, maybe even more. He turned back to see where his young men were. It's right that one turns back like that, nonchalantly. Only that he has half the group knocked out."
The one who pays the highest price is Dumoulin, who then has to retire.
And we come to the Anderlass bomb, the doping investigation that stops the Slovenians Koren and Bozic, respectively domestique and sports director of Nibali's team. But also the former sprinter Petacchi, now Rai commentator. Involved 21 athletes from 8 countries and 5 different sports.
Very strange that the UCI only found out about the investigation, which has been ongoing for a long time, today, and from the pages of the newspapers, and during a major race. They could have stopped them earlier, right?
In the newspapers you can read frightening reports, where Slovenia is portrayed as the new frontier of doping (and meanwhile for the leader of the race, the Slovenian Roglic, who goes twice as fast as the others, adjectives such as “monstrous, superhuman, a machine”... are used).
I read about middlemen who deal with three types of athletes: cyclists, horses, and camels! Camels? Yes, camel racing is a major business in the Arab Emirates. A sad chapter, humanly sad, of businessmen and swindlers, of losers and desperate people looking for a job, but also of clean-faced big names with bags in the closets and blood transfusion centers in anonymous campers.
"The problem is that there is a philosophical void."
“Excuse me, did you say philosophical?”
Yes, my professor's word. The cyclist works with his body, but he doesn't know how he should consider his body.
«The biological body of an animal, or a machine-body?».
Is the relationship with the mechanical medium dialectical or osmotic?
And what does cycling represent? A tool for affirming human authenticity (effort, will, training, courage, respect...) or a spectacular and business staging of the new technological/scientific performance frontiers, then applicable to any human aspect, from work to entertainment?
What counts more are the “human-animal” ingredients (feelings, instinct, tenacity...) or the techno-chemical ones (programs, substances, computers...). What is doping? The boundary is unstable, the rules change, it is easy for the mentality and the way of respecting the rules to take root, to circumvent them, to be ahead of the bans, in short, to avoid getting caught.
The theme is that of man-machine. In this sense, cycling is a border sport and the cyclist (intended as a single body of bike and athlete) is a mythological creature, half man and half machine (or horse) and you understand that the tendency, the human logic of going beyond, of overcoming, leads to making both the vehicle and the man increasingly high-performance, and by any means! What will the cyclist become? Automaton, robot, clone, humanoid, cyborg, replicant? They are not synonymous words, they are all very different formats, which mean different identities.
This philosophical void on the meaning of cycling as a sport (both as a public/media event and as a personal/physical activity) is at the basis of ambiguities, uncertainties, hypocrisies, doubts, gray areas. Of everything I don't understand.
Thursday, sixth stage
Mythological day, with the victory of Masnada, a victory in the Rosti jersey, the first at the Giro.
«But why did Masnada say what he said in the heat of the moment?».
Our freshly-victorious champion began to talk under the spotlight about his near future in some big team. It wasn't very nice.
My professor says: the great global sporting events, the football World Cup and the Champions League, Formula 1 and MotoGp, tennis tournaments and the cycling World Tour, are the raw material of contemporary mythology, they represent values and challenges, while the great champions are like ancient heroes, closer to the Gods than to ordinary mortals.
"Their enterprises serve to make billions of people dream."
The main dynamic of this mythology is simple: there are the invincible superbigs of the big teams of the big sponsors, the fight is between them. They represent the characters of a cast. There is the most beautiful, the most unpleasant, there is the young, there is the expert. Roglic, Nibali, Yates, Dumoulin, Lopez. They are the great leaders of the big armies. They represent strength, power, domination. They are able to please the big sponsors, they are like the big companies that govern the market.
Then there are the surprises. The emerging ones, the new names, those who bring authentic values, rebels, eager to do an unexpected feat, not yet contaminated by the "system". It is the same dynamic between "main stream" and "indie" that concerns music, fashion, design, technology and every sector of innovation. Small independent teams that defeat large organizations, new Davids that take down old Goliaths.
Here, Masnada, Androni, Rosti have done this feat, they have beaten the giants. The moment of true pride, of arrogance, the moment to reward all those who in their daily lives fight against the giants every day...
And instead our smiling one says, admits that he can't wait to be on the other side, in the ranks of the dominators...
"I had to tell you, Giovanni: after the crazy joy, immediately after the crazy joy, hearing those words made me feel silently sad."
Talking about a “mains-stream” future when you’ve just accomplished an “indie” venture in the present is completely illogical, and depressing. No, I really didn’t understand if it was naivety or malice.
"Did anyone understand? Did you understand?"
Then you read what Roglic said before the stage, and your arms drop, Roglic wanted to "give up the Pink Jersey to avoid having to waste time at the end of each stage with awards and interviews".
Do you understand? The new champion is telling the organizers that awards and interviews should be done differently. And the winning breakaway of Masnada and Conti is labeled as a “fake breakaway”, that is, “a breakaway led by gregarious riders without excessive ambitions and that for various reasons allows the person who launches it to gain a big advantage, capable of influencing the final general classification”.
At the end of the day I have mixed feelings about Roglic.
Last year I fell in love with him for how he went downhill. This year he's become a big name, but he seems to belong to another sport. Too cool, too perfect, frighteningly self-confident, he seems more like a motocross or surfer to me.
Friday, seventh stage
While little happens at the Giro, I rode a Gravel bike all day around Rome.
«Riding a bike in Rome is impossible».
You never know where to go. There is no space on the sidewalks, too many people. There are no bike lanes. Taxi, bus and tram lanes, you don't get out alive. Normal roadways dotted with potholes, cobblestones, patches, tracks, gravel, slippery manhole covers with giant grates, and drivers who look at you badly and squeeze or cut you off with great naturalness.
"How did Conti, who is Roman, become a cyclist?"
I climb the Gianicolo, and I don't meet a single bike. I cross the entire Villa Ada, which is as big as half an Alpine valley, and I don't meet a single bike. I walk along the Lungotevere from Flaminio to Trastevere, 6 km, and I don't meet a single bike.
After 3 hours of madness I stop in Campo dei Fiori to drink two beers and I realize that in all this exhaustion the only really good thing was the bike, this Gravel of my friend P., the Roman friend who works in a company that produces documentaries and hosts me in her huge house in the center of Rome. Then she will lend me an old Alfa Romeo that has to return to Milan, and so I will return to the Rosti area, it's nice to have friends.
At the third beer I go to Wikipedia to see what Gravel means and I see that there are two towns between Piedmont and Lombardy named Gravellona. Gravellona Toce and Gravellona Lomelllina. They are 90 km apart of water lands between Ticino and Lake Maggiore, so I imagined being the CEO of a mega sports events company and I ordered my executives to invent a new cult race on a Thursday, the Gravellona-Gravellona-Gravellona, a Gravel Race there and back. The alone Gravellona Gravel race.
And meanwhile, under a downpour, the stage ends. Conti keeps the pink, and the insider leaves me his track n.3
I'll tell you how I managed to get all these miles under water.
I was fifteen, I was in a youth team but without particular enthusiasm, I did the minimum and without passion. That summer at the seaside for the first and only time in my life I fell in love. My first love story. No sex yet, just a few hints, but total transport, hours and hours of kissing in the moonlight.
She was from another city, but in the following month she would go on vacation to the mountains to her aunt, 80 km from my city. I would go to visit her. By bike. The day set arrives, that is, set by me, because I wanted to surprise her.
On the way there I kept telling myself how fast you are, you're really going fast, it was 80 kilometers with several stretches to go over, and I was going faster than I ever thought I was going, and I was so eager to see her that I was burning the road, and in the blink of an eye I arrived, and I found the house - she had explained to me, then of course you call me, she had said, but I had memorized the information exactly and hadn't called her, I wanted to give her a total surprise, like in the movies, like in the commercials - and so there's her aunt who tells me go to the pine forest, she's with her company in the pine forest and so I go to the pine forest with my racing bike and in the pine forest I see this scene... sorry Sophie, I can't do it, I'll send you the end of the story later or tomorrow.
Saturday and Sunday, eighth and ninth stage.
Saturday the longest stage, Ewan wins, Viviani beaten again. Sunday Riccione-San Marino time trial. Something will happen. I'm in a bar in Testaccio.
«The Giro starts today».
This is what Giuseppe Saronni claims on TV.
“Who is it?” I ask.
"Someone who had already worn the pink jersey 50 times before you were even born."
Good. When the top riders start, Campenaerts has the time to beat. Then it will be nice to see if the “duds” will hold up.
In the meantime I surf the net. A website title: today Roglic wants to kill the Giro.
At the key moment, with Yates, Nibali and Roglic in the race, the rain is pouring. Roglic gains. Nibali holds on. Yates and Lopez pay a lot. Masnada defends itself. Conti keeps the pink, Carboni loses the white, and our Peters, in Rosti, picks it up.
The Shark: «The Giro starts now».
And the insider sends me the ending of the story of his first love.
And so I arrive in the pine forest on my racing bike and I see this scene: she on the saddle of a scooter, and someone on top of her, standing, kissing her, kissing her and more, and I was there like a voyeur, made of chalk, salt, dead, I don't know how I managed to turn the bike around, and go back, and going back at the beginning I was going very slowly, I felt like Pinocchio, then I started to push, I wanted to cry, and then I pushed even harder, as if I wanted to blow out my muscles, my legs, my heart, my head, my belly, something, and instead I didn't explode, I got home even faster than the outward journey and after two days I had a race, and I won it like nothing, that experience had turned something on my head, or I don't know where, the sports director looked at me strangely, did you take anything he asked me, no, but from that day I started to think that I could be a professional.
Here, in today's stage, if you want to know, in the suffering of today's stage, rain from start to finish, I retraced the path of that day almost twenty years ago. Something I had forgotten. I have already been in love like a child. The difference is that then I was a child. Now instead...
Now instead I'm going to drive this old Alfa, and I'm coming to the Rosti area.
I want to see a Giro with more sun, more courage, more passion.
I put on a Nirvana CD and close this first week with a quote from Mark Fischer (from “It’s Easier to Imagine the End of the World Than the End of Capitalism”):
We are dealing with the programming and preventive modeling by the dominant culture of desires, aspirations, hopes. Let us take those alternative or independent cultural areas that replicate gestures of rebellion and protest: today they no longer denote something foreign to the dominant culture, they are, if anything, simple styles internal to the mainstream, the dominant styles of the mainstream of tomorrow.
No one has embodied and suffered this stalemate more than Kurt Cobain. With his aimless rage, the leader of Nirvana is the voice of this despondency that grips an entire generation... Cobain knew he was just another cog in the show. Here even success equals failure, because being successful only means that you are the meat that feeds the system. Therefore, the immense existential rage of Kurt Cobain...
See you soon Giovanni!
Sophie