By Sophie
Hi uncle, I'll be honest, I was pedaling with that excitement mixed with fear and pleasure on that increasingly narrow strip of land between the river and the canal when your 7 voice messages in rapid succession entered my earphones and with the adrenaline I almost took a flight copyright Rosti and in any case my answer is yes, let's start right away.
Direct and fast preliminaries, with a quote by Mourinho re-upholstered at the Rosti Bar, “Whoever only talks about cycling, doesn't understand anything about cycling” and two caresses/slaps of pre-digital journalism from B. Pizzul: “You have to say what you feel when the event happens” “Because emotions can't be prepared”
Speaking freely and without brakes about the bike phenomenon at every level, what I see when riding my bike in the mountains, in the city, on the road, in the woods, but also following the Giro, the Tour, the classics, the cyclo-cross, the triathlon, the MTB, is that everything converges in a single impulse that manifests itself in a thousand ways but is the same for every biker: and it is an impulse of freedom, irrepressible. I would start from here, from the sense of freedom, to say the Rosti world.
You know when Mel Gibson dies in the finale of Brave-Heart screaming “freedom”, well, not to be a know-it-all, but maybe not everyone knows that the word “slogan” comes from there, from the ancient Gaelic of the Scottish highlands: the sloagh-ahnn is the roar of thunder, the cry of the sky, the cry of freedom launched by dead warriors that becomes a battle cry and transforms the amorphous multitude into a compact mass, you understand, we are talking about something very powerful, the basic weapon of advertising.
I did a quick search on the slogans, pay offs, and headlines of competitors in the cycling clothing sector. It's all a rosary of "passion" and "made in Italy", no statement of unmistakable identity but above all no mention of values, needs or emotions related to those who ride a bike.
Yet on the forehead of every cyclist I see written “Freedom I want to seek” including those who only talk about ratios, watts and altimetry, and who seem like cold monomaniacs, without thoughts or feelings. In reality, if you only look carefully, they are warriors of the ancient type, ready for anything.
Even those hyper-vanity subjects who could advertise anything, with the always perfect look, casually street style or strictly vintage. Then you get to know them and they reveal an ethical rigor, not only aesthetic, of other times, and they prove capable of absolute fidelity to difficult, countercurrent choices.
It doesn't matter how much money you have, what bike you have, whether you play sports or deliver pizzas. Face the questions and problems of life as you face climbs, meter after meter, minute after minute, without ever giving up. This makes us brothers.
Riding a bike means being willing to work hard. Denying the label of a people who are full, spoiled, lazy. Not only that. The truth is that many people have realized something important that those in the sector have not yet fully understood.
The bike is not just recreation, sport, free time, tourism, fashion and mobility. The bike is what finally allows you to talk to yourself. The bike is the best psychotherapy on the market. More tiring, more effective and also more satisfying.
While waiting for the right slogan to come down from the sky during a thunderstorm, I tried to consult another kind of warrior, reviewing the titles of 3000 novels, and I noted two: “Inhabiting the Wind” and “Ask the Dust”.
All right, I'm coming to take a tour of the knitwear factory, the slogan with the perfect sense of Rosti for cycling, if it exists, is certainly there.