By Leone Belotti
You were a shy, frail little girl. Today you are an athlete and a fantastic woman. You tell everyone: I got my passion for cycling from my father. Or: the bike is my masculine side. And also: it is my drug. I smile, and think: one day I will have to give you a speech. Tell you how it really went. Explain to you what the bike has meant to me, to us. It is not easy.
It was another world. We spoke little, and that little with anger. At school, at home, kicks in the ass. As soon as you could, you took your bike, went to the river. That calmed you, the strength of the river. Your three friends would arrive, their faces as grim as yours, you greeted them with a nod. They would throw the bike in the grass and sit there with you to look at the water. Half a sentence was enough and suddenly all the filth of the day would explode in laughter, nonsense, shoving. We would tie a long mountaineering rope to the rack of an old Graziella and with that we would jump from the bank into the river. We were twelve years old. That summer we found ourselves wide-eyed watching the Giro d'Italia pass by. The next day, at the sports bar, we would pick up the forms to join the cycling union.
Five years later, same place down by the river. Midsummer night, heavy metal music from the tape player of the souped-up Vespa. The first cylum, the chemical hunger. At dawn naked in the water, drunk, very efficient in assembling in the middle of the river a scaffold stolen from the construction site where we worked. To fish. On that scaffold in reality, we were trying to understand something of our lives. We were no longer children. We were waiting for the postcard to go to the army. We had spent the years of development together every day, morning at school, afternoon in the saddle. The training, the falls, the coach's curses. The bigger bike, the first races. We had an obsession in our heads, but with real girls we weren't even capable of talking. And so we let off steam on the pedals. The symbiosis of running in a group, the adrenaline of the escape, the orgasm of the sprint. Juniors, track, amateurs. We had grown up on the pedals. But none of us was a champion.
After the military service, we ended up in the world of work almost without realizing it. Some on a construction site, some in a factory, some behind the wheel, some in an office. And no one had the time or desire to pedal anymore. The bikes ended up hanging on a nail, at the back of the garage. The one of us who was going fastest, the only one who could have made it in the professional world, was the first to go. Twenty-two years old, a great climber, died of an overdose in the toilet of a train. The whole old team at the funeral.
A few years later, the sprinter gave up. In his garage, with exhaust fumes. You knew the last one too, you remember him well, even though you were only four years old. He taught you to ride a bike without training wheels. He was out of his mind, yes. Collapsed of a stupor in a red-light motel, on his thirty-third birthday. That was our third funeral, a very hot Saturday in early summer, and at the cemetery someone said: tomorrow we could go for a bike ride. People who hadn't pedaled for ten years, with ten extra kilos on them, and ten years of cigarettes. In the end, we went down to the river. We lit the fire. We didn't need to drink, or anything else. To get us high, there were the memories of our friends. Then we had to push the bikes to get back up, making fun of each other. From that day on, the bike came back into our lives. Some took up cycle touring, some mountain biking. Those who, like me, have started taking their children out on bike rides.
We haven't had any more funerals. When we spend the night at the river every year, it's to be with our friends who are no longer with us. But there's nothing to mythologize about that world of then, my daughter. There's no need to talk about the bike as a male passion.
We were a generation adrift. We didn't have the awareness you have today, we didn't understand the pleasure, the well-being of riding a bike. It was the only way to vent our anger, our rejection of rules, our impotence, our hunger for life, our need for love. It wasn't our drug. It was the alternative to drugs.