This cycling of ours has had two faces again, again and always, for years. But lived, debated, loved, spent, in Campania, really today, it is even more conflictual, due to the honest narration between a lilial present and a wounded past, still close. Heart and illness.
And it confuses us tonight – the heart and illness debate – that we write, Ornella Vanoni has been gone for a few hours and we listen to her. And the other afternoon we were at the awards ceremony of the “Crescenzo D’Amore” Challenge, dedicated to youth cycling and promoted in Brusciano, precisely the town in the Neapolitan hinterland, birthplace of the junior world champion in San Sebastian in ’97, tragically passed away in a car accident last year these days, by the family and by the Campania Cycling Federation, led by Umberto Perna. That Perna, a gentleman of the track, among other things, who had been the coach of D’Amore, who died at the age of 45.
And there he had been nice to find the faces of Campanian cycling, and first of all Neapolitan, which in the short and long years from 1995 to the first seasons of 2000 had in fact created a magical enclave of Flemish passion transplanted onto the sunny Tyrrhenian Sea, far from the mists of the North Sea….
Do you remember? Yes, we paraded, with the affection of the lines of the time, the faces of Antonio Salomone, Filippo Perfetto, Pasquale Muto, Antonio D’Aniellofor each one an applause and a distinction. Up to the dominant one of Giuliano Figuerasthe boy from Arzano who in 1996, in Lugano, became the Under 23 world champion, and ahead of three other Italians: Sgambelluri Sironiand even at the foot of the podium Bettini. Lots of Italy, coach Antonio Fusi, too much that day, too blue. And we remembered the beginning of the article, come on The Morning some time later, when he turned professional with Mapei Giuliano would immediately win in Malaysia, at Genting Highlands: «a Merckx from Campania, with a surname that is a cross between a Cuban sprinter from the 1960s and a Spanish tennis player from the 1980s…». Yes, how good, and intriguing that crasis that exalted the editor-in-chief between Figuerola and Higueras.
Everyone has a bit of an abdomen on them, not muscular, the boys are ex-boyfriends, and the perfect physique du role, an intelligent and winking smile that avoids questions, of course Philip Perfect.
That glory cycling would have flown away, and they were there at the time Salvatore Commetto European champion in ’97, twice Italian and winner of as many stages at the Tour, Raffaele Illiano, Domenico Romano and Antonio Varriale, and Salvatore Scamardella, absent the other afternoon, in the sensational whirlwind of inconsistent cycling of the early 2000s and its shortcuts: as much Campanian blue as a buriana would have thus ended up sideways to the established order and rules, sometimes badly, like indeed so much and too much national blue cycling.
Singular stories that would certainly have built a plural Italian defeat. Patience, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, so we all – not just them – paid in person, to recover in racing bicycles and credibility the misunderstanding of a boasted quarter of a century.
So be it, but personal feeling cannot be ruled by, the predilection of the old disillusioned writer emerged in the embrace for each one. “Do you remember, Giuliano, the Picnic bar in Arzano, and mum and dad, then?”. And with Antonio Salomone we talked about Piotr Wadecki and the accident at the finish line in Sorrento and the Cape Epic… And a Tony D’Aniello I would have remembered, I didn’t have time, or maybe I lacked the stability of the heart, the red stamp of the sparkling wine cork on the cheek, not the miss’s kiss, for a Magnum of bubbles that hadn’t waited for the right time, at the Tricolore for elites 2003… We won’t miss their days, cultural honesty is a handshake.
And of cycling in Naples heart and illness, for once again – at our age of autumns, who can judge us? – with Ornella Vanoni we would have preferred Tomorrow is another day a The music is over. And not just because Christmas is coming for everyone.
from tuttoBICI in December
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