Maybe he already dreamed of cycling while sitting behind that desk, but until that moment he had never seriously tried. Okay, a few runs with friends, that electric spasm of joy when he realized he was going faster than the others, the feeling that he really enjoyed all that effort. But Giuliano Calore from Padua, at 39 years old, he thought mainly about his work at Enel, his family and his powerful passion for music.
But he also liked cycling. Then he put himself to the test, as a very ordinary person Normal One, elbowing on the tracks of amateur circuits. Three races, three successes. Enough to believe it a little more. Calore, however, immediately understood that he could not be satisfied. It wasn’t enough for him to win a normal bicycle duel: he wanted to compete against the limits of his body. It was 1979. In this way a rather unlikely record holder was born. Because the placid employee Giuliano suddenly changed into the indomitable athlete who coined an absurd specialty: racing on a bike without handlebars and without brakes. Or rather, going up and down.
Because he wanted to engage those legs that expressed the power of a hydrofoil in an absurd challenge: go up to the Stelvio pass, without using your hands or placing your feet. The people crowded at the edges of the hairpin bends that year had smiled smugly: but where was this going? Those who knew him best, however, didn’t move a muscle. They knew he could do it for real. And in fact, 45 years ago, Giuliano Calore tamed the gigantic mountain, rendering everyone speechless. He had just invented a new sport, extreme cycling. The spotlights of the Guinness Book of Records had turned in sync.
Also because it wasn’t enough for him. In the book of record he would have entered it, from then on, 13 times, “But only because the Rai videos are not counted as evidence, otherwise they would have been more”, he swears. Up and down those 48 treacherous hairpin bends, therefore, since Calore was not content with making the enormous effort of climbing them. He also started descending them, managing to find the ideal curve trajectory only with the strength of his body movement, swinging at the right moment, opening his arms as if to glide slightly, caressing the wheel of his normal racing bike with one foot.
Not even the most adverse weather conditions could dissuade him: in 1986 he crashed on the Stelvio a heavy snowfall, but he didn’t care and climbed those 1842 meters of altitude aboard his damaged bike anyway. Which he might as well have hung, after all those triumphs. Nope: insatiable, at the age of 77 – it was 2015 – Calore had decided to do something else.
Descending the Stelvio, again, but this time at night, surrounded by an oil-colored darkness that was pierced only by the faint emissions of the torches. From that umpteenth undertaking a film would also be born, “48 hairpin bends at night”. Not bad for someone who had sat behind a desk for half his life.
