A great sports journalist repeated to him that the cycling press gallery is the road and Beppe Conti he breathed in a lot of dust, following the races, on board cars and motorbikes. She has been doing this for decades, since the 1970s, for her brilliant reporting on the Gazzetta dello Sport, Tuttosport, Tuttobici and, in more recent times, in Rai live broadcasts. He wrote pink or white pages, then spread his clear voice from the ether, now he is in particular a fruitful writer of cycling things, which recur in the most recent publication after quite a few previous texts: Cycling. Secret stories. Events, background and confidential news of today’s yesterday’s championspublished by Diarkos of Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna, in the Grande Sport series (December 2023, 228 pages).
Born in Turin in 1951, Beppe was and is the heir of excellent cycling journalism, of the greatest names on two wheels reported: Bruno Raschi, Gianni Brera, Gianni Mura and, in specific roles, Sergio Zavoli, creator of the “Processo alla stage” and Adriano De Zan, with his unforgettable commentary.
One or more generations who unfortunately no longer exist, all specialized in cycling and Giuanin Brera in all human knowledge. Beppe Conti he is there, however, and continues to excite us with his affable speech, with his memories, with the revealable secrets of the champions and with some revealed mysteries, also and above all in his books.
This also reserves a reason for particular emotion: the preface by Claudio Ferretti, Rai commentator who died prematurely in 2020, son of another giant of pedal journalism, Mario Ferretti, a great live radio narrator of sporting events that he made epic. Observed live, cycling is long waits and a quick flash in the rustle of wheels and what follows on the screen frames exciting daily adventures, but if listened to without images it becomes true magic, especially when an anxious voice extols feats you don’t see: “a single man in command, his shirt is white and blue, his name is Fausto Coppi”.
I remember Mario Ferretti well, I don’t forget the excited and engaging tone that fascinated us little people from Pescara, when he described live the continuous escapes, the many fights and some tantrums of another unforgettable: Vito Taccone, the first “Abruzzo chamois”. In the early 1960s, there were few cars in circulation in the city and all the neighborhood children played in the street, in the afternoon, in May-June, while live radio broadcasts of the Giro d’Italia broadcast from the open windows of the surrounding houses.
This is a story of cyclists and cyclists are men, therefore it is a story of men, of sensational successes and weaknesses, also of fears, doubts, mistakes.
Beppe Conti starts by saying that the idea is to tell people the stories that the suivers following the cycling caravans tell each other, in the breaks between one challenge and another.
No desire to cause scandals, to cause a sensation or to tarnish a splendid sport.”mistreated too many times”.
It starts from the beginnings of cycling, from the Tour which risked closing at the second edition in 1904 due to public order problems and not seeing the start the following year. He had gotten out of control of the organizers, we had seen everything: gunshots and beatings, nails scattered on the street, stones thrown in the night, runners bludgeoned, punched, seriously injured. Back then we ran long stages of four hundred kilometers or more, with average speeds of less than thirty per hour and we left or arrived in the dark, still facing a lot. In the darkness, they acted maliciously for various reasons.
Then, obviously, space for some champions of the legendary era, Binda, Magni, Bartali, Coppi and their co-equipers, a cycling barely touched by the cameras and television cameras, which now frame even the buttons of the boots in the foreground.
One of the taboos of those years was sex. It was believed that practicing it seriously harmed the cyclist.
Conti reveals that in the epic and glorious times of heroic cycling, women were kept at a distance from cyclists, because they were seen as temptresses.
It is no coincidence that Gianni Brera’s book on the story between Fausto and the White Lady had the title Coppi and the devil. They were not allowed to travel in a caravan. The story of a journalist who disguised herself as a man to cover the Giro d’Italia in the 1950s is not a legend.
Approaching our times, we necessarily stop at Madonna di Campiglio 1999, passing through topical events whose protagonists are Anquetil, Nencini, Defilippis, touching on the mystery of Merkx’s doping, the Moser-Saronni rivalry and the many secrets, mysteries, misdeeds, legends of great stage races and classic monuments. The author rereads the mystery that deprived Marco Pantani of a Giro d’Italia that he practically won, with his exclusion from the race in the pink jersey, due to the blood hematocrit values which were found to be outside the norm during the official check, but found within the limits during the checks carried out by the Romagna sample before and after the samples taken by the UCI health team.
It ends with Fabio Aru, the last Italian pedal champion who could have been so much and wasn’t, after the shark Nibali.
We still wonder about the causes of the zero results after the engagement in a sumptuous cycling team (the UAE of Pogacar, directed by Giuseppe Saronni) and the inglorious withdrawal from the 2020 Tour, won by the Slovenian “Pogi”.
Beppe Conti puts forward a hypothesis. Without giving anything away, we will say that someone has made one or more mistakes. Too bad, we were left without a name that seemed launched towards a very bright career, which ended at the young age of twenty-seven.
