The Eroica of the twenty year anniversary
Paolo insisted for 4 months. For four months, I resisted.
For pity’s sake, I’d always heard about “L’Eroica” of Gaiole in Chianti very well, but what can I do? I’m a loner. I love to pedal by myself for days and the simple thinking of the “multitudes” puts pressure and a bit of sadness on me.
Then Paolo switched to blackmail – “If you don’t come, I don’t go neither am I”.
Curse.
OK let’s go.
I haven’t finished yet thanking Paolo for insisting so much, because “L’Eroica” is a lonely event with 7,000 people.
For just one day of gaming there were 7000 people (net of relatives and friends) of 65 different nations. Just for the record, to the last Olympics there were 11,000 athletes to representing 206 nations for a month.
You will forgive me if I use “people” and not “cyclists” and “play” and nothing else, but the first thing that strikes is that a river of people moves from all the world to pour out into a small Tuscan village to play. The game comes before the sport. To play you need a tacit and complicit understanding, there must be passion and the rules are essential otherwise, the game ends, while sport, too often, continues.
The Saturday before “L’Eroica”, walking for Gaiole, you meet only joyful, polite, respectful and passionate people. I know it’s rhetorical, but it’s all you want to meet in the morning when you leave the house, if only we were passionate about the whole life and not just a bit of it.
A gentleman dressed like Jacques Anquetil stops to ask me about my bicycle, a group of British for information, two Danish of 120 kilos each one, drink beer to maintain their ideal weight, and then: mustache up, ladies elegantly dressed like in 30s, beautiful cyclists who seem to have just come out of the beach marbles, the market where you find everything but what you find everywhere is a smile.
At the end of the day everyone retires happy and … worried. Everyone knows that the length of the path chosen does not matter, and in his heart prefigures the fatigue he will do and it will be much, and on top of that, there is also the changeable weather on the first Sunday of October, an element so indefinable that you can not consider it. In the stories.
“L’Eroica” is not a challenge, it is not a cyclosportive, it is not a reenactment, the best word to define it is: a memory.
Memory is a private matter, at “L’Eroica”, it becomes collective and you find yourselves leave at night with the excitement of a teenager at the first appointment with the only certainty that you do not know how it will end.
Let’s start, I and Paolo at 6:30 am, the most fearless at 5 am are already pedaling but we are all welcomed at dawn from the lightness of knowing that we will work hard until the last pedal of the last meter.
Climbs, dirt, sweat, burning legs, palmer that popping out, refreshments, ribollita, finocchiona, wine! Duels!!! Infinite with the Belgians.
The British are taking their time and the Swiss go ahead. Orderly.
We are in the group, we all wear a racing uniform so it’s all true, we are cyclists of the 70’s in the competition.
The group stretches, the speed rises, a Sanmontama man commands the row to make a selection, Cilo-Aufina controls, Paolo (Bianchi even riding a Legnano) sprint!
After a few miles he comes up beside me, at the bottom of the group and tells me “there you go: I fixed it..”
“Did you have any problems with the bike?” I curious ask.
“No” he replies “I went to reclaim the flight.”
Between imagination and reality, “L’Eroica” is something so evocative that everything become possible thanks to the extraordinary and professional organization, practically invisible and super efficient, you have the impression that everything is perfect because, otherwise, it would not be the Eroica of Gaiole in Chianti.
L’Eroica XX° edizione