#GiroDays | Imola – E mi alzo sui pedali

20th May. Imola, Circuit.

The pole position’s stripes are even more lucid and even whiter on the asphalt soaked of rain. Somewhere there is still Ayrton’s breath here. This morning Murilo Fishcer had a helmet with Brazilian colours. Senna written on the side.

To them he was a kind of God. He, who used to talk to God everyday, was a boy that felt awfully in debt with life. Because of money first and because of the luck and of the talent then. He wanted to give back.
Ayrton.
Last martyr of a sport that was becoming too dangerous. Ayrton who believed in tears: they aren’t made to be hidden. Because sensitiveness is a precious gift.
Ayrton who that morning of May stayed for a long time with closed eyes in his single-seater car. Giorgio Terruzzi tells that to everybody it seemed pain for Roland Ratzenberg died the Friday before. It was maybe awareness instead. It was that famous sensitiveness that put him in contact with himself. It was like he knew.

Cycling and motoring. They have always had something in common. Two opposites with the same obsession for speed. For the road. You’re pilot and you’re cyclist because in your blood your fate flows. You can’t say no, you can’t rebel. You just have to ride, you just have to press the accelerator.
It rains on this circuit surrounded by the hills of this land that Ayrton liked to hear early in the morning. It rains on these guys with the faces blackened by the mud of kilometres mixed with water. The mask of the life they chose because it called them.
Crazy. Says the society. It is always like this when we don’t understand something: we give wrong labels to forget that we can’t explain it.
Uncontrollable. We’re afraid of what can’t be controlled. Love, for example. For the silence of the bike or for the rumble of an engine.
It rains on that runaway boy with two water wings and it seems like he is flying.
Only at the finish line a little bit of sun comes out. He looks a bit back, he looks at the turn. There is that road, used to the engines’ oil and than there is him.

Puddles shine, they reflect the clouds and the cyclists who flow in the crowd attached to their tired bikes. The silent buzz of a buses’ paddock on the light of a whimsical afternoon. The mild memory of a car that went fast and the more tenacious one of a pilot who still believed that the goodness of mind would have won every thunderstorm.
And maybe he was right.
Traduzione a cura di Martina Meroni.