The years between 1979 and 1989 were a different kind of journey, very different from the free, instinctive one of the first miles. The bicycle was still there, faithful, but it was no longer just a game. It was becoming structure, rule, sacrifice. The first serious races, regular training. At the beginning the mileage was still limited and, in a way, it remained a game. But as the years passed, the structures grew more rigid, more demanding. Kilometer after kilometer under the sun and in the rain: the body grinding on, without asking too many questions, while the mind tried to make sense of the gap between what it wanted and what it felt it was supposed to do.
Training—I truly loved that. Riding with others, laughing, joking, challenging each other without consequences. Those were hours on the bike that I loved deeply. Being together, moving through space, feeling the body working in harmony with others. That was my place. That was my language.
What weighed on me were the races. I wasn’t born to compete. Competition felt unnatural to me, something that wasn’t mine. I didn’t have the knife between my teeth. I slept badly the night before, arrived tense, and never really managed to enjoy the race. I don’t remember clearly how it felt when I was very young, but I know that from thirteen or fourteen onward, competing made me feel unwell—even if I couldn’t yet see it clearly.
And yet I did it. Without saying a word. As if that were the destiny assigned to me, something that simply had to be lived that way. Yes, I dreamed of becoming a professional, of being strong, famous. But inside me there was already a subtle, persistent voice saying something else. Saying that this wasn’t my world. That I didn’t truly belong there. That I lacked something essential: blind hunger, the instinct of the rider who wants to win at all costs.
I played at pretending everything was fine. I hid how I felt about racing, perhaps because riding a bike mattered too much to me to question everything. From Monday to Friday I was exactly where I wanted to be. Saturday and Sunday were the compromise. They were the hell I had to cross to return to paradise.
Without realizing it, even then, I was learning a lesson that would return many times in my life: how long can you stay in a place that doesn’t truly belong to you, simply because you deeply love one part of what that place offers?
Looking back today, I can clearly see how comfortable I was with laughter, with joking, with not taking myself too seriously. That was my natural rhythm. Competition didn’t allow that. Competition is serious. It doesn’t move at your pace, doesn’t accept detours, doesn’t grant lightness. There’s no space for jokes, for laughter, for air circulating between people. It requires an inner fire, a constant tension, a desire to dominate that simply didn’t interest me.
And yet I was there. I was there because I was playing a role. A role I hadn’t truly chosen, but felt I had to perform. To please my father, first of all. And then, cascading outward, everyone else around me: coaches, teammates, the environment. I had to wear that role, inhabit it properly, make it look like mine. Somehow, I had to learn to like it.
I believe that until the breaking point with racing, I never seriously considered the idea of quitting. It wasn’t an option. You go on. You do what needs to be done. You keep everything inside. I played my part in silence, without causing problems, without asking questions. But inside, slowly, something was cracking. Not loudly. Not visibly. It was a subterranean fracture, invisible even to me.
Then the break came all at once. Suddenly. Like when a dam collapses. From the outside, it seems nothing is happening. The water is still, controlled, contained. But underneath, pressure builds. Until it can’t hold anymore. And when it gives way, there’s no transition, no gradualness—you’re overwhelmed. Water, debris, uncontrollable force.
That’s how it was for me. No one noticed anything was happening until it was already too late. Not even me. And perhaps this is the hardest point to accept, looking back: I didn’t betray myself all at once. I left myself behind slowly, day after day, while I kept pedaling.
In races, I was like a fish out of water.
It wasn’t just the physical effort—which, in truth, I even enjoyed. There was a much subtler, more exhausting effort: the mental strain of playing a part that wasn’t mine. Wearing a character. Staying inside a script written by others.
Around me were boys with real, fierce, almost animal hunger. The knife between the teeth wasn’t a metaphor—it was a way of being in the world. I belonged to the same cycling nation, yes, but not to the same species. I didn’t feel at home in that pack. I was there, but not fully there.
And yet I wasn’t weak. I had the engine, I had the legs, I could be at the front. And often I was. I could hold the pace, I could suffer, I could even be competitive—at least on the surface.
I remember one race in particular. That day I was playing the part perfectly. Everything was working. I was at the front, in the action, present. But when the final kilometers arrived, it happened again.
A precise sensation, always the same. Something closing in my stomach. Not fear. Not fatigue. A clean, definite closure, like an invisible hand saying: not here.
I reached the sprint. I could have won. I knew it, others knew it. But when I lifted my eyes and saw the finish line appear in front of me, I sat up. I surrendered to that inner force that wouldn’t let me go further. There were only a few dozen meters left. I went from potential first to eleventh, maybe twelfth.
I remember the looks from the team directors: confused, powerless. An incomprehensible gesture. How do you explain something like that?
Even today, I can’t fully explain it. But I know what it wasn’t: it wasn’t a lack of legs. It was as if someone else had pulled the brakes for me. As if something—body, instinct, truth—was telling me with absolute clarity that this wasn’t my road. That those finish lines didn’t belong to me.
It didn’t happen just once. Those blocks returned. I lived them, I suffered them, but I hid them. We didn’t talk about such things. They weren’t shareable, especially at that age. So I did what I knew how to do best: I kept everything inside and kept going.
In training, though, it was another story.
There I was free. There I had strength, determination, joy. I attacked, I dropped others, I laughed. The body responded without friction, without knots. In training I was myself. In races I was someone trying to be myself, without ever fully succeeding.
In hindsight, everything was already there. The body knew before the mind. It knew that this form of victory wasn’t mine. It knew that not everything you can do is also what you must do.
At the beginning of 1990, the dam collapsed. No one—myself included—knew where to begin gathering the debris, the remaining pieces of that collapse.
Zen Mindfulness Cambridge Zenways Italia 