Davide Rebellin is dead and with him our child time

I quit. But I don’t know if I’ll stop, if I’ll really stop. To compete yes, but you never stop cycling, at least I think I never stop. He said that not even a month ago Davide Rebellin. He said it while smiling, but with his eyes clouded by a subtle, light melancholy, like that slim and light physique of his that he had ridden on a bicycle for over forty years, thirty of them racing for real, being a professional .

had stopped, But you know that… that sometimes I think about it and I tell myself that I really don’t know. Because his fifty-one years weren’t too many to run, to stay behind and often in front of opponents who could be his children. On 16 October he finished the Veneto Classic in thirtieth place. One hundred and twelve had started, seventy-four had finished it.

I stop, but with the bike I don’t really stop. He stopped today, a Wednesday November 30th that we will never forget. He stopped today, killed by a truck driver, who who knows maybe he didn’t even see him, because the driver never sees the cyclists, who are the invisible, the pariahs of the road.

Davide Rebellin is deadkilled by a man on a vehicle much less thin and much heavier than him, his bicycle, his infinite love for that vehicle and for that sport. And in that same instant at least two generations of cyclists died, much less fast and certainly less subtle and light than him, who perhaps did not always think of him, but who, seeing him run, still struggling in a group, glimpsed that incredible magic that only sport, and above all cycling, can give, that of dilating time much more than usual, to prolong a childish passion that must have already died down. Because in knowing that Davide Rebellin ran, continued to run, it was as if time didn’t really flow, as if a part of us, of the us that was, hadn’t been lost, hadn’t evaporated, in kilometers and kilometers pedaled, in hours “lost” in other commitments, work and all those other everyday occupations, which keep us away from the bicycle in spite of ourselves. Knowing it in a group, with the number on the back was something reassuring. Seeing him pedal was, as always, a pleasure, because he continued to know how to pedal.

Davide Rebellin was killed while doing what he had always done, what he would have liked to continue doing indefinitely. Among the old cycling enthusiasts, people who still go pedaling in the tavern because it is blasphemous to abandon certain vices, the bike and wine, it is often said that death is better faced in the saddle, a squeeze to the heart and away. It may be true, sometimes we think about it, we imagine that it really is like this, that it would be better this way than in others, provided that the age is the right one, if there is a right age. Surely it’s not right, it’s not possible, not even conceivable, to say goodbye to everyone at fifty-one years of age just over a month after farewell to racing. And moreover on a regional road.

It often ends up like this. There are many white bikes on the side of the road, one more from today. They stand there saying what nobody wants to see, lives gone while they moved thin and light in an hell of metal boxes that slide too fast and too distracted at their side, whining because there is a dirty cyclist who slows them down. Maybe someone like Davide Rebellin who brought our childhood dreams with him.