Eroica 2022. How to carry your belly on a bicycle

There always comes a time when you wonder why you keep riding a bicycle and go out pedaling for hours. So much is known that they are hot and up early in the summer and cold and abandoned sofas in the winter. It is a question that does not make any sense, so much so that it is asked but never really answered. There is no need to give yourself an answer: you just pedal, because if you didn’t it would be worse, one less pleasure.

There is another, much more sensible, that emerges at some point. And even this question is never really answered, because the signals that determine the answer are all there and very clear: do you eat to pedal more, or do you pedal to eat more? If we ask it, it is because we already have the answer, it is in the second part of the question.

It is a self-evident stance, in the sense that it is enough to look in the mirror to see it. The physique of the runners never appears in the mirror, not at least of those you go to see them along the roads or on live television. That runners are dry hard, with certain thin yet muscular legs and certain chicken breasts that one wonders if there really can be such breasts in the world. They have nothing to do with them, the runners, with those who ride without giving up anything and giving up nothing. Or maybe yes, because there is always a bicycle involved, and then, perhaps, it is a bit like those family dinners where uncles and parents think differently about everything, but they are at the same table (more or less) well, however better if there are few lunches (or dinners) a year.

They are a bit disgusted, cyclists with prominent bellies, those who still live in the dimension of competition, those for whom speed is better than tranquility, those who turn the cranks to detach everyone else, even if you start and come back together. All people who prefer gels and bars to bread and a side dish, an isotonic drink – probably a dirty word – to a glass of red wine. All this is of little interest to belly-ridden cyclists. They are fine all the same, even to struggle more uphill; at the top, especially when the ascent becomes a step and the altitude rises, there is some gastronomic delight: the mountain takes away a lot of energy, but it can fill the senses like no one.

As between the Chianti and the Crete Senesi, especially one weekend a year, the first of October. Not that you fall badly even in the other months, on the contrary, but it is during L’Eroica that cyclists with bellies no longer become a minority watched by eyes, with that mixture of sympathy and pity typical of those who are convinced that they are right, but a large team, a festive minority aware of having nothing in less than the others, but something more: the belly.

You can find them on every route, from the shortest one, 46 kilometers, to the longest one, 207, demonstrating that what matters are the legs and if those go, it’s not a few extra pounds that stop them.

Like all historical cyclists, L’Eroica lives in a dimension of its own compared to other cycling events: the only thing that really matters is pedaling, how, for how long, at what speed and with how many pauses it is completely superfluous, just arrive . It always comes. It is the revenge of slowness over speed, of pleasure over deprivation, because speed is in itself exclusive, deprived, it is a run-up to loneliness. That’s what it takes in cycling, but cycling is only a minority part of the bicycle: the fast one.

And so put your foot on the ground, look around, stop two more minutes somewhere, put bread and salami in your mouth (or better finocchiona, since we are between Chianti and Siena), sprinkle it with red wine is not a nutritional blasphemy. , in the words of Guido Foddis, but something absolutely necessary. Someone like Romeo Venturelli would have liked at the Eroica, as well as someone like Jan Ullrich.

It is a place Icp L’Eroica: pot-bellied cycling indication. It is a place and a time where the belly is more worn with style – the choice to keep it over or inside the shorts is completely personal – and with a certain pride, because that’s okay, because it doesn’t hurt the belly on a bicycle. On the contrary. It gives harmony to the whole. Wasn’t it said that Fausto Coppi was wonderful on a bicycle because he formed a magnificent semicircle with it?