Gino Mader is dead | The paper

The sensation is that of a punch in the pit of the stomach. Lack of oxygen, lightheadedness, a dry pain. Gino Mäder is dead. He died on a bicycle fell into a ravine yesterday at Tour of Switzerland, along the descent that leads from the Abulapass to La Punt. He had been found lying unconscious in a creek bed, had been revived and taken by air ambulance to Chur hospital. They tried to save his life, they couldn’t.

It had already happened that runners died running, fortunately less than in the past. It is believed that the past, what we have already experienced, can help us to accept the facts of life, to better rationalize events. On the other hand, you go fast downhill, just a moment of distraction, being more tired than you think, risking a little more, or encountering an unexpected event and boom, falling can be painful, you can get hurt. And when we pedal we never really think about this, an inexorable optimism drives us.

What is past serves no purpose. It doesn’t make us ready. The oxygen is always lacking, the dizziness is totalitarian, the pain is real. Only two words ring out: he is dead. Nothing else matters.

The bicycle has the ability to make us equal, to experience a state of total empathy with the riders. When we see them run we know what they feel, we perceive their fatigue, it is the same we feel when we move by bike in places, sometimes the same ones, in which they moved, only more slowly and without the worry of a victory , a ranking, a stopwatch, a result.

Sometimes we like cyclists more or less, they can be more or less close to our ideal cyclist, we always have one and there’s nothing we can do about it. Gino Mäder was one of those whom it was easier to love, to feel sympathy for. He had that magnetic smile, polite manners and a gaze that was always poised between joy and melancholy.

It’s difficult to root against someone in cycling, the jerseys and colors don’t matter, they don’t exist, they change when the sponsors change. It’s often difficult to even make it a question of nationality in cycling, there used to be, now less and less. You can see it on the side of the road, in the applause and in the come on come on come on addressed to everyone. This was seen at the end of the seventh stage of Paris-Nice in 2021, when there were hundreds and hundreds of people trying to push allez Gino towards the finish line at Colmiane. He had gone on the run, he had pulled away from everyone, but Primoz Roglic was chasing him in the yellow jersey, sprinting like a rocket a few hundred meters earlier. Gino got very angry just after the arrival with the Slovenian. He forgave him right away. He had to go like this. The next day, however, Roglic fell and to those who asked him if it was karma, Mäder replied that what had happened the day before was in the dynamics of the race and that Roglic didn’t deserve to lose the Paris-Nice in the last stage due to a fall. He didn’t smile that day, he had the melancholy expression of someone who felt guilty for having just thought something bad.

Gino Mäder when you saw him before the races was always concentrated, but he always found a way to concede a smile. Once, before a stage in the Giro d’Italia, he was with Mikel Landa, his teammate and captain. A boy approached him and handed him an autograph book, he was passing it to Landa to have him autographed, when the boy stopped him and told him that he wanted his, because he liked Gino Mäder. Gino blushed, then laughed, signed and took a picture with the baby. He told the boy that he had given him a gift, that now he too had an Italian fan.