The useless crime against our lives of Covid at the Giro d’Italia

What I know about bicycle racing remains fixed in the images fixed in the epic, sweat dust mud and people on the road, because cycling is still, despite all the harm they have done to it, a sport of the people. I’m not as good as @giostuzzi who would know how to distinguish a ride in the fog of an Alpine pass, when it’s sincere and when it’s scam. But I also remember the tragedy of cycling plagued by pills and drugs. Perhaps things are better now, but one has to gape in disappointment to see what happens at the Giro d’Italia 2023, one hundred and sixth edition.

Started when the World Health Organization had already declared, and even late, that the Covid pandemic was over. Instead, the favorite champion, the pink jersey, the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, was quickly picked up and repatriated by his team because he tested positive for the swab. Now, in theory the protocol still exists, but it hangs on the disused wall like Coppi’s bicycle and above all there is no obligation to withdraw: even if there is the possibility of contagion, it is declassified as a normal disease. Who knows if they would have done the same in the Tour, or if the noblesse of the French race would have prevailed. But for poor Giro, it is “another useless crime against our lives”, as the Maestrone sang.

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• Maurice Crippa

• “Maurizio Crippa, deputy director, was born in Milan on a February 27th of swallows and spring. It was 1961. He grew up in Monza, his home town, but for more than twenty years he has been a proud metropolitan Milanese. He attended classical high school and graduated in Cinema History, his first love. Then there are the loves of a lifetime: Inter, the mountains, Jannacci and Neil Young. He works in the Milan editorial office and deals with a little of everything: politics, culture when he can, church when he wants. He is happy to have two great Popes, Francis and Benedict. He hasn’t written books (“why write ugly new books when there are still so many good old books to read?” Sandro Fusina taught.) He has long pursued the dream of knowing how to use social media, but then, thank God, he repents.

  He is in charge of the weekly page of the GranMilano sheet, he writes Against Mastro Ciliegia every day on the first page. He has a wife, Emilia, and two sons, Giovanni and Francesco, who are no longer children”