It is not true that time arranges everything, which blurs the edges, which attenuates the black transforming it into shades of gray. The passing of days and years never succeeds in restoring what we have lost. It’s just that everyday life gets in the way, accumulating images and voices, distracting us. Yet that sense of abandonment resists all this, it does not repair itself, at most it moves away, it is put aside, like a broken object that is set aside, boasting a future accommodation. Time is a placebo, it’s up to us to convince ourselves that it works.

The wounds can also heal, but there remains a mark on the skin, whether small or large, which brings us back to the place and time in which they were formed. That place and time, for an indefinable number of people it is Madonna di Campiglio on 5 June 1999. When Marco Pantani was ousted for high hematocrit from a Giro d’Italia that was dominating.

It has been over twenty years since then. Marco Pantani it hasn’t been there since Valentine’s Day in 2004. Yet a photo, a video, or just the name of a climb is enough to still feel part of a plural story. Because Marco Pantani was a us. We that the bicycle also in the bedroom. We who had discovered the world by pedaling and who would not have wanted to do anything else. We who had never seen anything like this on the pedals. Especially us who seeing him pedal, fall, get up and win, we had begun to hope, and perhaps to really believe it, that even the bad luck by which we felt gripped could be overcome, set aside, overwhelmed. It wasn’t really like that, but we’ve been convinced for years. So much so.

It is not true that time fixes everything, if it is enough to get up on the pedals with your hands down to tighten the fold of the handlebar or see a yellow jersey to rekindle that melancholy that those who have seen it run and shoot know that it will never go away. . Imagine a docufilm. Imagine “The best. Marco Pantani ”by Paolo Santolini.

It would have been enough to make a collage of the videos of his ascension escapes to make it clear what luck those who have been able to see the cycling of the nineties have had. The shot on Passo Monte Giovo, the solo on Mortirolo, the escapes on Fedaia and Galibier, Plan di Montecampione or Plateau de Beille, the comeback in Oropa, the last solo in Courchevel. It would have needed nothing more than this to tell the magnificence of that 55-pound wren who climbed mountains like no one did at the time and few have done in history.

That would have been enough, but it would have been unfair. And Paolo Santolini did not.

In the docufilm there is little about Pantani by bicycle, but enough, certainly less than what one might think. Yet there is everything and more than what we have seen so far in specials and retrospectives on the Romagna champion. It unfolds in the words of family and friends, in that elongated present that still envelops those who loved Marco in one way or another. It is a work of collective memory, a narrating us, which keeps the bicycle inside Cesenatico, Romagna, and which in all this gives the exact dimension of what Marco Pantani was and what the bicycle is. A us. Sociability.

Martha

Sorgente: Marco Pantani was a us