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Posts tagged ‘cycling’

Jan 1

dino buzzati’s giro d’italia

A deep cut for my cycling friends, this essay reviews Italian playwright Dino Buzzati’s account of the 1949 Giro d’Italia. It originally appeared as a front of the book piece in Paved Magazine, and it fit the offbeat vibe of the place. If you can by chance find a copy of Buzzati’s book, I highly recommend it. A lengthy review essay like this one is so thoroughly a print artefact, it feels out of place here on the internet. But why the hell not? Words, we can put them anywhere we want, really. Also, history is fun. Let’s make more of it.

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In 1949, Corriere della Sera sent Dino Buzzati to write about the Giro d’Italia. His daily reports are collected and translated in The Giro D’Italia: Coppi versus Bartali at the 1919 Tour of Italy. A novelist and playwright, Buzzati had never before followed the race. The editors plainly gave him a free hand, because Buzzati did not cover cycling in any normal sense of the word. Read Buzzati’s dispatches in vain for talk of time gaps and race leaders. The stage winner is rarely the lede: This is no straight-up story about a bike race.

Instead, Buzzati’s daily reports read as a series of dreamy, stream of consciousness essays. He is the master of overwriting with a style so wrong, it’s eventually beautifully right. And through the surface chaos, a consistent set of themes become clear over the course of his twenty dispatches from the Giro. Buzzati meditates on what it means to be Italian at that particular moment in history. He dreams in classical mythology and finds ghosts among the ruins. A bike race runs through it all.

Buzzati’s cycling vacation came at the height of one of the sport’s great rivalries. In 1949 Fausto Coppi had twice won the Giro d’Italia while Gino Bartali had three victories in Italy’s grand tour. Legend has portrayed the two riders as stark opposites, a perspective reinforced by the dramatic race reports of the time. Like a photographer peering through a pinhole, cycling’s writers of the 1940s could see only pieces of the whole, so they filled in the gaps with their own inventions.

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Sep 4

Lost

We get lost a lot. We go out on the bike on the same rides we’ve done hundreds of times, for the past ten years and counting, and still, we get lost.

Maybe it’s because we each ride along in our own particular world. Sometimes, when we get home we talk about what we saw. It’s like we weren’t even on the same ride at all.

There was the black truck stacked full of badass dudes with tats with Call Me Maybe blasting from the stereo. There were tourists dressed in bright colors, reading their guidebooks as they walked blindly off the curb. There was a bird in a tree and a cat slinking through the grass stalking it. There was a woman riding one horse and leading another. There was a man in playing golf in a red sweater. A duck flew by.

You didn’t see that? Not any of it?

And then there’s the clearing where we always meet up. But somehow this time, it didn’t work out. He went up the climb. Then I followed after him. And that’s where I lost him. A car passed behind me as I turned the corner, so he didn’t see me. Tricky, those cars.

We started the ride together, and then we finished it separately, because we get lost a lot, even on the same ride we’ve done a hundred times.

We make the wrong turns and climb at different speeds and somehow lose sight of one another for a moment too long. Maybe there was a bird in the tree or a horse on the road or a woman jogging with a dog. 

You’d think no one ever gets lost in a world of cell phones and signal towers. But that imagines that we all carry our phones. There’s pockets in the back of our jerseys, even, and the phone fits right in, but you have to remember to put it there. Sometimes, it’s easier not to remember.

Phones don’t work in the best places, anyway. The places you want to go, those are the places beyond where the phone can go. You ride right up to the edge and then, you keep going.

And so we just get lost. And we get home and we laugh and we talk about what we saw. Because we ride a bike to see the weird and wondrous things along the way and to share them at the end of the day. While we may ride the same road, we never sees it exactly the same way as anyone else.

We get lost to find ourselves all over again.