Last Sunday, on the day of the Milanese closure of the Tour of Italy, among the collateral events a public cycle ride was planned: Among the many participants, one was the most honored, a gentleman almost in his seventies, but who has lost none of his old charisma, which had made him one of the most loved champions regardless of the results: Giovanbattista Baronchelli.
«It had been exactly one year, 7 months and 15 days since I had been on a bike», he says, almost as if the distance from the two wheels was a sentence and perhaps it was a little, after closing his bike shop in Arzago d'Adda that he ran for a very long time with his brother Gaetano, the same one who shared his competitive activity: «We closed on October 25, 2019, just before the pandemic broke out.We were supposed to retire, but we almost regretted it given what happened and the boom in the cycling market."
Regret is an integral part of his life, even when thinking back to his career: «I fought against great champions, I was second in my first Giro d'Italia, making a certain Eddy tremble Merckx and second in a World Championship behind Bernard Hinault, but he's always second, who remembers? In cycling, it's who wins that counts..."
Remembering Lombardy
If asked what his best memories are, Baronchelli will not mention those exceptional results: «No, they are linked to Tour of Lombardy which I won twice, the second time arriving alone near the Duomo. For a Lombard, the "classic of dead leaves" is everything, doing it in front of the Duomo is unique, a dream come true."
Few people know, however, that Baronchelli, born in 1953, with 58 career victories, was a pioneer: if he had raced now, he would have been someone like VDP, Pidcock, Van Aert, ready to move from one discipline to another: «I've always liked off-roading: I used to do cyclocross in the winter and when I was about to end my career, the mountain bike trend started to spreadI found it much more fun than road cycling, and it was also an important part of the shop's sales, so I started doing it and a team formed around me that grew to over 120 members."
Second career in MTB
Over the years (and there have been many, a true second competitive career that lasted even longer than the first) Baronchelli has collected an infinite series of victories in MTB, becoming an authentic icon of theBold, but those successes have a different flavour, it's as if he was stealing something from someone: «I trained just a couple of times a week, leaving at 5 in the morning. I went there more to hang out with friends and meet customers from the store. I didn't care about winning, I cared about being there...».
This versatility has remained in his blood and allows him to look at current cycling with different eyes: "Mastery of the vehicle is fundamental, I was sorry not to have been able to do the track, it would have been very useful. Today, for example, evenepoel he is the greatest talent in existence, but pays for the total lack of control of the vehicleAt the Lombardia, on that left-hand bend, he would have leaned over to avoid the wall. At the Giro, they had crashed in front of him, but he panicked and ended up hitting the guardrail. In that split second, you have to have the composure to understand that it's better to lean over than to go straight.
What should the Belgian do then? "Its leaders should address the problem, make him do a whole year of MTB, intensively, without expecting any results, because he's twenty years old and can still learn a lot. So he would also lose that unconscious fear that remained from that cursed dayBut are they willing to make such an investment? That didn't happen with me..."
The lack of patience of the managers
Let's go back in time…: «A month after the '74 Giro, the one of the challenge with Merckx, I fell and broke my humerus in three places. I had to undergo three operations. I should have started again slowly, but at the end Scic They didn't agree: I started '75 by winning the Laigueglia and a stage in Sardinia, but I arrived at the Giro exhausted and at the end I also caught hepatitis. I had asked too much of my body and it presented me with the bill».
Cycling today, so diverse and encompassing so many disciplines, is a world he greatly enjoys, but in Italy it's hard to keep up: "The lack of sponsors is the whole problem. In my day, all the greats, Merckx included, rode for Italian teams, now Italians go abroad to be domestiques. The problem is that there are no companies that can invest in cycling, the economic crisis in our country is still being felt very much. But seeing people like Caruso e Moscon I just can't stand those who run for others..."
