Now that Colbrelli is slowly starting to come to terms with it, right now you can understand how psychologically huge what happened to him wasOn the day of that famous press conference in mid-November, Sonny publicly credited his mental coach.
“It made me understand my worth,” said the Brescia native, featured in the opening photo of Bahrain Victorious, “and that I’m stronger than I thought. I realized that I can do important things even if I'm no longer a rider.. Now I see it this way, maybe tomorrow I'll withdraw into my silences. It's not easy."
Pozzato's intermediary
Paola Pagani He's from Como, but lives in Bergamo. He met Colbrelli in 2019 thanks to Pozzato's intuition, who had collaborated with her around 2013, in one of the most difficult moments of her career. It was Pippo who sense that Sonny was ready for the leap in quality and just needed to clear his head. And so it went. The victories of the tricolor, the European championship and the Roubaix of 2021 made one think that the work was giving excellent results and that the career would be a continuous crescendo, instead, suddenly at the beginning of 2022, everything stopped. The heart and its path.
«It's very hard – explains the mental coach – for a cyclist like Sonny, as for anyone who really reaches the top of their career, to fall abruptly to the ground, for something that has absolutely no influence on him. Sonny obviously had to put his head down on everything he can still do, thanks to the fact that he managed to pull it off. But surviving at the beginning was really difficult. We were planning for 2022 and it was supposed to be a great season. He wanted to reconfirm himself to demonstrate that 2021 had not actually been a fluke.».
This morning we interviewed a 32-year-old rider (Villella, ed.) who was left without a team, and he split hairs to understand who made the mistake and why.
But here it's a little different. The boy who at 32 years old he stops cycling because he doesn't have a team, he can do a sort of analysis on himself, to understand what has been done and what has not workedOr he could investigate the mentality he had that prevented him from achieving results. For Sonny, it's different, because he was doing everything right and had a team. It was about dealing with something he had no control over whatsoever.The boy who quits at 32 may have some responsibility. Maybe he could have competed in a few races and tried harder. Or, if he tried harder, he could start working on his mentality, to be a champion who exploits his talents much more than he did.
What about Sonny?
Sonny hasn't had any problems with his abilities, and that makes everything less manageable. I mean, you have nothing to think about. He went from running normally to almost dying. I remember the race in Spain very well.I was cheering him on TV. I cheered him on, then I walked away, and after half an hour I found myself with messages everywhere about what had happened to him…
How do you deal with the unexpected?
There is no control over certain things that can often happen to us. So we have to be strong enough to get back up again. and to reinvent ourselves on a different path than the previous one. To continue to be the spectacular people that we remain, because Sonny was spectacular as a cyclist and can be spectacular off the bike.It's hard. When you're used to being a champion and your life revolves around cycling, it's hard to give it all up.
So much so that for a while he thought about going back…
Sonny stopped thinking about running again when By now it was clear that they would not give him the go-aheadTo race, you need to be fit. Eriksen plays football, scores goals, and wins matches, but he operates on a much smaller field than cyclists. So it's also understandable that the UCI doesn't agree.
How do you go from preparing for the great classics to training to survive?
It's about managing the mind of an athlete who prepares to win and on the other side of a man who has to get up againFor me it's still a competition, but more difficult: different. It's an unknown competition, in the sense that a person used to competing, knows what the competition is likeHe knows the emotions associated with the race, he knows what it means to win and he knows what it means to lose. But when you find yourself facing something totally unknown, everything becomes more difficult.But since it was a competition, I always told Sonny that this was the most important thing in life. It was about getting up and getting back in the saddle on a different kind of bike.
Is there a lot of work done on motivation?
There is the motivational aspect, but above all a very personal aspect to understand that the person has a value and a talent linked not only to his skill as a rider, but to the person. And those talents can be used in other ways, in other fields.
Are these life dynamics that happen often?
This is a very common case. I tell everyone I work with that "Life happens for us." And so in any case, whether it goes well or badly, it still happens for us.If all goes well, let's celebrate and pop the champagne. If it doesn't go the way we want, we have to find what's good about what happened..
How do you do?
The question I always ask is whether what happened to you was not actually the best thing that could have happened to you, what you really needed. Obviously, when you tell this to someone who was at the top and suddenly finds himself at the foot of the mountain, without even understanding how he managed to slip down, these are not easy questions to accept. But when you stop for a moment and start thinking and recovering, you start to see things in a different perspective. And then you can also get up and reinvent yourself in ways even better than you imagined. Because we don't really know what life has in store for us., but the important thing is to use what life gives us to create the life we want.
At one point Sonny started saying that things could have been much worse…
Sure, absolutely. I've always done it. reflect on the fact that he was taken by the hair anyway, because there were many circumstances that played in his favorBy now it might not even be there anymore. He was rescued, he has a wonderful family and what happened to him happened at the peak of his career.There are so many people still looking for it, so many people still appreciate it. So it's also one of the best times to reinvent yourself. It's not like when you fall and are already forgotten, then it's certainly more difficult. But his journey is still long and he has the legs to do it.
Was it hard to recover?
It was really tiring. Wow, let's put ourselves in his shoes. From afternoon to evening your life changes completelyYou're 32. You're very young. You think you still have 3-4-5 years to do the job you love and adore at the highest levels. And suddenly everything changes for you because of something you don't understand.. But he was very good, absolutely.
