Bella Figura pt.2

Bella Figura

With the Giro due to start in just a few days, this seems as good a time as any to say that I love Italy -- and the Italians.

Some of this affection was passed on by my Father -- a fellow cyclist and lifelong admirer of Italian food, wine and music.  He took me -- as a small boy -- to Naples, a city which -- twenty years earlier -- he and his RAF colleagues had enthusiastically attempted to flatten, then fallen in love with.

Ever since, I've shared his love of the country memorably characterised by Dave Stohler's Dad in Breaking Away as one where "the men shave their legs, but the women don't shave theirs."

I admire Italian design and their passion for the really important things in life -- like cycling.

Across thirty years of velo-obsessiveness, most of my bikes have been Italian, running on Italian hardware.  

But one thing which has begun to grate a little recently is the Italian insistence on their innate superiority in dress sense.   Certainly there was a time when Italians -- especially Italian men --were better dressed than their fellow Europeans, but I think that may have passed.

Filippo Pozzato is at it again in this month's Cycle Sport -- a man possessed  by the worst peloton hairdo since Laurent Brochard, and wearing a leather jacket he appears to have borrowed from a Neapolitan pimp -- lectures other riders on their clothing deficiencies.  Most of these alleged deficiencies -- he claims -- are because the riders in question are not Italian, and therefore not blessed with innate style.

His argument is weakened slightly by appearing in the same issue as Dave Millar - a man with a real sense of style, and no need to resort to iffy perms and giant designer logos.

And weakened further by these pictures -- admittedly of two of my favourite cyclists of all time. Separated by forty years, but united by a shared inability to look in the mirror before going out.

Not everything Italian is automatically stylish. Enjoy the Giro.

  

Maynard Hershon

I've been on this Interweb malarkey for a good few years now;  long enough that I was once a number not a name in the original Compuserve "community".  In fact,  it was while taking part in a very lo-tech Fantasy Tour De France on a Compuserve forum in the early nineties that I first realised there were people in this world even sadder than me.

But it wasn't until this week that I realised that the great Maynard Hershon had a blog.  Maynard's books "Half-Wheel Hell" and "Tales from the Bike Shop" are now out of print, although I suspect an E-Bay or Amazon search could turn up a copy,  but much of his excellent writing has been revised and reprinted in digital form.

I first came across Maynard in the mid-Eighties, when he wrote a column for the US cycle racing magazine Winning.  

This was long before Procycling and Cycle Sport, so UK bikies were stuck with the dull and parochial Comic and not much else.  During the Giro, Paolo Garbini would let us sniff his Gazetta at his shop in Great Pulteney Street, and I would buy L'Equipe during the Tour to look at the pictures and brush up my schoolboy French.

So Winning came as a breath of fresh air.   True, you had to wade through pages of unnecessary guff about obscure mid-Western crits, and its Grand Tour coverage was inevitably tilted towards LeMond or the 7-Eleven squad - but at least it had good colour pictures and intelligent writing.

And Maynard Hershon -- and his folksy, quirky monthly column.  Tales of old-school mechanics, mid-week races and life viewed through the uniquely twisted prism of a cycling obsessive.  Imagine Prairie Home Companion set in a dusty bike shop, with Garrison Keillor in a faded, celeste Bianchi jersey.  

Sometimes the stories were just too folksy, too Waltons for UK taste -- but most of the time he set a standard for thoughtful writing the rest of us can only aspire to.  Maynard was by all accounts a useful racer in his time as well, and an official motorbike rider at several US events, including a spell piloting one of the yellow Service Des Courses Mavic motos.

Bizarrely, a short-lived UK edition of Winning was published -- with a few time trial results stuck in among the stories of the Coors Classic and, unforgivably, Maynard's column was clumsily rewritten in a hopeless attempt to make it sound British ("Last weekend, I came across a dead coyote by the side of the old fire-road in the hills above Milton Keynes").

Not long after, Winning itself folded and was absorbed into VeloNews, to which Maynard still occasionally contributes.

Anyway, stop reading this and go and read his blog instead.