On conquering – and being conquered by – some of cycling’s greatest climbs at the Maratona dles Dolomites.
Michael Venutolo-Mantovani is a writer, musician, record label owner, and professor of journalism based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This is his third piece for Escape Collective.
The slow roll of tires on tarmac. Chains grinding faithfully against cassettes. Birdsong, at least while you’re still below the treeline. Breath, in and out, in and out. Yours. Theirs. Ours. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a little hush of wind across the back of your neck.
Despite being in the thick of one of the world’s biggest, most prestigious, and most difficult fondos, surrounded on all sides by fanatical cyclists, some who’ve traveled the world to be there, that’s about all you hear as you climb the wall-like roads of the Dolomites.
You stand up sometimes — if for no other reason than to give your ass and your quads a tiny respite — and count your pedal strokes. You set a target number in your mind, rather than a location up the road, and, standing up, you tick them out in the silence of your brain. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” and on and on until you reach whatever that predestined number was. You sit back down, hoping the grade has mellowed out a bit in the twenty-five or fifty or one-hundred times you’ve turned your pedals. It hasn’t.
You focus on the little names and the little national flags printed on the numbers of the riders in front of you. As the fondo reserves half of its 8,000 entries for Italians, most of them are lyrical in the way that only Italian is lyrical. “Catarcione,” “Tagliapietra,” “Della Pergola.” Others are almost funny. You focus on the man named “Zucchini” and the woman named “Panini.” But you have neither breath nor will to laugh. You wonder if anyone behind you is doing the same, focusing on the little name printed on the little number stuck to the back of your jersey, asking themselves how a “Venutolo-Mantovani” ended up in the United States. You wonder if there even is anyone behind you or whether or not you are it, Lanterne Rouge, D.F.L. Dead fucking last. You see a German name like “Wolfgang” beside a little Italian flag and presume he must be from around here, in this rare part of Italy that is almost as much German and Swiss as it is Italian, in Alta Badia, in the Sella Ronda, in South Tyrol.
This post is for paying subscribers only
Subscribe now
Already have an account? Sign in
Did we do a good job with this story?
👍Yep
👎Nope