MICHELE SCARPONI

The cycling world was shocked by the tragic and untimely death of Michele Scarponi. We examine his impact and legacy

22 April 2017

An old training partner, Francesco Lasca, used to say the hours would fly by with Michele Scarponi - but that was when Lasca’s friend was alive. Three days on from the tragic collision that ended Scarponi’s life in its 38th year, the cyclist’s father, Giacomo, sat beside his coffin, caressing his cheeks and kissing his forehead for eight hours that seemed like forever.

A few metres away stood an olive tree put there by the members of Scarponi’s fan club. To them it symbolised the land, their land, in which Scarponi was a kind of prophet and also a stoic in any weather, before any ordeal. It had been meant as a tribute to Michele, yet had now come to represent the courage of a family trying to process an inestimable, irreplaceable loss.

Four days later, 7,000 people attended Scarponi’s funeral. Friends, like the former Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini. Fans. Half the Italian gruppo. Others, like Peter Sagan, who knew ‘Scarpo’ as the beating, silly heart of the peloton. Some weeping, like Moreno Moser. Others speechless and inconsolable, like Vincenzo Nibali.

No one who was there will forget the eulogy of Michele’s brother Marco, so different in appearance, with his thick frame, brown beard and quilt of curls, yet so inseparably bound, as he now explained, by the “collective history” of a family and a region built from the same toils, sacrifices, values and strength. That the Scarponis were ‘gente tosta’ - hardy, saltof-the-earth types - everyone knew before Michele arrived on 25 September 1979. Grandfather Marino had been a farmer. Dad, Giacomo, worked on the motorways. Mum, Flavia, had given birth to Marco two years before Michele and would have a third child, Silvia, in 1985.

It was ‘Babbo’, grandfather Marino, who infused Michele with a passion for cycling by gifting him a bike, a blue-celeste Bianchi, on the day of his first communion. Not long after, they were going together to sign him for a local club, Pieralisi in Jesi. Michele’s first race took place on his eighth birthday. A hilltop finish in Tolentino, the ‘Aquillino di Filottrano’, the Baby Eagle of Filottrano, won easily, alone, though not quite in the graceful style of his grandfather’s hero Fausto Coppi, having refused to slip his tiny feet inside the toe straps of his pedals. “The Marche is lucky enough not to exist,” the writer Giancarlo Liuti wrote a few years ago of his and Michele Scarponi’s native region, a poorly drawn oblong with Italy’s Adriatic coastline on one side and its Apennine backbone on the other. Liuti went on to explain that the Marche is one of Italy’s most sphinxlike, heterogeneous territories, and yet he could also have been referring to the region’s lack of history in cycling. Michele Scarponi would one day become the region’s first Giro winner. Before that, as a teenager, he was a big fish in a small pond and rarely stood out or indeed won races at a national level.

The turning point came in 1997, with victory in the Italian national junior championships. Another strong performance in that year’s Worlds might have yielded a medal were it not for a late puncture. By now Scarponi was on the radar of Italy’s top Under-23 teams and ended up joining Zalf-Desiree-Fior, a north-east Italian institution.

Scarponi showed enough promise in his three years with Zalf and one with another nearby amateur team, Site-Frezza di Tezze, to earn a pro deal with Acqua e Sapone in 2002. His most famous team-mate was Mario Cipollini; his room-mate was Roberto Conti, the winner at Alpe d’Huez in the 1994 Tour de France. At the Settimana Lombarda, four months into his neo-pro season, Scarponi won a stage and glimpsed a gilded future. Two months later, he was grovelling through the Giro d’Italia, telling himself how wrong he’d been. Famously, in 1998, Marco Pantani had turned to Conti, then his mountain sherpa, on the steepest slopes of the Passo di Fedaia, otherwise known as the Marmolada, and asked, “When does the Marmolada start?” Hearing Conti’s incredulous response, he had then ridden into the distance to take the maglia rosa.

In 2002 Scarponi glanced across at Conti on the same ramp and asked him not when the Marmolada would start but when it would end. His analysis of the climb later was typically ‘Scarponiano’: “The most terrible climb you could imagine and maybe more terrible than one you can’t imagine.”

That was also the year when Scarponi met his wife, Anna, the friend of a team-mate from his amateur days. A chemistry graduate from Conegliano, deep in the Prosecco vineyards, she later moved with Michele to Filottrano and took a job in a pharmacy in the old town. Michele would pop in to see her every day after training rides, usually after a coffee and ‘due cazzate’ - (espresso) shots and giggles - with the regulars in Bar Wally in Filottrano’s central piazza. They finally married in November 2006. She used to tell him, smiling, that he had six months to grow up. It Scarponi scores his irst professional victory in stage 3 of the 2002 Settimana Ciclistica Lombarda

wasn’t only on the bike that Scarponi became a sort of Peter Pan. “I’m an old man now but I’m generous too: I’m saving the State the price of a pension,” he said.

Really, like everyone else, from day one Anna loved the boyishness that was Michele’s way, his ability to ‘sdrammatizzare’: to bring laughter and perspective to a world that took itself too seriously. One year, at the end of the season, they and their dog, Lamù, jumped into their car and drove to Paris - “on a road trip, like young lovers”. Anna adored art galleries and Michele happily played the role of inquisitive, wisecracking naïf at her side. She once took him to see a Piet Mondrian collection in Rome. That time it was Michele who felt like the expert: the stars of the first Tours he had ever watched, Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond, had worn La Vie Claire jerseys inspired by the Dutch painter.

Growing up he had idolised Gianni Bugno’s arch rival Claudio Chiappucci, then Chiappucci’s arch rival Bugno. In time he would decide that he liked them both - as well as the two Italians’ common nemesis Miguel Indurain. Taking sides was never something that came easily. Filottrano is, after all, an unruly jigsaw of smaller frazioni, hence why for Il Corriere

Adriatico, the local paper, Michele was sometimes the Aquilla di Cantalupo, not Filottrano. When asked, though, Scarponi would just sigh because any sort of tribalism went against his nature. “I find it hard not to be nice to people. It comes naturally because I like to make the people that speak to me happy. It’s the same whether things are going well or not.” After the honeymoon of that first win at the Settimana Lombarda, the harsh realities of life in the pro peloton tested even Scarponi’s knack of seeing only silver linings. He finished 16th in the Giro in 2003, 13th in the Vuelta the same year, won the Peace Race the following summer, but also had to contend with unpaid wages and assorted disappointments on the road. In 2005 he emigrated to Spain and joined Manolo Saiz’s Liberty Seguros team. Saiz handed Scarponi a race programme based around the Giro d’Italia in May; the team’s doctor, Eufemiano Fuentes, gave Scarponi a nickname, ‘Zapatero’, that roughly translated his surname into Spanish, and a calendar scrawled with circles, asterisks and arrows. Midway through Scarponi’s second season with the team, the Spanish Guardia Civil would find the year planner among Fuentes’ files. They also discovered Scarponi’s mobile number in the doctor’s diary. Scarponi came to the 2012 Giro as the defending champion having inherited the 2011 title after Contador’s disquali ication In May 2007, on the same day as Ivan Basso, and having explicitly denied his involvement a few days earlier, Scarponi finally came clean to the Italian Olympic Committee. He was banned from racing until August 2008. On his return with Gianni Savio’s Androni team, Scarponi reflected that he had deserved his punishment and that it had served a valuable life lesson. “At first I didn’t know whether I even wanted to come back, but I’ve realised that I need cycling to be happy,” he said. Speaking later to the journalist who knew him best,

La Gazzetta dello Sport’s Marco Pastonesi, he put it even better: “Some mornings I get lazy and struggle to get up and dressed. But once I’m on my bike, life feels light again.” In the first half of Scarponi’s pro career, he had been outshone by the dimming lights of Italian cycling’s last generation of galácticos. His return coincided with an eclipse that saw Danilo Di Luca, Davide Rebellin, Franco Pellizotti and Riccardo Riccò, among others, disappear, all disgraced, Paolo Bettini retire and others continue or commence their descending cycle. Suddenly, Scarponi became one of Italian cycling’s brightest stars for the first time.

The sport’s audience was also changing. Thanks to social media, in particular, the world beyond Filottrano could finally get to know the harlequin, the loveable jester who, as

Corriere della Sera’s Marco Bonarrigo wrote in an obituary, “would have been a cabaret artist, and a good one at that, had he not made it as a cyclist.” His films with Frankie the macaw became an internet sensation. Scarponi told the American journalist, Andy Hood, that the bird would sometimes fly with him, occasionally pecking on his helmet or power meter, for 15km. “He got comfortable with me and I don’t know if he thinks we belong to the same team because the colour of my Astana jersey is similar to his feathers.”

His regular room-mate at Astana, Davide Malacarne, was part stooge and part scrooge, and therefore another perfect foil. Before every race where they were due to ride together, Scarponi would send

“I find it hard not to be nice to people. It comes naturally because I like to make the people that speak to me happy. It’s the same whether things are going well or not”

It was partly Scarponi’s love of that land that made his stage-win 50km from his home in Camerino at the 2009 TirrenoAdriatico the most cherished of his career

‘Mala’ an almost identical text message: “Can I share a room with you or are you chucking me out?” In races and hotel rooms, the mischief evoked memories of a bygone age, of Dino Zandegù belting out Italian folk songs mid-race in the 1970s, or Gianni Motta eating a plate of spaghetti as he rode to victory in the 1966 Giro. At a race few years ago, a child at the roadside pushed his luck by asking not for Michele’s bidon or racing mitts but his bike. “I can’t give it to you… but you can nick it,” Scarponi told the boy with a wink.

A more prolific collector of friendships than of victories, to Scarponi a fellow pro’s age, language, nationality and experience were all immaterial. “He respected everyone, from the first to the last” confirms Cesare Benedetti of Bora-Hansgrohe. One day in 2012 Benedetti received a text from a number he didn’t recognise. “Ciao, Michele Scarponi here,” it read. “I’m coming to Lake Garda on holiday for a few days and I know you live around there, so I wondered whether you wanted to train together.” Benedetti was as thrilled as he was confused; Scarponi had won the previous year’s Giro, yet here he was asking to train with a rider eight years his junior, who had only ever raced professionally for a modest outfit from Germany.

In the days after his passing, the depth and breadth of Scarponi’s bonds revealed themselves. One of the most touching homages came from the Cofidis rider Luis Ángel Maté, who had ridden with Scarponi for two years at Androni. “With you every banal moment became an adventure. With you, and thanks to you, I learned to become a better person,” Maté wrote on his Facebook page. It was while they were training in Scarponi’s beloved mountains overlooking Jesi, Macerata and, on a good day, the Adriatic, that Angel Maté decided Scarponi was the “William Wallace of the Marche - an icon, a legend.”

Others also saw something deep and elemental in Scarponi’s bond with his terroir. One day, as he and his then Astana team-mate Alessandro Vanotti rode back into Filottrano, close to the fateful spot where it was all to end, Michele swung onto a grass verge, climbed off his bike and stood contemplating his kingdom. “Vano,” Scarponi said, turning from the sumptuous tableau of rolling hills and to his friend. “Now do you understand why I’ll never leave?” It was partly Scarponi’s love of that land that made his stage win in Camerino, 50km from his home, at the 2009 Tirreno-Adriatico the most cherished of his career, more than even the 2011 Giro d’Italia awarded to him after Alberto Contador’s disqualification for doping. A replica of the Trofeo Senza Fine, the Giro’s corkscrew-like trophy, lives among family photos on a cupboard in Scarponi’s lounge, “because it was thanks to the stability they give me that I won.” Nevertheless, deep down, Scarponi never felt that prize was really his. He’d made Giro history as the first winner since the maglia rosa’s introduction in 1931 to have won the race without it gracing his shoulders.

His Giro triumph was diminished for another reason: in 2010 Italian police had recorded meetings between Scarponi and the notorious Michele Ferrari. After leaks in the press, Scarponi drove to Rome in November 2012 to tell the Italian Olympic Committee that, yes, he had consulted Ferrari and that, no, he didn’t know the doctor was banned. Scarponi was suspended for three months.

Since then in Scarponi’s life it had been mainly good news. Michele had a habit of referring to the future as a “science fiction”, perhaps because he was so happy in the present. His five-year old twins, Giacomo and Tommaso, worshipped him and he them. They had a doting uncle, Marco, and an aunt, Silvia, who had declined offers from some of Italy’s best women’s football teams to stay in Filottrano, as much for them as for her ‘other’ job as a pâtissière.

Vincenzo Nibali had won the Tour with Michele in 2014. They had then repeated the heist at the 2016 Giro, with Michele making an even bigger contribution both in the race and the team bus. Like the team’s former press officer, Chris Baldwin, said, “Michele was the straw that stirred the drink.”

As of the third Saturday in April, all that’s left is pain and memories. But what pain and what memories. Scarponi’s long-time manager and friend, Raimondo Scimone, says that the power of the latter at least attenuates the force of the former. “Seeing 7,000 people at his funeral made me realise how many lives he’d touched, what real love there was. I always worried that he wasn’t getting the recognition or respect he deserved, because he wasn’t just a funny face and a nice man but an unbelievable professional. Now I know how much he was loved. That and the hundreds of special memories do bring some comfort, and some strength.”

A little, strong man with a lot of guts, Michele Scarponi must now inspire those he has left in their hardest battle - the fight to accept that the Eagle of Filottrano has flown for the last time. Crossing the line in Camerino: Scarponi takes his most prized stage win in 2009's Tirreno-Adriatico