Whirrrr. Moser in Verona, 1984

Early one summer, walking around the Vigorelli Velodrome in Milan, north of the historical Fairground, between the cluttering noise of Viale Teodorico, a saturnal sorcery of workmen, carpenters and commuters, and the long indeterminacy of the French-style boulevard stretching out from the Arco della Pace, I became preoccupied with how cycling and urban development fused so beautifully in this metropolis of southern Europe that one had to turn the volume up to sort out who was doing what. With its wheels spinning against vast expanses of grayish labor, the bicycle is a perfect emblem of Lombardy, building as much in intensity as in stubbornness. This velodrome has always represented, in the history of the city, a Cageian moment: a moment of creative confidence turned elastic and philosophical—musically and even symbolically, and in both cases utterly so.

The Milanese who lives in this area, be it the flâneur of the Sempione Park or a trade organizer for the World Expo, is a conservative at heart, somebody who thinks of art as the process of making something out of nothing. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out that the nearby Monte Stella came out of a heap of rubbish, or that the soccer arena at San Siro is an extraterrestrial, show-business blarney in which the locals believed with no less sincerity and occultism as they did back in the time when they permitted themselves to bet on the races at the horse-track.) The Vigorelli can no longer think of anything worthwhile to fill the silence that so famously crept into its terraces after the smashing of a heavy snowfall; the cracked wooden floors decline to distinguish between performances, while the elephant’s memory of the place rehearses different sessions.

Fausto Coppi’s 1943 successful ride over Maurice Archambaud, a small French cyclist who achieved a world record at the Vigorelli in 1937, was so tiring because of the cold and the mechanical insufficiencies of wartime. The Italian champion fell sick to the floor, unable to experience his victory—a victory of the kind in which Milan first embraced a ringing phone and the pneumatic drill. The hour record sought and finally established by Francesco Moser in the 1980s was rather from the era in which Milanese audio engineering embraced loops and feedback, and the cartoon mechanic of the Moro Elettrica cast his all-seeing eye from the rooftops.

Photograph: Alessandro Zuek Zucchetti

Elliptical and anguished, the Vigorelli is unlike any other stadium that comes to mind. It makes of cycling mood music, and so is most of Milan’s sporting life—mood, not background. (It sustains interests if you make the leap of faith, but if you are not in the mood, don’t even try it.) Its track shrieks, rages, wails, wanders off, disappears, returns and aches, until the last cymbal crashes bring it level to the ground. Like Moser’s style, it is built on long caesuras—think of Miles Davis’s dark magus period—boring in a witty sort of way, very repetitious but with spurts of amazing riffs. The Vigorelli itself and the hour records achieved there, are, perhaps, the best chance to explain how a specialist of the Northern classics and an accomplished time-trialist managed to win a race such as the 1984 Giro d’Italia, an unusually flat course whose final stage was set in Verona.

After winning the 1977 world road racing championship, Francesco Moser developed a powerful and almost casual pedal stroke; yet, for all his intimidation and energy, the heavy build of the body did not make him highly suitable for the mountains. What allowed Moser to become a Giro winner, clinching the prize from the better climbers of the peloton, is a combination of two factors. First, his ability to rely on the swingless tableaux of indoor cycling—where you have to use dissonance to keep your attention, and every moment that seems aimless at first blush takes on depth and interest. Secondly, the masterly avant-garde anomaly of his technical equipment. Despite some controversies surrounding Moser’s attempt to break the hour record on 19 January, 1984, in Mexico City, when he used a radical high-tech bike furnished with aero bars, it’s clear that the rider’s conception opened the door to aerodynamic technology in cycling. There had always been something disembodied and ghoulish, something that went through Moser’s use of full disc wheels, which resembled the consulting room of an optometrist. Sitting under a darkened window, a cool aura of solicitude from the optician around you, and gazing through the lenses inserted in those strange eye-test frames at the letters in the illuminated box, something would be in clear focus one moment, completely blurred the next.

Verona and its handsome Roman gates stood motionless, rising to a generous twenty-five degrees centigrade, a plane-line alley after a long loop. At some time between 12:27, if the riders were averaging thirty-eight kph, and 12:39, clusters of riders would be recognizable for the country bystanders sitting in a ringside of white plastic chairs sipping white wine, the policemen whose orders were genially ignored by the spectators edging into the road, the TV helicopter and motorbike cameras, the chunky red-and-white barriers festooned with pink ads of the Gazzetta dello Sport, and the friends suffering for hours out in the cold to express their fellow-feeling with the riders through minimalist tricolori painted on their cheeks. Even though it is not like the Tour de France, rightly cherished by the French as a jour de fête with its picnics, the grimacing faces and the official T-shirts thrown just before the race, the Giro is still a synaesthesia of helmets and blaring horns—the blue-and-white of Banesto, the gaudy wools of Molteni, or, in Julian Barnes’s words, “the Spanish-omelette colors of Mapei” [1].

Moser is separated by the crowd by the wry reputation of Trentino (whose people routinely avoid clichés that simply aren’t in their vocabulary); his idiosyncratic third-stream conception of the bike takes a final solo that defies the orthodoxies of cycling improvisations, the very conventions he appears to embody. Most winning riders at the Giro rely on resolution and linear phrasing, but Moser is like a jazz musician who continues to switch between acoustic and electric. He bikes as though he doesn’t know how his cycling sculptures will look until they’re done. He plays the changes, the changes never play him. As Gary Giddins notes in an inspired essay on Jim Hall, “electricity is never merely a means of amplification. . . it has its own glowing aura, an exacting integrity, which he manipulates for a broad range of shades and colors” [2]. Moser’s full disc wheels are lenses not made for your eyes: through them, no matter how slow they turn or how few notes are played, flows a wave of chords bleeding into each other and moving in and out of focus, as though barely acquainted with electricity. ♦

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Notes.

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[1] J. Barnes, Something to Declare: Essays on France (New York: Knopf, 2002), p. 93.

[2] G. Giddins, Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 570.