2014 Giro d'Italia stage 17

LOCAL HERO
These days the Veneto is wealthy as never before, but it wasn’t ever thus. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century it suffered massive outward migration to South America, the United States and to the big industrial cities further west.

Back then the sport of cycling, like boxing, was a way out of serfdom. The likes of Learco Guerra and Ottavio Bottecchia, the two great Venetian champions of the 1920s, were cases in point. Bottecchia won the Tour de France in 1923 and 1924, and cycling has been building myths around him ever since. Legend has it that his mum and dad named him Ottavio because he was the eighth child, and because they couldn’t think of any more names. Be that as it may, Bottecchia was too hungry to concern himself with fanciful notions of cycling as a spiritual metaphor. He and his like suffered like dogs not because they thought it "enlightening" (that’s a 21st century conceit), but because they were skint. And skint in 1920s Veneto didn’t mean the absolute horror of having to forego the latest iPhone. Skint meant having to forego your dinner.

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