MILAN (ITALPRESS) – “My dad had a scientific approach to sport. Back in the day it was written that ‘Coppi was twenty years ahead of the pack’: this as a mental approach, physical, preparation, way of racing, clothing. They say he is the one who invented modern cycling.” This was said by Faustino Coppi, son of Italian cycling legend Fausto Coppi, when interviewed by Marco Klinger, for Medicina Top, a TV format of the Italpress news agency. “I remember several years ago I went to the arrival of the Tour in Paris and was taken to the offices where there were all the photos of the champions who won the Tour at least three times: there was also my dad who won only two, they told me ‘Coppi is Coppi’, he had that kind of consideration – he recounted on the ‘Championissimò – In his incredible career he also had a fair amount of bad luck, I even remember the fracture of his femur and several accidents. In my memories as a child there is him on a stretcher who had to stand still – he recalled – There were certainly not the techniques of now at the medical level and then it was not even easy to resume training, they were heroic times.” And on his mother Giulia Occhini, nicknamed the “White Lady”: “Despite themselves, they ended up a little too often in the crosshairs of the press. For the times that there were and the mentality of the time, they had the courage to make a decision that swept them up in what I define in quotes as a scandal,” Faustino Coppi pointed out, retracing the well-known affair, also judicial, that the couple was forced to endure. “I can’t say anything because I myself was born from their union, growing up then you certainly have this desire to know and you ask yourself some questions. “Times have passed, techniques and bikes have changed, but if he could have raced with the champions of now, even Pogacar would have had a hard time,” he added, “My father would have given the current champions a run for their money, also because he had some great rivals back then. From his memories also came a book, “Another Story of Fausto Coppi,” written together with French writer Salvatore Lombardo, an imaginary dialogue that accompanies the son to the meeting with his father-legend: “I have no memories of him on the bike, but not a day goes by that there is not someone who tells me about some of his feats or victories,” he explained, “I wrote this book with Salvatore Lombardo: initially with all the books they wrote about my dad I thought ‘What more can I say?’ Starting from here, we wrote a book in which I brought out things that I might have wanted to keep to myself, those things that I wanted to tell my dad and couldn’t tell him.” My only regret? Being left out of the world of cycling, since he passed away when I was little,” he concluded, “Probably with him by my side I would have been in the world of cycling, which is a great world, it would have been a good thing.
– photo taken from Top Medicine video -(ITALPRESS).
