Fresco come una rosa / Fresh as a rose
Richard Abraham on fatigue and freshness as the Giro d'Italia reaches the end of the second week
by Richard Abraham
Daniel mentioned something when he chatted with Larry Warbasse ahead of a Giro d’Italia stage the other day: fresco come una rosa, an Italian idiom that perhaps best translates into English as ‘fresh as a daisy’.
Struck by the neatness of citing it at the Giro d’Italia, I looked it up and discovered that, inadvertently or otherwise, Daniel also seems to have referenced a popular Italian internet meme.
Before continuing, I will say that I think a meme loses much of its potency as soon as it has to be explained, but I’m going to explain it anyway. Here goes. Young people, look away now:
The original source video is a clip from an Italian news report. The setting is a night club. It’s got the vibe of a Sunday night – there is far too much space on the dancefloor – and a TV reporter from Rai 2 is interviewing late night clubbers. One man – and his frighteningly wide eyes and grin both suggest this man likes to party – explains that he has to be up at 7.30 in the morning. He is already wearing his suit and shirt.
‘And how do you get to work?’ the reporter asks.
‘How do I get to work? Fresco come una rosa!’
Fresh as a daisy! He claps and grins and stares back.
It’s curiously compelling. Replay. It is weird in an uncanny valley kind of way. Replay. The man has remarkable eyebrows. Replay. Who has eyebrows like that? Replay. What year was this even filmed? Replay. Before I knew it, I’d watched the thing 20 times.
Such is life as a freelancer in the 21st Century.
If I were on the Giro, it’s the sort of GIF you’d send each other on WhatsApp as the days tick forward to week three of a Grand Tour. Don’t let me speak for Daniel and Brian here, but in my experience – both as a reporter on Grand Tours and as a guide on multi-week bike trips – those well-intentioned habits start to die off as the fatigue sets in.
Consumption of caffeine begins to increase. Laundry or the lack of it becomes an expanding concern. Detritus starts to build up in the crevices of the vehicle – even the fastidious tidier will pick up various freebies or things that might be useful later on but never are. One always buys awkward souvenirs. Tadej Pogačar meanwhile has run out of space on the front window of the team bus for more of those cuddly Giro mascot wolves and is shoving new members of the pack in cupboards and air vents and fridges and teammates’ rucksacks. Probably.
(Fun fact, which you may remember if you were listening to The Cycling Podcast’s Giro coverage in 2016, the aforementioned Lupo Wolfie, despite lacking in my opinion the zany charisma of its predecessors Girbecco the ibex or Ghiro the sinister dormouse, was banned from France that year).
Of course the double entendre of the fresh as a rose idiom in a cycling context is that rosa is the name of the jersey, the race leader, and the particular irony now is that nobody is feeling fresh on stage 13. The best rider is the least tired. Maybe that’s Pogačar. Maybe it’s not. We’ll see. In my hunt for more metaphors, the first roses of the year are out in my garden and there’s one plant that has popped up from nowhere with one single flower. It bloomed at the start of May and it’s starting to look a little ragged. I’m not sure it will last another nine stages. Half the yellow roses didn’t. There’s an illness going round, you know.
This is the sole flower that matches the specific colour of the Giro maglia rosa, that warm dusty pink with hints of terracotta and strawberry ice cream inspired by the pink pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport. I learned this week that the UK used to have its own spectrum of sports papers printed on coloured paper. These were issued as quickly as possible following the full-time whistles of the Saturday 3pm kick-offs across the country in order to furnish the match goers with pub conversation as they streamed out of the terraces. Most ceased publication in the late 20th Century, although some live on (in name at least) in podcasts or blogs.
There was the Pink’Un, the Green’Un, and also Sporting Buff, all so named because of the colour of their paper. What would the buff jersey look like? It could be great, so long as the designer could safely navigate the treacherous waters of Burberry and Footon-Servetto.
(There’s room for a whimsical interjection from Lionel, a relic of the faded print media here: The Pink’Uns and Green’Uns were printed on coloured paper, like La Gazzetta dello Sport and L’Equipe, partly because coloured paper was cheaper than bleached paper. The Saturday evening editions were written and printed rapidly and distributed as they came off the press. Early editions contained half-time scores and match reports because it was quicker to have the printing and distribution process up and running rather than wait until all the matches were over to start printing. Anyway, the papers started dying out in the early 2000s as the internet rendered half-time match reports even less relevant. The last major one to go was Portsmouth’s Sports Mail, which ceased in 2022.)
Pink however seems fitting for the Giro. Bright, evocative, romantic, childlike, nostalgic, fresh; just as yellow is the bright sunflower ball at the centre of the cycling system and red is the burning heat of Spain in late summer.
This Giro, despite entering the neither-here-nor-there middle days of a Grand Tour, is still fresh as a rose. It is still delivering brilliant stages, none less so than Julian Alaphilippe’s victory yesterday on stage 12.
Injured throughout 2022, winless since last June, berated in public by his boss, luckless and injured again in the spring, second on stage six last week feeling the fatigue of over 400km in the breakaway in this year’s Giro already. Maybe Alaphilippe was out partying too much. Maybe not. Who knows and who cares? He turned up at work again and delivered. Fresco come una rosa.
The Girovagando case from DVine Cellars
The 2024 Girovagando case of six wines, curated by our friends at DVine Cellars, is available to buy now.
Stage 13 of our Girovagando coverage will be on air tonight. Join Daniel and Brian in Italy as they recap a stage for the sprinters (almost certainly). The 11.01 Cappuccino will be back on Monday with whimsical tales of rest days past.
A big thank you to MAAP for supporting The Cycling Podcast. Check out the full range of clothing to make you look the part on, and off, the bike at maap.cc
Nice words Richard, I liked you tying 3 very different things (The Giro, a nightclub goer and your garden) together.
Fantastic piece of writing! More please!