Almost twenty-seven years have passed, but some days never get old. For Vittorio Serra , a longtime Sardinian cyclist and artisan frame builder, that day was in early 2000, on the coastal road that descends from the southwest of the island towards Pula . Winter sun, a mistral wind at his back, the sea below. And next to him, astride a celeste Bianchi wearing the yellow jersey of Mercatone Uno, was Marco Pantani . "It's a Giro I've relived a thousand times," Serra says today. "Just me and him. Me and the Pirate." Pantani was thirty and two years earlier had won the Giro and the Tour. Serra was forty-two and was enjoying his best season: regional elite cross-country champion, three months earlier he had invented and won the first edition of the Serpilonga, and that same year he would conquer the Iron Bike.
Even before setting off, Pantani's attention turns to Serra's bike, leaning against a wall. It's the Monolite, a carbon frame that Serra had built himself, using prototype molds, between Villacidro and the basement of his house in Sinnai. It weighed seven kilos, at a time when such a weight was almost science fiction. "He lifted it with two fingers, like a feather," Serra recalls. "He put it down, lifted it again, his eyes widened, and said to me, 'Vittorio, what the hell is this? It weighs nothing.' I explained to him that it was carbon, rubber, and little else. When I made it, people around didn't even know where to start."
"He ran his hand over the frame, the undercarriage, the fork, like you'd caress a horse before a race," Serra continues. "Then he tried it for a hundred meters, got off, and looked at me seriously. He told me it wasn't a bike, it was an animal: when you push, it responds immediately, it doesn't waste anything, it seems to climb on its own. And then, in that Romagna voice of his: 'Your bike is beautiful, I want one too!' I replied, laughing, 'I'll make it for you, Pirate. But you'll have to come and get it in Sinnai.' "
Off we go. Curves and climbs follow one another, with the sea as a backdrop. It's a bar-style bet: whoever gets to the top first buys a drink, including coffee and a croissant. But there's total respect, and neither of us really wants to leave the other behind. "Even though," Serra admits, "I would have loved that..."
"Marco started off in his own way," he says. "Standing on the pedals, dancing. He'd sprint, turn around, and taunt me: 'Vittorio, I'm going to make you sweat today!' I hung back, stiff, and as soon as I caught my breath, I said to him with feigned smugness: 'You seem slow... can't you go a bit faster?'"
The reality, he admits, was different. "I could smell the myrtle and mastic, the sea getting smaller and smaller, and the exhaustion gripping my throat. I thought I could taste blood. But there was no way I was going to give up. And I thought: 'Goddamn, this is going so fast.'"
"Halfway up the climb, he started to study me," Serra recalls. "He said, 'You're a tough nut to crack, aren't you? You never give up.' I replied that I'd learned that way, in Sardinia, in the mountains, in the desert, over 24 hours: you never give up."
"For a while, we swapped bikes, just for fun," he continues. "On the Monolith, he flew away. After five hundred meters, he stopped to wait for me, his eyes shining like a child's. He told me that uphill, it was something else: light, rigid, precise. 'Me on one like that, on the Mortirolo…', and he started laughing. Then he insisted he wanted it just like mine ."
"In the last kilometer, we sprinted together, shoulder to shoulder," Serra recounts. "I won by half a wheel, but it was a fake victory, just as friends. He came up, put his hand on my shoulder, and laughed. He told me I was the winner at home, that he'd overtake me on the Mortirolo, and that I'd won thanks in part to that bike."
"Then we sat on the wall, our bikes side by side, like two tired horses after a battle. Only wind, sun, and silence. He wasn't acting like a champion: he was acting like a curious boy, in love with cycling like me. He asked me how I'd made the molds, how I'd applied the resin, how long it had taken me." They descend together, slowly, without challenging each other any more, as the sun sets.
Serra also retained a sense of cycling from that afternoon. "He was cycling the way we like it. To find another like him, I'd have to go back to Coppi: a pure climber, standing on the bike, in a danseuse, with the long gears. Today I see mopeds, always sitting in the saddle: a bore."
Pantani would pass away four years later, on February 14, 2004. “So many years have passed,” says Serra, “but I can still hear his voice: ‘Your bike is beautiful, I want to have one too!’”