THE IRON SERGEANT
The scene: a hotel car park in the little Tuscan seaside town of Donoratico. It’s a cold winter day early in 1995 and the MG-Technogym team riders are milling around getting ready for a long ride inland to Volterra as part of their pre-season training camp. With temperatures not far above zero, the riders are muffled up in all the kit they can muster, and one, Luca Scinto, is wearing his favourite woolly headband. It neatly keeps his ears covered against the spring chill.
There is just one problem with the headband. It isn’t team issue. The direttore sportivo, Giancarlo Ferretti, notices. He isn’t happy and instructs Scinto to take it off. Scinto isn’t happy and refuses. The pair have a brief stand-off in the carpark. “Ferron” won’t let Scinto leave if he’s wearing it and eventually the rider gives best, takes off the offending article and away the riders head for their stint among the olive groves and renaissance hill towns.
It would be nice to think that Ferretti was simply playing the role of the hardcore traditionalist who takes no comeback from his riders in order to impress an English journalist and photographer who happened to be there. I don’t think he was. This was pure Ferretti: the hardest direttore sportivo in 1990s cycling, the man who ran the tightest of ships. By the time he retired in 2011, ‘the Iron Sergeant’ was known for one thing: he had put teams on the road that made a mark in
