BEING PIPPO
Flanders seems a long way from the hills above Lake Maggiore. It’s the Monday after the World Championships, and Procycling is in northern Piedmont, Italy. Here, a dreamy half hour drive from the Swiss border, lies the childhood home of the time trial maglia iridata. We’re privileged. Filippo Ganna is famed for his big heart and his generous smile, but his private life is his own. He doesn’t do interviews away from the races, and in the normal course of events the family home is off limits. However his mother, Daniela, is friendly and evidently quite persuasive. She’s convinced him to make an exception for Procycling and so here we are.
Ganna keeps on winning big bike races, or doing demolition jobs in order that his team-mates do. Since September 2020, he’s accounted for two world TT titles and six Giro stages - each and every TT, a cracking road stage and a bunch of maglie rosa, and latterly he won a stupefying Olympic gold medal in the team pursuit. There are more wins besides, and it’s fair to state that good things tend to happen when he pins on a number. All this because, quite simply, he allies an exemplary work ethic with outrageous God-given talent. Ganna’s here under sufferance, then, and one suspects he’d like to appear surly and uncooperative. But he doesn’t really know how to be those
