Beyond birds, attacks up the port and incontinence, cyclists fear going out on the road: naked and helpless, they are an easy target for the clumsy driver.
Davide Rebellin has left this Wednesday, just as Michele Scarponi had left in 2017.
Both, rammed short, while pedaling.
(There is more sad news from unfortunate Italian cyclists who left soon. We remember Fabio Casartelli, who died in the ’95 Tour, at the age of 25, while descending the Col de Portet-d’Aspet. We remember Marco Pantani, found dead on the hotel room in Rimini; we will never know exactly what happened to him; he was 34 years old).
Davide Rebellin was 51 years old, with a cycling career behind him and a professional life ahead of him. The past is there, and the future has been mowed down by a truck whose driver is in search and capture.
The heavy vehicle has appeared on the Regional 11 highway, in the territory of the municipality of Montebello Vicentino, it has rammed the cyclist in a curve, it has passed over him and it has disappeared without even stopping.
The medical services have not been able to do anything to save Rebellin’s life, and the newspaper libraries have gone up in smoke.
Rebellin has been an important cyclist in the international peloton, lucky chain link between the times of Cipollini, Chiapucci, Bugno and Chioccioli, going through Pantani, Ivan Basso and Damiano Cunego, to match Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru.
Although, unlike most of those, Rebellin has always sided with the classics, people like Fondriest, Bettini or Argentin: in 2004, Rebellin won the Amstel Gold Race, the Fleche Wallonne (he managed to win it in three occasions) and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
With stages of the Vuelta and the Giro in his history, and even an eventual pink jersey, only one dark spot hindered his professional career.
You have to go back to the 2008 Beijing Games, the road test that had been held next to the Chinese Wall, with a rising finish in which Samuel Sánchez won, with Rebellin taking silver and then being shaken.
Dispossessed of the podium on account of a hypothetical positive for CERA, third generation epo, a Padua court would end up acquitting him seven years later, restoring his money and good name, restitution that Rebellin had always claimed.
