Fabio Marzaglia worked for six years as a press officer for Gianni Savio's teams, today he is the director of Il Biellese and wanted to share his memory of the Turin-based manager.

There is a trait of Gianni Savio that emerges in the countless memories of these hours. Intense, as he always was in an adventure that to make it last like this on the scene for forty years, one had to have something more. Intense, like always, as a man who lived with cycling and for cycling, with people and for people.

The greetings, even the funeral ones, that social media now make public, unlike the intimate thoughts once entrusted closed in an envelope to be sent to the family, are the expression of what he was and what he did. A man, overwhelmed by a damn passion, as he loved to call it, who enjoyed the attention, affection, and love of people. Those same people who today remember a handshake of his, display a photo, ah the photos (moreover, in many of those published these hours it's like I'm seeing from the other side of the lens), boast a chat, wave an autograph, bring to mind a phone call or a simple smile. Yes, people, especially those of cycling, were his adrenaline. For people, one had to show respect in every race, for people one had to put on a show, for people one had to be there.

Gianni Savio was an incurable optimist who, to tell his story, a book would not be enough, which in life he would never have tolerated because it would have been a bit like looking back for someone always used to looking forward.

Today I remember him not because I knew him, but because I lived him. Six years as a press officer for his team (and Marco Bellini's, as he never failed to say). From that lunch at Birilli in Turin, because Gianni had places he far preferred to others, up to a Giro dell'Appennino, because even in races he had some that were unmissable.

And if for Manzoni it was from the Manzanarre to the Rhine, from the Alps to the Pyramids, for us it was from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic, from Mortirolo to Izoard. He never lived in exile like Napoleon, although from the stories keeping him out of the Giro on some occasions became a bit like an exile, far from his race, his audience, his team car.

I could tell kilometers of anecdotes, like those spent in the car, lived from the privileged seat of command. Because if the masseur knew everything about the rider, as a somewhat unconventional press officer with Gianni, I knew and felt almost everything. It was an honor and a school from that point of view. He would respond to everyone, whether it was the prime minister from who knows where or an old fan to whom he had given his number. He would stop at every corner, at every whisper of his name, which quite proud him. He was careful to write to anyone. More than anything, this gives an idea of why and how he was considered a gentleman, a gentleman from distant times. The distant lands, instead, he had thought of discovering them, going to South America to seek cycling when at most others there, if it had to be a sport, thought about football. That South America always in his heart, even when over the years he had started going there less. There he was a kind of cycling god with his "un saludo muy cordial a toda l'aficiones" that entered houses and inns with radio waves like a mantra.

One day he told me that he considered himself lucky. He explained: "For the wonderful family I have". About luck at work, in cycling, he had never made a mystery of that either, calling it the ability to seize opportunities. In fact, he seized opportunities, after seeking and cultivating them. He had intuitions. I was daily struck by the courage of a man who seemed to never want to know about going to sleep. One of those to debunk myths and legends, because he far preferred the more Latin hours of a lunch at two in the afternoon to "the morning has gold in its mouth".

Yes, how many lunches, how many dinners, how many snacks, how many coffees. A highlander who jumped from a bus to a meeting to a podium with the team. From an airport to a ski lift.

I knew the general manager, but above all the man. With his rituals and habits. I had learned that after Laigueglia, not even the time to stop in the queue in Spotorno, and we had already made the classification of the Coppa Italia, that damn Coppa Italia. I had learned to know his childhood and family friend Cico, I had learned to listen without hearing the punctual and unavoidable calls to his daughters, rigorously greeted with the nicknames they had carried since childhood in a perpetual motion of affection, and to his wife, forever intimate in the cabin, the "beautiful Pablita". "You see, I've always been away, I owe her so much for raising our daughters so well. I tried to never make them lack anything," he would explain to me, talking about phone calls home while he was on the other side of the world.

We went everywhere: to Rome for an honor lap or to Albese for an evening about cycling with the same desire, the same attitude, the same wish to be there. We went to the Giro as protagonists and to the Tour as spectators. We wore out the soles of our shoes at the finishes of half of Italy, whether it was forty degrees or torrential rain. Because for that damn passion, there were no borders or limits, not even those the team doctor would advise him about, more out of the Hippocratic oath than the idea of being able to slow him down in something. We signed riders in a basement behind the Alps, we imagined escapes and attacks. We, in a plural that certainly makes me proud, giving me a strong sense of having been able to live something well beyond his beloved press releases that I had started writing hot, very hot, with more or less convincing stops at the highway restaurant or the makeshift lay-by because we had to "go out immediately". We lived victories and defeats, strokes of genius and setbacks, like that summer signing that with Spanish drones seemed to fly into the future and instead made dreams crash. We would make ritual stops, like in a race, from savior Pino Buda, from Bepi Bigolin or Diego Turato, from Mario Androni or Anna Salice, from Lauretana and Miche. For a photo that was a press note, for a contract that was lifeblood for the team.

I hold tight to the habits (I could have ordered him dinner or coffee his way at the counter) and also the anger, the waiting, and our everything with the team, with him, Marco (Bellini) and Giovanni (Ellena) more than others. I hold tight to everything from a beautiful, very beautiful, extremely intense period where you would suddenly find yourself in Pieve di Cadore getting in the car with him and racing to Paris in one night to hug Egan Bernal in yellow. Hard to forget. Impossible to relive.

He was never a king, Gianni Savio, but a Prince, with a capital P, yes. The nickname given to him by Pier Bergonzi, for which I believe he would have made a monument, was his for style (I think I saw him without a jacket only once, but still in a shirt, for about twenty minutes and no more), grace and savoir-faire. Something I rarely saw or heard him lose. When it happened, he was right though. Because like everyone, he might have had some flaws, but he was honest. His word was his bond. And he held that above everything.

As many have remembered, he was the man who gave an opportunity. Often the first, to a masseur, a mechanic, a rider. To me (at least fifty percent). And often the second, of rebirth.

Now it's all over, like the last stage of a great Giro. But unfortunately without another to follow. But only all those past to remember. It's sad, simply sad thinking about someone who on the phone, whether it was Ferragosto or Christmas, noon or midnight from the other side of the world, never failed to have a ringing, lively, and determined voice.

I believe this river of testimonies and affection would not move him, but it would deeply touch him. Surely. And very much. Quoting him, I would tell him that one didn't need to be Einstein to imagine it. Because there will never be another Gianni Savio. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. I'm sure he would smile.