If cycling were a hydraulic matter, it would have reigned for a decade. The bicycle is movement and also water, it is pipes and also pressure, it is current and also energy, it is a sport but not a liquid sport. And so Ernesto Bisacchi, known as Stefano, had an intense but brief parabola: like a cloudburst.

Precise from birth (January first, 1952, in Cesenatico), with a railway worker father, a housewife mother, and an older brother nine years his senior, Stefano was six when he received a little bicycle, "a Battistini, not Graziano the rider from La Spezia but Tarquinio the cyclist from Cesenatico, who once gave a bike to the Pope". Stefano was so happy that "I loaded my brother onto the crossbar and took him home, imagine that, me six years old, him fifteen, and yet I managed it". And he was sixteen when he received his first racing bike, "as a junior, in the Riviera Sports Group, where Pio Paganelli treated us as if we were all his sons". His first race coincided with his first victory: "We were racing in Cesena, on a circuit, Paganelli had positioned himself in a curve, where we would slow down, so he could talk to me better, he kept telling me to watch out for that guy over there, that guy was Ivan Benedetti, and then in the sprint I overtook him, and I told Paganelli it would be better for Benedetti to watch out for me". Not just road, but track too: "Paganelli kept telling me that if you want to learn to ride on the road, you must pedal on the track. And I still agree with him now. We trained in the Forlì velodrome. Up, down, inside, outside, together, in contact. And without brakes. Why do they all end up on the ground on the road now? Because no one has ever learned to race on the track".

Stefano, on the bike, had serious intentions: "I emigrated to Tuscany, two years with Casabella in Perignano, one with Mobilieri in Ponsacco. A few victories, many placings. And I continued with the track. They saw me big and strong, one-eighty for eighty-one-eighty-two, they assigned me to pursuit, I learned to push and file, in individual and team events, and it's not a given that someone good in individual is also good in teams, in individual you need regularity, in teams harmony. And it's also a matter of speed".

Then other transfers: in 1974 he returned to Paganelli, in 1975 and 1976 to Niteba in Pesaro. Guido Costa, the track technical commissioner, selected Stefano for both individual and team pursuit: "At the Worlds only in the team event. But it went badly: sixth in 1974, fourth in 1975. On that occasion, Costa made a mistake: with me, Beppe Saronni and Rino De Candido in qualification, there was Cesare Cipollini, whom he then replaced with Orfeo Pizzoferrato. But Cipollini had sixty per hour in his legs, Pizzoferrato, who was very strong in individual, fifty. After the 1975 Worlds in Rocourt, a week at home and then the Mediterranean Games in Algiers. Velodrome, cement track, 400 meters as was used then. Accommodation in a kind of college, university, all together. The first days we ate goat broth... Then, fortunately, food arrived from Italy: pasta, oil, parmesan... and with the parmesan we restored our eyes, and our throat too. The race was not a walk, but almost. Gold in teams ahead of Spain and Greece, gold for Pizzoferrato and silver for me in the individual".

Bisacchi was considered the metronome of the quartet, the director, he set the times, marked the changes, directed the harmony: "I had been selected for a pre-Olympic training for the 1976 Montreal Games. But for some time I was supposed to receive 800,000 lire in reimbursements and prizes. And those 800,000 lire never arrived. They arrived on the last day, when I had already decided to go home. Those 800,000 lire would have been useful, but they wouldn't have changed my life. And so, with a gesture of pride, I told them they could keep them".

The road also brought him disappointment: "Peace Race, the old Prague-Warsaw-Berlin, 14 stages, professionals from the East and amateurs from the West, me in the Italian National team. But something wasn't working. The coach Elio Rimedio, mechanics and masseurs were sitting at one table, us six azzurri at another. They didn't even talk to us. We were treated like meat for the slaughter. The last stage, from Magdeburg to Berlin, 163 kilometers, a breakaway of four, I came back alone, I joined just before entering the track, the bottom had something plastic, it stuck, it braked, I managed to catch up with one, almost two, I was fourth".

Life is a tap: cycling closed, hydraulics began again. "Even now - he admits - at seventy-three years old". If class were water, Ernesto Bisacchi, known as Stefano, would be in history.