News
Pino's Thoughts On The Pink Jersey
The 31-year old from Osio Sotto near Bergamo, nick-named “Pino,” is one of the few riders in the peloton with a university degree - and his engineering mind is obvious in his keen scientific interest in crunching training data and following new training techniques.
Outside of cycling, Marco Pinotti’s other great love is writing. For the past two years, he's been contributing daily articles to his local regional paper "L'Eco di Bergamo", where he gives the Tifosi an insider’s perspective on cycling. Realizing he night be a bit late filing his column on Friday May 18, when he slipped on the pink jersey for the first time, he was quick to get onto the phone and apologize to his editor.
Respecting the unwritten rules
Pinotti won a lot of praise over the following weekend for allowing his breakaway companion, Luis Felipe Laverde Jimenez, to win stage six uncontested - "A gesture from another cycling era“ judged “La Gazzetta dello Sport".
But Pinotti knows that there are unwritten rules in cycling that must be observed. "I have never won a Giro stage, but there exists these unwritten rules in cycling that I wanted to respect," continued Pinotti. "One rule says that, in certain cases, you divide the stage and the jersey. This was one of those cases; the stage to Laverde and the maglia to me." Pinotti and all the competitors for T-Mobile ride the Giant TCR Advanced Team T-Mobile bicycle.
Pinotti, who represents the riders on the board of the Italian cycling federation, is a firm believer in T-Mobile hard-line stance against doping. “I would have never joined T-Mobile if it wasn't for this change of policy," he explained. "Their ideas are clear and direct. The team gives us the best instruments for performing in cycling without using banned substances.
Pinotti's strong stance and clean image has even attracted praise from UCI president Pat McQuaid: "He's been very brave and I completely agree with him," McQuaid said on Saturday, May 18.
25 May 2007