Ernesto Colnago is 90, Tadej Pogacar 23. Yet this Slovenian boy gave him the only race that (it seems incredible) his bikes had never won: the Tour de France, in 2020 and 2021.
Ernesto was born in Cambiago (Milan) on February 9, 1932. There is no other manufacturer who has made such an impact in the history of cycling. “I used to play balls with bicycles, I was in love, I had to be a farmer but I didn’t want to. I went to night school and went to the workshop in Cambiago to repair plows and bicycles. To keep me there, my parents gave the owners two kilos of yellow flour every week: I learned the trade, soldered. I was 12 years old ”. At 13 he entered as an apprentice at the Gloria bike factory in Milan, in viale Abruzzi 42: he falsifies the age, he says that he is 14 years old. He will stay here until 1952: “The bike saved the people who went to work after the war from misery, and it saved me too: I went from the misery of milk and polenta to the possibility of eating steak. Now it can become the symbol of a new, green, ecological revolution. Because the bicycle is health, does not smoke and costs nothing. By bike you are free, you dream and you see the world “.
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