Eighty year-old famed bicycle builder Giuseppe Marinoni out on an afternoon long-distance ride in Terrebonne, Quebec, just north of Montreal, on Thursday, April 27, 2017.
Giuseppe Marinoni – master craftsman, champion cyclist, world-class grouch – rolls in from a 75-kilometre bike ride with two younger partners trailing behind. He pulls off his helmet and exposes a head of damp grey hair.
"The wind was very strong. That's normal – Canada is a windy country," the 79-year-old says in the spring chill.
His buddies, both more than a decade his junior, say Mr. Marinoni was uncatchable. "We have to work hard to keep up," says André L'Archevêque, 67. "It's like he's superhuman."
Mr. Marinoni has entered enough feats into life's logbook to allow himself a rest. He has racked up cycling victories, built a cult following as a bike-frame maker and, when he was 75, set the world record for his age group in one of cycling's most prestigious benchmarks, the hour record.
Now, the Quebec grandfather and wild-mushroom enthusiast is setting out to silence the doubters – the youngsters who foolishly try to pass him on rides, skeptics who think there's no fire left in athletes in their sunset years: Mr. Marinoni is training to break the hour record in the 80-to-84-year-old category this summer.
The cycling legend is the first to admit he's a little crazy to try.
"Maybe I need a good psychologist," he says. "But in life, if you don't have a goal, you'll never go far."
He adds, "Of course, I could die. The heart has its limits."
Mr. Marinoni's back is curved now, as if it's been moulded to fit over a set of handlebars. His fingers seem permanently stained with grease from a lifetime building bike frames. But his eyes betray a single-minded focus on winning. Like other older athletes, he's pushing the boundaries of high-level performance.
"When I'm on my bike, I'm ageless," he says at Cycles Marinoni, north of Montreal, after his morning training ride. "I don't feel I'm 80. I push myself to my limits just like I did when I was 20."
The record he's seeking to break sounds deceptively simple: Ride around an indoor track and go as far as you can in 60 minutes. But cyclists compare the challenge to their own Everest, a required milestone for the sport's biggest stars. It's an unforgiving endurance test pitting one cyclist in a race against the clock. British cycling great Bradley Wiggins, who broke the overall record in 2015 with a distance of 54.526 kilometres, called it "torture" and said it was the closest he would come to knowing what it's like to give birth.
"There are no teammates, no tactics, no shelter. There's just an athlete alone on the track," said Michael Hutchinson, a former British professional cyclist who twice attempted – and failed – to break the hour record. "It's just you and the bike."
Mr. Marinoni set the record in the 75-to-79-year-old category in 2012 for riding 35.728 km in one hour. To set the bar in the 80-to-84-year-old group, he will have to beat the current record of 38.657 km.
"I'm in my early 40s, and most cyclists my age would struggle to do that," said Mr. Hutchinson, author of the book The Hour.
(The finest example that there's no age limit on athletic achievement is a Frenchman named Robert Marchand. Last January, Mr. Marchand set the hour cycling record in his age group; he is 105. After riding 22.547 km in an hour, he said all that he wanted to prove was that you could be 105 and still ride a bike. Mr. Marchand, a onetime firefighter and prisoner of war, may have gained some of his fortitude during his time in Canada: As a youth, he worked as a lumberjack in Ontario and as a stud-farm employee in Quebec, both of which he later recalled as back-breaking.)
Mr. Marinoni could have his pick of the newest and sleekest bike for his attempt on Aug. 19 at the Mattamy National Cycling Centre in Milton, Ont. Instead, he's turning to a 39-year-old steel bike he made for Canadian Olympian Jocelyn Lovell, considered the greatest cyclist of his generation. Its white hue has yellowed, the paint is chipped and scuffed, and the metal is exposed where Mr. Lovell rubbed the frame with his shoe on each pedal stroke.
The name on the frame, however, still says Marinoni.
"I delivered it to him at noon," Mr. Marinoni recalls of the day in 1978. "At 4 p.m., he was a Canadian champion."
Mr. Lovell had his career cut short when he was hit by a truck during a training ride in 1983, rendering him a quadriplegic. He returned the winning bike to Mr. Marinoni. Last year, Mr. Lovell died at the age of 65.
"I could use a more high-performance bike. But I want to do it for him. He honoured this bike," Mr. Marinoni says. He rode the bike for his successful 2012 hour record and wouldn't dream of attempting the new goal any other way, he says.
"For me, Lovell was a great friend and a great champion. I'm going to ride it – in his memory."
Along with Mr. Marinoni's mythic name in bikes comes a reputation as a curmudgeon, which he does little to dispel. One day, a customer brought him an expensive bike to have a part fixed; when Mr. Marinoni showed him the repair, the customer said that in any event, he was planning to buy a new bike anyway.
"I took a pair of pliers," Mr. Marinoni recalls, reaching over to his work table and grabbing a pair in a rigorous re-enactment, "and broke the part. I put it back to how it was. He didn't trust me!"
Hard work has never scared Mr. Marinoni, even if he's ready to admit his physical frailties. He reckons he's shrunk about three inches in the past few years. He broke five ribs rolling over a pothole during a riding mishap a few years back. He has lost his sense of smell. Last year, he almost had a catastrophic bike accident after losing his grip on his handlebars while going downhill at 75 km an hour and hitting an obstacle, leading him to finally agree to wear a helmet.
But Mr. Marinoni, who was the subject of the documentary Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame, is undaunted. He's a workhorse, and has been ever since he landed in Canada in the mid-60s to race for the Italian national team, and never left. For a while, he made a living as a tailor – he even sewed suits for Montreal Canadiens players – before discovering his passion: building bikes.
He has made more than 30,000 frames over the years, some of them for Canadian champions such as Tour de France stage winner Steve Bauer, some for everyday devotees who cherish them the way some motorcyclists cherish a Harley. These days you'll still find Mr. Marinoni in his workshop in baggy work pants and protective goggles, wielding a blowtorch like an artist with a paintbrush, sometimes at 5 a.m., sometimes at 9 p.m., sometimes on holidays such as Easter.
"For me, it doesn't feel like I'm working," he says. "It feels like I'm having fun."
Behind the sometimes gruff exterior, friends say, is a man with a mountain-sized heart, known to give cycling shoes to friends in need and put in extra hours to finish a job.
On Thursday, Mr. Marinoni flew off to his native Lombardy region in northern Italy to begin his training in earnest. Though he won't turn 80 until September, he is eligible to compete in the 80-to-84-year-old category because his birthday falls during the race year.
His wife of 50 years, Simone, admits that all her husband's hours pedalling on the road sometimes leave her concerned for his safety. Last year, he logged 12,000 km on his bike, the equivalent of cycling between Montreal and Toronto more than 21 times.
"But he won't slow down," Simone says. "When younger riders say they can't believe he's nearly 80, he says he's only 40 years old in one leg and 40 in the other."
She is philosophical about her husband's time on two wheels. "It's dangerous. Each time he goes out on his bike, I worry," she says. "But if he dies, it will be the death of his dreams – on his bike. For him, that would be the most beautiful death possible."