No obstacle can stop you as long as the desire to fly is stronger than the fear of falling
– Angelo de Pascalis

ML Magazine is Mirco Lazzari‘s new editorial venture: a journey through photography, sports, culture and colors. Mirco Lazzari is one of the best known and most appreciated photographers of the MotoGP and Superbike World Championships and has taken some of the most famous shots in all of motorsport. We are honored to be able to host his work on our pages. You can read the full edition of ML Magazine at the link below.

Here we are, back on track. Finally.

Few, 15 of us, however, are there. And with pride.

Everything is different, everything is strange.

Kudos, however, to those who have managed to make it possible for us to start again albeit amidst a thousand limitations and precautions but with a new spirit.

It is a bit of a “one for all and all for one” among us photographers, with a collaboration that perhaps has never been seen before. Collaboration aimed at trying to provide everyone, pilots, teams and news outlets with that material to show not only the competitions but also everything that needs to be done to relive great races and sporting moments at this particular moment in history. On the other hand, for each of us, it is also a great experience both professional and personal.

From a certain point of view it is a new challenge for all of us who live with a camera in our hands, a bit of a throwback. It’s stimulation, a desire to be able to “read” races the way they used to. Doing it for you, for others… however, better than others. Yes, because in a world accustomed to having everything and more, speakers that convey to you the emotions of what is happening on the track, video walls that show you and that while with your scooter you go from one corner to another allow you to manage your race, even if only by figuring out how many laps are left to the end. Well, that doesn’t exist now! No videos, no cheering crowd nor boos at the top moments, none of that. You have to brush up on old memories, old experiences not only of titled races but also of minor races to manage yourself as best you can. Look at the clock calculating the length of the competition and toward the end get help from the marshals to know how many laps are left until the end. Organizing and reorganizing on the fly. And on your own, without collaborators to help you or pull your chestnuts out of the fire if you miscalculated a few times. Relying only on your own strengths, yes really strengths, even physical ones, because when the degrees are more than forty and you have to wear the FP2 mask all the time as well as the helmet, long sleeves because after months in which we went outdoors very little even sunscreens help up to a certain point, well yes, the passing years you feel them all!

But then I think of what Angelo Orsi has always told me: “Mirco, always remember that working in the foundry is worse!“

And so okay, it’s true, after all, ours is still the greatest work in the world! When they wrote these words and coupled them with their music, Steppenwolf did not even remotely imagine that they would enter history and the commonplace. It was 1968, and in the United States and around the world quite a few were convinced that a lot of things would soon change. Certainly two. The song “Born to bel wild” became wildly popular because the following year it was included on the soundtrack of the most two-wheeled movie in history, Easy Rider. The same song has served as an additional soundtrack to countless movies, theme songs, commentaries on news reports, travel memories, and you name it. In short, a genuine cliché that has inspired an immense number of variants, which, however, always read like this: “a nice guitar riff, screaming lyrics, easily sung in the chorus”-the right music for the motorcycle!

But is it really the right music for the motorcycle? Years of television storytelling have helped emphasize two distinct phases. The first very rocky, with images of action, overtaking and counter-overtaking, crashes, sparks, unraveling, triumphs, and another more technical-reflexive, meditative one, with slowed-down images as if to reveal the technique by slowing it down or the rider’s concentration, which, another cliché, when concentrating slows down. As opposed to the speed with which the rider’s head thinks on the ride. This is not necessarily how things work or even that motorcycling is just this alternation of rock and soft, screaming and silence. It’s just a comfortable and understandable way of telling the story, however, we can accomplish something revolutionary in our own small way, too, by changing the soundtrack: away with the rock and the screams of the commentator during the last lap of a scorching challenge between Marquez and Dovizioso and in their place we place Boccherini’s Minuet. A probably fatuous but entertaining experiment that makes us realize how much more work needs to be done to improve the storytelling of a sport.

All photographs and content on this page are the property of Mirco Lazzari and are republished here with the consent of the author and his associates.