7 MIN

I don't have many images of my childhood, but they are almost all happy, whether they were with mom or dad, or, more likely, in a fight against my brothers, since I was the one in the middle and got into trouble every time.

We were competitive, and we have been competitive for our entire adolescence.

Competitive and independent, capable of taking on our responsibilities early on.

We often found ourselves at home alone, even when we were little, because mom had to work so hard to support the family.

Now that I look at it with adult eyes, it must not have been easy for her.

But at least we learned to cook, to clean, to take care of each other.

All things whose importance, perhaps, I did not realize at first, but that are useful to me today, as I face the solitude of my job.

Because traveling is beautiful, of course, but when you do it for cycling, you really see very little of the world.

Airports.

Gyms.

A few hotels.

And roads. So many roads.

An infinite number of flags that you can proudly stick on your globe, from Colombia to New Zealand, but few things that you truly feel as yours.

Few experiences that make you feel connected to the place where you are.

Few opportunities to explore yourself through others, and their cultures.

Maybe this was also, in part, what made me an introvert.

After all, you never know what the final goal is of someone who asks you something.

You don't know why you should really say something about yourself.

When I was little I was a hurricane, always on the move, always ready to challenge the boys, especially at the beginning.

I was loud, smiling.

Open.

But then this life pushed me to close myself off a bit, to prevent others from seeing who I really am, from having access to my deepest thoughts.

And it’s only now, in these last few years, that the process is slowly reversing again, and that I am able to show the real Lotte to the outside.

The nice and light-hearted one.

The one who shows herself a little more.

Who finds the desire or the strength to speak up.

Maybe the journey, this going and coming, in and out, has a price to pay.

A price in kilometers, and a price in awareness.

And I have now finished paying off my debt.

When I started pedaling, even in that case, I did it to follow in my brother's footsteps. Nothing more and nothing less.

I didn’t like training, but I loved competing.

The competition gave me a great adrenaline rush.

My mind would jump impatiently from one weekend to the other, waiting for the next race, the next challenge.

It wasn’t until later that I understood what discipline meant.

At the time, competing was enough for me.

I just needed to feel part of the group.

And it didn't matter if I never won against the boys, because the only thing that really mattered was feeling like one of them. Seeing that even though I was a girl, I took my turn at the front, pulling the group.

It's the sense of belonging that made me fall in love with cycling.

That sense of individual goals and, at the same time, of collective suffering, where fatigue makes you brother and sister to everyone.

Then I went to boarding school, a sports boarding school, dedicated to cyclists, and the level started to rise, and the results started to arrive, even though there were only three girls in the whole institute.

We were pioneers, of course.

Especially if I think about the steps forward that have been made in these 10 years.

But we were also just girls, with every right to experience the journey in our own way, and with the boys as our only benchmark.

A path that few had taken, before me.

And a path that I didn't even know if I would be able to actually take, before the government put me under contract, at 18, giving me the opportunity to make cycling a profession.

Who knows if it's the very nature of the path that motivates me the most today.

Who knows if it's precisely because I was among the first, precisely because it was uncertain, precisely because it also depended on forces greater than me, who knows if it's for all these reasons that my main motivation is not wanting to fail.

Who knows if it's for this reason that I feel relief, first of all, when I achieve a great result.

Of course, then there's happiness, that comes.

Personal, family, team.

It gives value to sacrifices.

But the main driver is that deep sense of urgency, that responsibility that I feel, towards the movement, towards the past, towards the country, towards the child that I was, towards others like me, and towards the athletes of the future.

Sometimes it makes you dizzy.

Then I stop thinking about it. And I get back on my bike, I hit the road.

Waiting for one day, maybe, when I decide to stop, I can sit down and put everything into perspective.

And really understand what cycling has left me and the others, medals aside.