For Ivan Basso (Liquigas-Cannondale), 2011 can’t come soon enough. The 33-year-old can’t wait to get going, he told La Republicca, “When the season begins I feel the thrill of the first day of school,” he said, “it’s a moment that I look forward to.”
There is one thing that is tempering his excitement though: the loss of the coach and friend who has guided him back to acceptance in the cycling world.
“Were it not for the sad death of Aldo [Sassi],” he said, “a father, a friend who I will always carry in my heart, it would have been a happy winter. After all I came from a good season.”
2010 saw Basso win the second Giro d’Italia of his career, and the first one since his return from his ban for his involvement with Eufemiano Fuentes, which was uncovered during Operación Puerto. He won the 2006 race and was preparing from his assault on the Tour de France when the scandal broke, he was prevented from starting the race but was not suspended until the following May.
“[It was] a liberation,” he said. “The closure of a long journey that lasted five years. It was a great achievement, even if it may have affected the rest of the season.”
“The Tour did not go as I expected,” he explained, “perhaps because there was I had a loss of power. It was an expensive Giro: stages in the rain, after l’Aquila [where a large group, including a number of overall contenders managed to get away in atrocious weather and take almost 13 minutes from the rest] we were always attacking and chasing. I paid for it.”
This does not mean that he thinks it’s impossible to win the Giro-Tour double, a feat not achieved since Marco Pantani in 1998, these days.
“If you don’t try you can’t do it,” he said. “It’s possible to do very well, I’m sure.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Basso is planning a bid to do the double next year though, although he refused to rule it out. He went on record in an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport in November, saying that he would leave the Giro to his teammate Vincenzo Nibali, while he himself would go for the Tour. Things may well have changed though, and even though the Giro promises to be one of the toughest in years, he may well be considering it.
“For now it's all in the planning stages,” he explained. “Great cycling has a lot of climbing, from that you can’t escape. Moreover, they once did stages of 400km in the dirt. These are the tough climbs and the roads that have the most authentic report cards.
“And then if a Giro is hard then it’s the same for everyone.”
Although, at 33, Basso is not one of the youngest riders in the peloton, he says he has no trouble finding motivation, ”because for me, cycling is still my favourite game. It is easy,” he said. Even the sheer effort of covering over 40,000km per year doesn’t bother him: “It's my life,” he added. “I don’t mind."
Because he is apparently enjoying his racing so much, Basso has no intention of retiring from competition any time soon. “I’ll ride until I’m 40 years old,” he said. “Basically, I lost a couple events for doping and I want to get them back.”
“I still wake up in the morning thinking about how I can improve,” he explained. “An athlete understands that there are a lot of signs that tell you if you’ve had enough or not. If you don’t give it all in a test, if you don’t push to the limit in training, if you ease back in the pedals, if you feel the weight of the cold or rain, it means that it is time to stop.
“But that hasn’t happened to me yet,” he added.
“This year I'm better than last season,” he added. “I weigh less and have a lower body fat percentage, the tests confirm it. It will be a tough season, but I am ready for it.”
Even though Roman Kreuziger has departed for Team Astana, and Nibali will be riding for himself in 2011, Basso is not worried about the stength of Liquigas-Cannondale.
“I have still a great team,” he said after the team’s two camps at San Martino di Castrozza and Sicily. “I've already seen a great team spirit.”
After having got together with Sassi at the Mapei institute, Basso has been held up by anti-doping campaigner Sassi as an example of a rider who can win clean. He prefers not to speak about it himself too much though,
“I do not make proclamations,” he said. “I try let my example speak for me. I promised Aldo: Do not betray again. I say it with my heart and I do it.
You see, this is a complex world, you find those who understood and understand, others take more time to understand, and then there is a group apart from those, which I consider useless. There are few, but if you really come to terms with your conscience that you cannot but behave well. According to your conscience, in fact.”