Mario Cipillini has been one of the biggest cycling stars of recent decades and one of the most eccentric and, therefore, one of those with the most stories and anecdotes.

One of them was when he was fined on a highway for traveling at 100 kilometers per hour on his bicycle. “That was in 2003. They say they were going 70 km/h, but it was probably 95 or 100. I got behind my mechanic’s Smart on the road that connects Livorno to Pisa. I was listening to music on my Walkman and was following the car when I saw the police stop me. At that moment, they fined me for speeding and reckless driving. Afterward, I got on my bike and continued on my way,” the Italian sprinter explains.

Another of his anecdotes, or rather incident, occurred in the 2000 Vuelta a España with the Spanish cyclist Francisco Cerezo. “That year I didn’t want to go to the Vuelta a España because my father was in a coma and my mother was very distressed. On the fourth stage, the peloton broke up. When I was in the lead group, I brushed against another rider, and he shouted, ‘Son of a bitch!'”

“I immediately tried to settle the score, but he ran away. I didn’t know who he was, he was nobody, but I saw him and the next day I caught him and beat him up. I landed a right hook to his face and knocked him out,” said Cipollini, who was disqualified for that beating of Cerezo, after which he needed three stitches in his face.

Cipollini makes no secret that another of his passions is women, a passion that even made him stop during a race to flirt. “I was forced to participate, I think, in the Coppa Agostoni. On the final circuit, Alessio Di Basco and I separated on the first climb. We went into a house, where we’d been invited to have lunch in the garden, and we saw the group passing by on each lap. The problem was that Di Basco wanted his manager to think that, instead of quitting, he’d gone to train. So we embellished the story, and a journalist wrote a love story. But this time, it wasn’t true,” the Italian cyclist comments.

During a stage of the 1993 Vuelta a España, when he was flirting with a journalist, he had to leave her in the middle of the courtship. “During the 1993 Vuelta a España in San Sebastián, I was giving my full attention to a journalist from the Diario Vasco in the start village. She looked gorgeous, wearing a tight dress. I was totally absorbed in words and thoughts when I heard the radio in a team car saying they had already launched the first attack. I grabbed my bike and shot off to catch up with the group at 60 km/h. 

The day he dies, Mario Cipollini doesn’t want to go to heaven or hell; he wants to go where the women are. “I don’t want to go to heaven or hell; I hope to go where the women are,” says the Italian cyclist.