On the morning of September 2, 1965, four young Italian cyclists lined up in Lasarte, a small town near San Sebastian in the Basque Country of northern Spain. They were there for the UCI Amateur Road World Championship in the 100-kilometre team time trial – a discipline that no longer exists, in which four riders had to cover the distance together, their time taken on the third man across the line. One of those four was my father, Giuseppe Soldi, the son of a miller from the Po Valley flatlands of Lombardy.
He was twenty-four years old, born in the small village of Stagno Lombardo near Cremona, in a world where bicycles were not a sport but a way of life. His father Palmiro had built Giuseppe’s first bicycle by hand from salvaged parts. His first racing jersey – white and celeste, the same colours as Bianchi – had been sewn by the women of the village. From the beginning, cycling was woven into everything around him.
Giuseppe’s path to the world championship was not a straight one. As a young amateur he had shown exceptional promise, winning the prestigious Coppa Dondeo in 1958 and establishing himself as one of the finest time trialists in northern Italy. Then, in 1961, on the eve of what should have been his transition to the professional ranks, a serious accident derailed everything. He spent weeks recovering, losing an entire season.
There was another setback that cost him nearly three years: a mistake over his military service. Instead of being assigned to the Compagnia Atleti di Roma – the unit for elite sportsmen that would have allowed him to continue competing – he ended up in the fire brigade, unable to race. The advice had come from a well-meaning acquaintance who turned out to be wrong. Giuseppe accepted it without complaint and served his time. He was not the kind of man to dwell on what might have been.
When he finally returned to racing, he did so with the Zoppas team from Conegliano – a squad sponsored by the appliance manufacturer whose name would eventually become part of his story. He rebuilt patiently, race by race, until 1965 when everything came together at once. That year he won seven races, finished second fourteen times, and was selected for the national team. He was the best Italian amateur in the country.
The day of the world championship began badly. A violent storm had moved in overnight, and by the time the Italian team lined up – Giuseppe alongside Pietro Guerra, Luciano Dalla Bona, and Mino Denti – the roads were rivers. Rain hammered the Basque hills. The grandstands at the finish line were partially destroyed by the wind.
They rode anyway. The four Italians had trained together for months, developing a rhythm so precise that they moved as a single organism through the rain. When the results came in, Italy had beaten Spain – the favourites, racing on home soil – by twenty-seven seconds. The margin was almost nothing. Everything had been perfect.
There was a moment of confusion at the finish. Officials initially announced Spain as the winners. Then the timing was reviewed, and the announcement came again: Italy had won. Giuseppe Soldi was the world amateur champion in the 100-kilometre team time trial. Standing in the rain, soaked through, he looked at the rainbow jersey in his hands and thought that he could not quite believe it was real.
The following year, Giuseppe turned professional with Bianchi-Mobylette. It was a logical step – he was the Italian amateur champion, and the professional world was the natural next horizon. His directeur sportif was Pinella De Grandi, a figure of authority in Italian cycling. At Milano-Sanremo in 1966, he found himself in a peloton that included a twenty-year-old Belgian named Eddy Merckx. It was one of Merckx’s first major classics. Nobody yet knew what Merckx would become – the Cannibal, the greatest cyclist who ever lived, the man who would redefine what was possible in the sport. On the Turchino Pass, Giuseppe attacked. He opened a gap. Then Merckx came, leading the chase, and the break was neutralised. Merckx won the race. It would be the first of his seven Milano-Sanremo victories.
Giuseppe finished the race and did not complain. That was his way. He was already beginning to understand that the professional world was not quite his world – not because he lacked the ability, but because the compromises it required were not ones he was willing to make. He had grown up at the oratory in Stagno Lombardo, raised with a clear sense of what mattered and what didn’t. The professional peloton of the 1960s was a different place.
Giuseppe Soldi in the Rainbow Jersey (photo courtesy of Luca Soldi)
After his professional season, Giuseppe walked away. He returned to amateur racing – not the under-23 category but the open amateur ranks, where adult non-professional riders competed throughout their lives. Over the following decade, he won more than one hundred and fifty races. He was still extraordinary. He simply chose to be extraordinary in a smaller world.
He went to work at a bank. He married. He raised his family in Cremona. He never stopped cycling – for decades he could be found on the roads of the Po Valley on weekend mornings, still fast, still precise, still the man who had once beaten Spain in a storm. But he did not talk about the world championship. The rainbow jersey went into a drawer, folded between old photographs, and stayed there.
His colleagues at the bank – people who had perhaps never watched a bicycle race in their lives – discovered cycling through him. He would talk about the sport with warmth and knowledge, but always about others, never about himself. I grew up knowing my father had won something important, once, but the details were vague. He preferred it that way.
In 2021, fifty-six years after Lasarte, the Italian Olympic Committee tracked Giuseppe down and awarded him the Collare d’Oro – the highest sporting honour in Italy. He also received the Cavaliere della Repubblica. When the secretary called to tell him, he thought it was a mistake. A secretary at the CONI had to explain that no, they had simply forgotten about cycling for many years, and were now correcting the omission.
He accepted the awards with the same quiet dignity he had always carried. At the ceremony in Milan, he sat in the car afterwards and looked at the Collare d’Oro for a long time. Then he said something I have never forgotten: that he was glad, but that the victory itself had always been enough. He had never needed anyone to confirm it.
Giuseppe Soldi died on July 6th, 2025, in Cremona. He was eighty-four years old. In the final weeks of his life, he made calls to each of his three teammates from that day in Lasarte – Pietro Guerra, Luciano Dalla Bona, and Mino Denti. They were old men now, scattered across northern Italy, but the bond from sixty years earlier had never faded. They spoke for the last time, and then he was gone.
After his death, my son Nicolo and I drove to Lake Como and donated the rainbow jersey to the Museo del Ghisallo – the cycling museum perched above the lake that has been a place of pilgrimage for cyclists for over a century. The director, Carola Gentilin, received it with great care. The jersey that had spent sixty years folded in a drawer is now on display, where people can see it.
I wrote this book because I did not want my father’s story to disappear with him. Not because he was famous – he was not, or at least not in the way the world usually measures fame. But because he was a good man, and because the way he lived seemed to me worth recording. He won the world championship and then went home and worked in a bank for thirty years and raised his children and never asked for anything more. In a world that rewards self-promotion above almost everything else, that kind of life deserves to be remembered.
Donating the 1965 rainbow jersey to the Museo del Ghisallo, 2025
Giuseppe Soldi (December 11th, 1940 – July 6th, 2025) was the 1965 UCI Amateur World Champion in the 100-kilometre team time trial, riding for Italy alongside Pietro Guerra, Luciano Dalla Bona and Mino Denti. He rode professionally for Bianchi-Mobylette in 1966. He was awarded the Cavaliere della Repubblica and the Collare d’Oro (2021). His biography, The Lion of Zoppas, written by his son Luca Soldi, is available on Amazon.
