The French Démare beats Ewan and Cavendish in the sprint and repeats victory in the sixth stage of the Giro d'Italia

Démare, left, launches his bike to win at Scalea. LUCA BETTINI (AFP)

Driving a convertible down the long straights of Calabria by the sea, the Giro journalist wants to be the Pasolini of the long sandy road, the dirty tale of love for bandits of a journey bordering all the seas of Italy, and he fails.

He feels like an impostor.

As Italian as Mark Cavendish, Englishman from Man who flirts in Lambretta, drinks Campari on the terraces of Tuscany, looks for shortcuts and doesn't always win.

As impostor, but ugly, as the coast along which the platoon parades, a narrow line of asphalt between the gray pebble beaches and the green, wild forests, the Byzantine stone houses, the cardboard and concrete hotels, the beaches private.

And it passes through Miletus, where Thales was not born, and at the end of a 20-kilometer straight, the line of the unattainable horizon, sprints to Scalea, the capital of the Costa de los Cedars, where there are no majestic conifers with beautiful pine cones, but small bushes with citrons, the mother of citrus.

Cavendish speeds up, his tongue brushing the wheel, Ewan, who is even smaller than him, goes over him, but, when he already thinks he is the winner, the Australian from the Belgian team, who is not very Italian, beats the bike over the finish line of a Frenchman from Picardy, eyes of a striking blue, cyclamen-colored dress launched by Guarnieri, a giant from Milan.

Is there anything more falsely Italian than Arnaud Démare winning his second consecutive stage in pure Cipollini style, by millimeters?

Diego Rosa leads the way.

Alone, a few minutes in front of the platoon that punishes him for his audacity and denies him shelter.

Rosa, tiny, a climber left to his fate between beaches and mountains on the flattest day, wears blue.

In pink, proud, almost imperial, the leader, Juanpe López, climber, tiny, from Lebrija, and on the road the smells of the countryside, slurry, oil mills, and giant tomato orchards are mixed, the fig trees of white figs, the red onions, and those of the sea, where the fishermen hunt swordfish.

Photo finish of Démare's victory by millimeters over Ewan.

And just as pink makes the leader, red makes the Ferrari, a symbol of Italian imposture.

The image is created.

And the noise.

40 years ago the pimps put the horn of a truck to a 600 and scared the old ladies to death in the narrow streets.

A few days ago, Ferrari released a car with a single six-cylinder engine.

And its engineers say that their greatest concern, the task in which they have invested the most hours of work and talent in collaboration with musicologists and musicians, has been the design of an exhaust pipe that would emit a pure Ferrari sound, that would convert the six in 12 cylinders, that the Ferrari symphony would continue to play when the driver pressed the pedal hard and the horses howled.

When he was younger, when in the Sky he was not the only concern of his bosses, when cycling had a little more imposture, Cavendish only asked his team that in the more or less complicated stages they always leave him a car at hand to be able to drag himself on some insidious slope or take advantage of his slipstream to return to a platoon that wanted to despise him.

In the Quick Step, and the Belgian team in the Giro is him and his circumstances, the car does not stay with him but half the team, which covers him, tows him, protects him, and his Morkov, the Danish brain that pedals so well , always by his side, even to tell him jokes and ensure that he does not disintegrate in stages of straight lines and endless development, arduous, stages as Giro as the one that climbs through Calabria following its long sand road, ending supersonic in Scalea.

And there, despite the fact that all the omens name him, Cavendish collides with another false Italian, but the imposture that rhymes so well with his personality,

, for 14 years now, that of a beardless on a scooter making noise through the Quarrata streets.

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