Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Giovanni Sala es," obviously frightened the hell out of him at the time. "I went straight off the end of a fast track into a dried-up riverbed," he said. "I don't know how I managed it, but somehow the bike bounced off every rock before I ended up back on the road again." 7J@ 'f1DD5[Jf)rIJrB 't!@f!!J @O@[Jf)9f] rfIrJD@f§!l @[J)@f!!J'f1 Giovanni Sala 1. Sala is a huge music lover. Need proof? Well. he has speakers wired into each and every room in his apartment Sunny Delight (including the bathroom) from a sizable music system in his living room. With British artists Pink Floyd, Sting, Rod Stewart, Elton John and the Beatles among the top few CDs in his collection, he reckons that English radio is much better than Italian. With our meal finished, and with not a cloud in the sky, Sala decides it's time to head back to his apartment via the KTM Italy workshop, where he picks up the LCa he rode in this year's Dakar Rally. Taking me first on a tour of his beautiful hometown of Bergamo, a town of which he's clearly very proud, Sala explains that, due to his busy time schedule, he's probably explored more of London than he has of Bergamo in the last 10 years. With the whistle-stop tour of the "old city" over, we head back to his apartment. Inside his modestly sized home above the family-owned shop in which he once worked are a mass of travel souvenirs, most of them from Africa. With only three of his five World Championship-winning certificates adorning his living-room wall (showing off, he tells me, isn't his thing), the rest of his home has a tidy but lived-in feel to it, with no obvious signs of children or a female companion. Chatting openly about how the life of a professional motorcycle rider doesn't gel well with the dating game, Sala's lifestyle has clearly left little time to meet Miss Right. Stepping into his garage is like stepping back in time. Buried deep beneath his apartment, the mass of old tires, ISDE race bibs, and half-empty tins of oil makes the place look more like a museum than a workshop, but as he puts his hand to everything he needs within a matter of seconds, the mass of stuff does begins to look like it's in some sort of order. Dragging out his training bike, a 250cc KTM thumper, to accompany the mighty LCa on our afternoon excursion, we suit up and head off - he on the biggest of KTM's off-road range, and me on the smallest. 2. He doesn't wear a watch - ever. Hard as it is to believe for someone who eams his living from a sport that requires accurate timekeeping, he gets by simply asking what the time is. He's also not too bothered if he's a minute or two late when meeting people. He does carry a watch on his bikes, though. 3. Despite both Italians and professional sportsmen being famed for their use of mobile telephones, Sala doesn't use one. Having only recently purchased one at KTM's request - the Austrian marque asked him to get one so that if he had any problems during the Dakar while traveling down through Spain en route to North Africa, they'd be able to contact each other - Gio leaves it at home and refuses to use it. 4. With only the occasional mix-up with the words "hungry" and "angry," Sala speaks near-perfect English. After studying English at school, "but not really learning much," he then learned the universal language from his Farioli KTM teammate, '92 125cc World Enduro Champion Jeff Nilsson. Realizing the importance of speaking English, Giovanni then extended his vocabulary by going to evening classes. As well as speaking Italian and English, he also speaks Spanish (it isn't that much different from Italian, he reckons) as well as French, which he picked up from KTM teammate Eric Bernard. 5. Even with a motorcycling career that has spanned two decades, Gio has had surprisingly few injuries - especially for someone with such a hard-charging riding style. With no visible scars, his only injury that has required surgery was a broken scaphoid sustained in '89 during a soccer match. Needless to say, despite his love of the beautiful game, Sala no longer plays. "It's too dangerous," he says. 6. Sala will probably take a year out at the end of 2003 when his KTM contract expires before "tuming the page," as he puts it. Not sure exactly what he'll then do - lying on a beach seemed to be favored, while running an enduro team definitely wasn't - if he does call it a career, his presence on the WEC will be missed by all across Europe. 7. He reckons that it was a mistake to have ridden a 520cc KTM in this year's WEC because the bike didn't suit his riding style. Mounted on a 250cc four-stroke for this year's Italian Enduro Championship, due mainly to the fact that the Farioli KTM team was left without a rider in that class after 2000 250cc Four-Stroke World Champion Matteo Rubin broke his leg before the season, Sala spent much of his earlier career riding two-strokes before claiming his first and only thumper title when he switched to the 400cc class in '99. 8. He considers the newly proposed changes to the World Enduro Championship, which will see the number of competitors in each round limited to 100, as a good move for the professional riders, but not so good for the organizing clubs. 9. He lives just five minutes away from both Farioli KTM and KTM Italy, and just 15 minutes away from Acerbis. Having only ever ridden KTMs during his professional career, despite having had other offers from WEC teams, the fact that Gio can walk to the Farioli KTM workshop, and that he has built up a solid working relationship with the team, are the main reasons he has stayed put, Dh, and they build pretty good bikes, too. 10. Sala wouldn't race in the United States like Britain's Paul Edmondson has, and Australian Shane Watts does, for all the tea in China. The reason? Simple: Quality of life is more important to him than financial gain. forming what can only be described as a politically incorrect gesture with his hands, it's only then that I notice the unusually high number of hot-pants-c1ad males with shaven heads lying on beach towels along the way. Yes, he has led me onto the very same piece of ground that Bergamo's homosexual male community uses to top up their tans. Handing back the LCa in order to open up my camera bag, we soon realize that we've just upset about three dozen 20- to 40-year-old males - one of which, we find out, was peacefully sunbathing only meters away from where we started shooting. As Gio gets a feel for the terrain by roaring up and down the nearest gravel road while lofting the bike's front wheel unnecessarily high over a 4-inch-deep pool of water, one of the men decides to take a closer look just at the wrong moment. Drenching him from head to toe in stagnant water, Sala, like a mischievous schoolboy with a huge grin on his face, rushes back to check that I'd seen what had just happened. Yes, Gio, I saw it, With afternoon having turned into early evening, Sala announces that he's got to get back because he's got a few things to do before he goes on holiday with his mates the following day. Thinking that he meant "pack," we head off back to his apartment. No sooner do we get to his house than Sala dis- Road Racers Weaving our way through the empty streets of Bergamo, he unexpectedly puJJs to the side of the road. Thinking that maybe he's forgotten to lock his front door or put on his lucky underpants, he shouts out seven small words that put a smile on my face for a week. "Do you want to ride this one?" he asks, pointing to the mighty piece of desert-racing machinery beneath him. "Yeah, why not?" I reply, and in a flash it's me who's perched on top of the 900cc orange-andblack machine. With a mass of fairings and instruments in front of me, and Gio trying desperately to keep up on the 250cc thumper, the bike that only a privileged few have ridden now has me at the helm, with Bergamo's streets as my playground. Thousands of miles away from Dakar, and with not a grain of sand in sight, the noise that the Akropovic exhaust system spits out from the twin-cylinder KTM motor is one that has to be heard to be believed. With Sala again leading the way, the deserted asphalt streets turn first into pot-holed trails, and then into stony single-tracks. And as we near the riverside wasteland on which Sala occasionally gives his bikes a shakedown, things take a sudden and unexpected turn. As he slows to pull me alongside, Sala shouts, "Pay attention to the gays," or at least I think he does. Riding off ahead while per- 40 NOVEMBER 13, 2002 • c u e I e n e _ lIS appears into his garage, drags out another bike and opens up a bag of parts. "They'll kill me if I don't get this thing ready for tomorrow," he exclaims while fitting a new set of sprockets to his trusty old XT600. "But I thought you didn't want to see another bike for a month?" I remind him. He pauses, then replies honestly. "This is different. This isn't my job. This is what I do for fun." Yes, Sala's idea of a holiday is to go biking with half a dozen of his mates through the twisty backroads of southern Italy. You'd better believe it. CN Sala competed in this year's Paris-Dakar Rally where he finished slxU! overall.

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