Yes, Gary, there is a Fabrizio

This little gem was mined from the newsgroup rec.bicycles.misc. We're not familiar with the Fabrizio in question, but it doesn't really matter.

Anybody have a picture of this marvelously-attired dude?
Gary

There actually *are* pix out there. Let me assure you, Fabrizio is real. And I know he'd blow my pins off in any hill climb. There is substance behind his style. He just doesn't talk about substance; he prefers to talk about style. Let me remind you, sometimes what people don't say is more important than what they do say. And sometimes, not.
Tom

And now Ryan:
We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication above, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful authors are numbered among the readers of rec.bicycles.misc:

Gary, your friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not written up in VeloNews. All minds, Gary, whether they be men's or children's are little. In this great universe of ours Category V is a mere insect, an ant, in its cycling, as compared with the boundless world about it, as measured by the riding skills capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Gary, there is a Fabrizio Mazzoleni. He exists as certainly as love and Shimano and brifteurs exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would the world be if there were no Fabrizio Mazzoleni! It would be as dreary as if there were no Garys. There would be no Category V-like faith then, no poetry, no Sunday rides to make tolerable this existence. We should have no cycling, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which cycling style fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Fabrizio Mazzoleni! You might as well not believe in hill-climbing wheels! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the bicycle races on the first day of Spring to catch Fabrizio, but even if you did not see Fabrizio Mazzoleni breaking away, what would that prove? Nobody sees Fabrizio, but that is no sign that there is no Fabrizio. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see the performance difference ten grams makes? Of course not, but that's no proof that it is not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in cycling.

You tear apart a bicycle pump and see what makes the air come out, but there is a veil covering the cycling world which not Jobst Brandt, nor even the united brains of all the mechanical engineers that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, intervals, style, weight-fixation, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal riding and racing beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding, excepting steel.

No Fabrizio Mazzoleni! Thank God! He rides, and rides forever. A thousand crits from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand Tours from now, he will continue to make style the heart of cycling.