Francesco Moser, who celebrates his 75th birthday this Friday, is still in remarkably fine shape. We have had the pleasure of seeing him on two occasions around the Giro d’Italia in recent months. First, in March, he attended the inauguration of the Milano-Sanremo Walk of Fame, where he earned his place thanks to his victory in the 1984 edition of the Classicissima. Then, at the end of May, ‘The Sheriff’ paid a visit to the Corsa Rosa during Stage 13 from Alessandria to Verbania, as the race passed through the roads and landscapes he has always called home.

Now focused on his life as a winemaker in the hills north of Trento, the land he has always called home, “The Sheriff” lived through one of the most transformative eras in cycling history. “I raced from 1969 to 1988,” he once recalled, years that bridged the sport’s most heroic age — with gear levers mounted on the down tube and far too many roads still unpaved — and the dawn of the first major technological innovations. Throughout that entire period, Moser was a leading protagonist: he claimed 23 stage victories at the Giro, won the points classification four times and, of course, crowned his love affair with the Corsa Rosa with overall victory in 1984, finishing ahead of the late Laurent Fignon.