From Shanghai to Milan

MY STORY

It starts with a trial class in an ordinary July. It passes through Shanghai. It is not over yet.

The first spinning class of my life lasts an hour. I come out with nothing left in my legs and one clear feeling: there is something here.

A dark room, the music pushing, the effort putting everyone on the same level. That is a feeling I want to live again.

In 2014 I move to Shanghai. Sport has nothing to do with it: I go there for the restaurants and the events.

They are intense years, in a city that runs faster than any other. I build my own road one piece at a time, until I open my restaurant, Sakemate, and my gelato shop, De Medici. In 2020, when the world stops, CNBC comes to tell my story.

But the real turning point comes on an ordinary evening, when I walk back into a spinning room, years after that first class. The dark, the bass vibrating in your chest, a full room pedalling as one. I find the effort again. And inside the effort, I find myself again.

From there I never stop. I train, I study, I get on the podium. And I become an instructor in a month of July, exactly ten years after my first class: same month, another life. In the studios where some of the most talented coaches in the world teach, I learn everything: the technique, the stage, the care for every single detail of a class. Then come the events of the big brands, the nights on the river with hundreds of bikes, a community that turns into family.

The last class in Shanghai ends in tears. Mine, and those of the people who pedalled with me for years.

My story told by CNBC · June 2020
The coach urging the class on during an outdoor event at night
An event class, at night
On the podium with the co-instructor, LED signs behind
On the podium, lululemon event
Among the rows of bikes at a night event on the harbour
In the middle of the class, not in front

I come back to Milan with one certainty: what I experienced over there does not exist here yet.

I start again at Virgin Active, and the community arrives straight away: full, loud, hungry for real classes. Then Technogym Italia picks me for the official filming of the classes, videos people train with all over the world today. And when GYRU opens in January 2025, the studio that brings the standard of the big international clubs to Milan, I am there from the first day.

I teach for the same reason I started: to make people feel good. And to take them one metre past the point where they believed they had to stop.

The coach on the podium of the GYRU studio in Milan, in the saddle with weights in his hands
On the podium at GYRU, Milan

The story carries on with every class.
Come and write a piece of it.

See the programmes Write to me