At 23 he is already winner of two Tours de France. At 24, a serious injury almost ended his career. At 25 he founded his own professional team, and also designed its shirt. At 28 he suffered one of the most painful defeats in the history of sport: a Tour lost on the last stage, and by just 8 seconds. Laurent Fignon has forged ahead in his career. But he was also burned by life: he died at just 50 years old, in 2010. The year before he had learned that he was seriously ill with cancer just in the days in which he was about to print his autobiography. In those pages he had written about himself, his profession as a cyclist and what it meant to be a sporting celebrity, with the vehemence, audacity and shamelessness of someone who has never been afraid to call things by their name: the ecstasy of success and the acrid taste of defeat, the impertinent challenge thrown at the sacred monsters and the recklessness and compromises of the long season of doping.
Immediately recognized as a milestone in sports literature, We were young and reckless is Professor Fignon's last lesson, from which contemporary cycling perhaps still has many things to learn.

    «Cycling has transformed into a defense sport, forgetting that its only reason for existing is attack [...].
    I'm not saying that in my time we were better, we were different. I think I experienced the brief hippie interlude of cycling and I'm proud of it."

THE AUTHOR – Laurent Fignon
He was born in Paris in 1960. Professional trail cyclist 1982 and 1993, he was one of the strongest champions of his generation. He won two Tours de France (1983, on his debut, and 1984), one Giro d'Italia (1989), two Milan-Sanremo (1988, 1989) and one Freccia Vallone (1986). He wore eyeglasses with gold frames that gave him the look of a professor or, at least, of an intellectual. In fact, compared to the majority of his colleagues, he had read quite a few more books. Having fallen ill with cancer, he died prematurely in 2010. His autobiography, Nous étions jeunes et insouciants, came out in France in 2009 – with the collaboration of Jean-Emmanuel Ducoin, writer and columnist for the newspaper L'Humanité – and now, thirteen years later years, translated into Italian, is considered a classic of cycling literature.

Weight: 0.6kg
Dimensions: 27 × 16 × 2.5 cm
Author: Laurent Fignon
Number of pages: 296
Format: 13 x 21 cm


Italian version only.