When I hear the word of French origin "Sur Place" immediately comes to mind the cycling of the 70s.

Let's talk about Track Stand, the technique that allows you to remain stationary in balance on the bike waiting for the best time to attack and surprise the opponent. Such technique is used above all in the competitions of sprint of the cycling on track,

Track stand, Track cycling, speed, sprint, an art. But who would ever say that surplace was also a commercial stunt?

Surplace: how it was born.

Half sport and half marketing. The technique was born from the idea of Antonio Maspes and Giovanni Borghi. Two legends from two different fields, bound together by a solid friendship.

The first, born in Milan who had won 7 world sprint championships. A boy who was born near the fair, bewitched by the Vigorelli, where he had entered by chance. An athlete who would become a legend of the track and the Velodrome. The Vigorelli Velodrome was not only a place of sport, but one of the vital points where the Italian system flowed, lived, grew and won.

The velodrome was (and is) a cycling naturally predisposed for television. The public sat and watched their heroes compete, win or lose, for hours on end. The track, therefore, was a place that lent itself to advertising. And not just for billboards.

The track was a place for emotional advertising... marketing, as we say today. It was not a vehicle for simple advertising slogans, but a place where the public could put some of its own emotion into it, thus becoming more deeply involved.

Giovanni Borghi, the man who turned a small shed in the province of Varese into a multinational company (IGNIS), intuited this. He was one of those who had created the industrial boom of the 1950s, with cars, washing machines, refrigerators and TV.

So, those two friends, Antonio Maspes and Giovanni Borghi, invented TrackStanding one evening at the Vigorelli. A tactical stop in the middle of the race. With the rider standing still and waiting for the other rider to pass, in order to have the advantage of starting from behind. The other almost always stopped too, and so it became a race of endurance and patience.

As chance would have it, however, all of Maspes' surplaces took place in front of the Ignis brand, clearly printed on the track. It is said that at the bar in front of the Vigorelli, the price list of the track stand bets even circulated. A legend? I don't think so... That Italy knew the value of sport.

However, there were no signs on the stretch of track at Masnago where Pettenella and Bianchetto, on July 27, 1968, stopped in surplace in the speed semifinal of the Italian Championship.

But there was television, and that event was an immense spot for track cycling, and for the two of them. Pettenella and Bianchetto were already the world's top sprinters. It is enough to say that in the Olympic final in Tokyo the protagonists were them. The fight then continued in the pros. A wonderful human and sporting story, made up of years of cunning, rivalry, betrayals and rapprochements, something else than Reality Shows, here we are talking about real life.

Anyway, that day, with the cameras framing 63 minutes of freeze frame, and embarrassed commentators who invented everything to pass the time, the world record surplace was broken.

The previous surplace record, one hour, was held by Maspes, the father of the specialty. Everyone knew it and everyone was there with their stopwatches in hand, and so at 61 minutes there was an enormous roar that shook Varese and most of Italy in front of the TV.

These extremisms have subsequently pushed the International Cycling Union to change the rules, sanctioning that no more than two surplaces could be performed in each heat of a speed race, and that each surplace should not last more than thirty seconds, under penalty of a warning and, if necessary, the declaration of defeat.

Outdoor velodromes on summer nights, the roar of the public at the Masnago velodrome... it seems incredible but it really happened.

In the video you can see an excerpt of the 1964 tokyo olympic semifinal, where a new record was set by Pettenella: 22 minutes.

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*cover image: Maspes and Gaiardoni during a "surplace" at the Vigorelli.