Not every cyclist has a full and complete life away from the bike, which means that when you come across a true original they tend to stand out. The 37-year-old Italian lead-out rider Jacopo Guarnieri is one such individual. Currently riding at Lotto Dstny, Guarnieri has been a pro since 2008 with a series of multi-year contracts at Liquigas-Cannondale, Astana, Katusha, and Groupama-FDJ – and although he’s seldom taken wins of his own, he has helped pilot the likes of Alexander Kristoff and Arnaud Demare to dozens of victories.
In the professional peloton there are many athletes occupying this space as workhorses of the sport – so that in itself is not unique. But Guarnieri has increasingly made himself stand out in other ways: a cerebral approach to the sport and his place in it, an outward-looking view on the world, and a grounded perspective that is uncommonly found in the tunnel vision of elite sport. He’s one of the few riders in the men’s peloton that’s talking the talk about LGBTQ+ inclusion, co-parents his young daughter as a single dad throughout the season, has a pride flag in his Twitter bio. He’s got interests beyond bikes, too. In a sport dominated musically by doof-doof and Europop, there’s another hint on his Twitter that Guarnieri is a bit different: his banner image is a fragment of the album cover of ‘Finally We Are No One’, the cult 2002 release from the Icelandic folktronica group, múm.
I’ve spoken to Guarnieri a couple of times, and the conversation often turns to music – an area of obvious passion for the tall Italian. In the last minutes before the start of Paris-Roubaix this year, he took the time to run me through the latest emo throwbacks that had been hitting the spot for him and to talk about which other cyclists are similarly minded (just one such musical ally on the Lotto Dstny bus: Henri Vandenabeele). At the Arctic Race of Norway – a much more mellow event with far less hubbub or pressure – Guarnieri stopped on his way back from the team presentation and just chatted about what he’d been listening to for about 10 minutes.
Guarnieri’s tastes are wide-ranging – there were name-checks of Manu Chao (and Mano Negra), Malian duo Amadou & Mariam, the Irish folk band Lankum (“very dense, very thick … just like a punch in the face for me”) and upcoming gigs he was seeing (post-rock titans Explosions in the Sky, something he was looking forward to but concerned that it wouldn’t match high watermarks of the genre, live, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor). The mediums by which he consumes music are shifting: “I probably will die as a CD guy because it’s my age, you know – in the ’90s and 2000 it was CDs,” he told me, but he’s starting to dabble in tapes and vinyl and the convenience of Spotify is hard to look past on the road.
For all of these reasons – the generosity with his time, the broad tastes, the curiosity and the obvious passion for music – I wondered whether he might be receptive to a project: making a playlist for us at Escape Collective that captured the essence of his time at the Arctic Race of Norway. No problem: “I like to make playlists around themes,” he said. “Like a mood, or an idea, or … I don’t know, if I’m on a train looking out the window, for something that can match it. So I’m gonna do that – is 10 songs OK for you?” More than OK. We arranged to touch base in a few days.
The Arctic Race of Norway is a beautiful event – huge landscapes, small towns, enthusiastic public – but it’s got a lot of driving. Stages typically finished after 6pm, followed by the packdown and everyone – riders and staff and media alike – piling back into vehicles for the drive back to Bodø. I have to imagine this factored into Guarnieri’s playlist for the better: when we caught up in Tverlandet at the start of stage 3, we’d all spent days marinating in midnight sun, watching a scarcely populated array of fjords and jagged peaks glide by the windows of our vans.
I’d initially asked Guarnieri to put together a playlist capturing the essence of the Arctic Race – however he interpreted that assignment, whether it was to match the scenery or through the inclusion of Nordic artists – but what he handed back was much more conceptually of-a-piece. That morning when we spoke he’d apologised for the lack of Norwegian artists, but really, from Helios to Nils Frahm, it strikes me that there was something more profound at play: an understanding of the perceptible melancholy of this landscape tempered with its calmness. Jacopo Guarnieri’s ‘Midnight Sun’ playlist encompasses all of that and a little bit more.
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