All of Us
Could Ride

The greatest risk is not always what you don't know. Sometimes it is trusting what has always worked.

I have been riding motorbikes since I was six.

Off road first. Then, years later, a full motorcycle licence.

Over time, riding became one of the ways I measured competence. Enough experience to feel capable, and enough to become dangerous if I assumed that capability travelled further than it did.

So when an old friend, Abramo, suggested we sharpen our skills at Fabio Fasola's enduro school in Elba, it sounded like a good idea.

There were three of us: Abramo, Giovanni and me.

All of us could ride. None of us could ride what was to come!

The distinction became clear quickly.

Fabio had ridden at a level none of us had, including the Paris Dakar. His teaching style was simple. He demonstrated. We followed.

The first day had the rhythm of a chase scene, without any of the glamour.

Fabio set off and, before I had fully understood what was happening, we were crossing rivers, climbing staircases, dropping down more stairs, cutting along narrow paths and threading bikes between trees on ground that exposed every lazy habit I had accumulated over years of riding.

He made it look effortless.

That was part of the problem.

When someone that good demonstrates something, the movement looks clean enough to be obvious. What you are watching is mastery compressed into a few seconds.

By the end of the first day, I was exhausted, physically and mentally.

Everything required attention: weight distribution, throttle, clutch, rear brake, line, balance, surface, trees, rocks, water, momentum.

The bike punished every lapse in attention.

The next morning, only Abramo and I rode with Fabio.

We began on light dirt tracks, working on body position. Weight back when descending. Weight forward when climbing. Clutch control precise enough to hold the bike at the edge of movement. Rear brake control light enough to slow without locking everything into panic.

Then we came through the trees and stopped at the top of a descent.

It was very steep, narrow and broken by roots. Trees sat close enough to make the line feel even thinner. This time Fabio did more than demonstrate. He briefed us.

Whatever you do, do not touch the front brake.

Then he went first.

For the first time, he did not make it look easy.

If Fabio had to work, we were in a different category of problem.

Abramo went next.

He started well. Weight back. Body loose. Rear brake controlled. The bike moving beneath him rather than against him.

Then the rear stepped out.

He released the brake, the bike began accelerating towards a tree, and his body did what bodies often do under pressure.

It chose the familiar control.

He touched the front brake.

The bike stopped.

Abramo did not.

He was thrown forward and came down hard. The bike followed and landed on him.

For a second, I froze. Then I dropped my bike at the top of the hill and ran down. Fabio was already moving back towards him.

I lifted the bike off Abramo.

Somehow, he was okay. Shaken, bruised and winded, but okay.

The lesson was no longer abstract.

We had arrived with years of riding behind us. We had ridden on different surfaces, in different conditions. We were not pretending to be professionals, but we were not beginners either.

At least not generally.

In that terrain, we were.

I have thought about that descent often because of what it revealed about competence under pressure.

That is difficult to accept because competence costs something to build. Years of repetition, failure and recovery. The earned right to enter a situation and feel useful. We protect it because it has usually deserved protecting.

Then, slowly, the knowing becomes part of the role. Asking a basic question begins to feel less like learning and more like loss of standing.

I have sat in rooms where that had happened. Experienced operators had stopped asking the obvious question because certainty had become part of what the room expected from them.

Good people. Careful people.

Learning had simply become socially expensive.

Organisations harden in the same way. They keep rewarding the behaviours that once worked, even after the conditions have changed.

On the hill, the front brake was essential in normal riding. On that descent, it was the wrong answer.

Every worthwhile move I have made has required some version of the same adjustment. Each time, the gain was range: a wider sense of where old instincts still helped, where they needed changing and where they had become unsafe.

All of us could ride. None of us could ride that.

The question is whether the terrain has changed enough that the instinct you trust most has quietly become the dangerous one.