Origins
Bottecchia was born to a poor family of nine children. He went to school for just a year and became a bricklayer. He married and had three children. In the first world war he joined the Bersaglieri corps of the Italian army. During the conflict he received a bronze medal.
With the end of hostilities he became an avid competitive cyclist. He won the Giro del Piave, the Coppa della Vittoria, and the Duca D'Aosta in 1920 and the Coppe Gallo a Osimo, the Circuito del Piave and the Giro del Friuli in 1921.
Read more about this topic: Ottavio Bottecchia
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)