When I was seven, I started asking my parents for a Grizzly – a mini-bike – but no matter how hard I tried, all my mother would say was: “AS LONG AS I LIVE THERE WILL BE NO BIKE IN THIS HOUSE!” So for eight long years, I went to see those dream machines at the top-notch motocross track in Sassello. I watched the guys ride by, fly off the track, make their tires screech. Every single time, I felt shivers down my spine while my heart sank!!!!!!!! Good heavens, how beautiful those motocross bikes were!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So at the age of fifteen, I made up my mind and for ten days I refused to go to school. No matter the slaps I was given or the punishments, I would not move and pursued my own personal strike to get a mini-bike. My claim was simple: buy me that bike or else I’ll turn into a vegetable!!!!!
Then one day, my dear grandfather came home with a beautiful CRE 50 cc – it still gives me gooseflesh when I think about it.
From then on I just spent a year on my own in the woods, riding in the country, the mud and the snow. By the end of the winter, my CRE was a wreck and for three years I was left with nothing but my feet and no money to buy another bike. The day I graduated from high school, I got a Honda 125 cc motorbike but a month later the engine blew up and I could not ride for another year. So I decided to work as a waiter in order to buy myself a brand new 125 cc. Once I got it, I did nothing else for a year but ride and take part in countless enduro motorcycle races.
Unfortunately, in 2002, my foot got stuck in a tree root and I broke my shin and fibula. I had to sit in a wheelchair for three months, which gave me the opportunity to watch plenty of freestyle motocross. I spent hours watching trick replays, frame by frame, and I suddenly felt I was inches from the three-letter dream I had been after all these years: FMX!!! Eventually, in 2003, Paolo Grana had me try my first ramp, a sort of iron plank set in the middle of the woods, 20 yards from a slope. Ever since, my love of flying has never subsided.