I didn’t know but I’m a Mamil. Or at least I should. That’s what the English say, that’s what an article in the magazine said some time ago Dailymail that was circulating online. Then some “middle age man in lycra“, the middle-aged men in Lycra shirts, also talked about it BBC, in turn taken up by some British tabloids, taken up in turn by bloggers and influencers. Amen. What harm is there in loving cycling, in wearing a body suit even if you are well over 40, 50 or even 60? But the mamils are something more. For the English they are that people of “excited people” who live, think and sometimes sleep with their bike, who take it to their hotel room, who pamper it, who live it in their own image and likeness, who spend money on the bike and almost always “spare”. A tribe of obsessed, trained people who would sell their souls for a bicycle. And they sell it a little.
But not for just any bike, say our English colleagues. Mamils are ready to spend five, six, ten thousand euros and more for a carbon or titanium frame, for high profile wheels, for profiled saddles, for disc brakes, navigators, electronic gearboxes, computers, power meters and so on. They spend on clothing, to register for competitions, to travel, to follow diets and personalized training plans. They spend on everything. But why do they spend? Because (in a nutshell) they don’t want to grow old.
The mamils are the ever young ones who don’t give up, who pedal as if there were no tomorrow, not so much to keep fit but to gratify themselves, to boost their self-esteem and not to burn out. In short, to survive. Because buying a motorbike or a convertible is too banal, finding a lover is too complicated and because the mid-life crisis perhaps doesn’t break your legs but your soul does and then, like many women (but also men of course…) on the verge of a nervous breakdown you give in to compulsive shopping which is then the “gentle nudge” towards consumption, study and theory of Nobel Prize winner Richard Tahler.
So we are all mamil and everyone, no one feels excluded, we have contributed to restarting economies on their knees, we have restarted the engine of countries that were limping, we have saved companies and families. And, whatever our English friends think, it is a small source of pride. But it ends here. The rest is the usual blunder, perhaps the usual cliché, which brings with it many marketing banalities. Theories. We are not all the same (fortunately). And then there are mamil and mamil and everyone is mamil in their own way. With his bank account, with his culture, with his way of pedaling, with his more or less “cool” bike, with his way of seeing life. But above all with his passion, because it is passion that moves everything, that makes the difference, that gives meaning to what one does. You can see when someone does things with passion: they are different, true, they come out well, easy, almost as if they were poetry. And this is a nuance that marketing experts don’t understand. For them we are all mamil: but what do they know…