Ciao, Cavendish!

Mark Cavendish's amazing performance at the Tour de France (he's the first Briton to have won three legs of the race and looks to be the likely winner) has put me in mind of a film that affected me greatly as a lad -- as coming-of-age films should do. This piece of cinema history, written by Steven Tesich, was 1979's Breaking Away. It comes as close as any work of art I know of to describing the phenomenon I'm exploring here ... but the lead character is an Italophile instead of an Anglophile.

In Breaking Away, Dennis Christopher plays an Indiana boy who has convinced himself that he's going to be a great Italian bicycle racer. But he buys into the whole thing: the food, the music, the whole Italian vibe. According to the trailer, he renames himself Enrico Gimondi (though I don't remember that detail). He calls his cat Fellini, and speaks incessantly in half-assed Italian learned from a phrasebook.

Believe me, I understand the obsession with Italy and all things Italian ... but that's for another blog. But there is something special about the laser-like mind of a teenage boy that makes them thrust themselves into something like this for a year or two. Of course, we never completely shake whatever that obsession is. Nick Hornby talks about the same thing in his memoirs, Fever Pitch: He becomes football-mad as a teenager while getting over his parents's divorce, and the obsession stays with him for the rest of his life.

I remember an interview with someone on NPR -- the was donkey's years ago -- in which the interviewee claimed to speak with an English accent for a solid year when he was around 14.

Is this kind of fixation immature? Is it daft? And if it is all those things, is that so wrong?