MOTOR SPORT/Chinese Grand Prix: Paddy Agnewon why Italy's world champion Valentino Rossi, one of the world's most highly paid sportsmen, is such an iconic figure in his homeland

At 28 years of age, seven-times World Champion motocyclist Italian Valentino Rossi is getting old. So much so he gets up at 10.30am as compared with his hitherto normal rising hour of 1pm. Getting out of bed so late used to cause problems, especially on raceways, he admits. Rossi says his new timetable is all thanks to his girlfriend, Arianna. Now that Arianna is around, he no longer needs to "go out on the chase" every night. As an afterthought, he concedes: "You see, life has changed for a lot of my friends. We're all a bit older."

Does all of this mean Rossi is beginning to slow down on the track? As he prepares for this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, he admits that to some extent the wheel has gone full circle. Where once he was the irreverent Young Pretender to such as his compatriot Max Biaggi, he is now working hard to hold onto the coat-tails of the 21-year-old Australian Casey Stoner.

At the moment, Stoner's Ducati bike seems significantly quicker than Rossi's Yamaha, especially on a track like that of Shanghai, which has the longest straight on the circuit, at 1,200 metres. All of this talk of faster rivals does not please Rossi: "If you lot keep on talking about (Dani) Pedrosa and Stoner as if they are just kids, then it makes me seem old. When I'm out there on the track, I'm the same guy I always was. I'm the fastest and I'm 28 years old, which means that, if I want to, I can still ride at this level for another five years."

Another five years of risking his neck, blitzing around the world's racetracks at speeds in excess of 300kph. Five years when he will doubtless continue to be one of the world's most highly paid sportsmen, on annual earnings estimated in excess of $30 million (€22 million) by Forbes magazine. (His current contract with Yamaha, alone, is reportedly worth $12 million (€9 million), making it the highest ever in the sport).

Up in the beautiful Renaissance city of Urbino, Rossi's native town, those figures might just make one or two people uncomfortable. It is hard not to feel sympathetic towards the art-history teacher who, more than 10 years ago, had the not so easy task of teaching Rossi. Exasperated with her student's apparent lack of interest in Piero della Francesco and other Renaissance maestri, not to mention the fact the world-champion-to-be would regularly go missing for a week at a time as he honed his racing skills, she rebuked him one day:

"Rossi, do you really think that running around, acting the prat with your motorbike, will earn you a living?"

As Rossi points out in his autobiography, What If I'd Never Tried It, motorbike racing has kept putting bread on the table for him.

Yet, it is easy to understand how the art-history teacher got it wrong. One of the great curses of modern Italian living is the motorini riders, young people who sway in and out of chaotic city traffic on 50cc mopeds with little regard for either the rules of the road or their own safety. Young people ride motorini because they are by far the cheapest and most effective way of getting around Italy's frequently log-jammed city centres. Yet they are clearly dangerous.

To the art-history teacher, young Rossi probably seemed nothing special: just another youngster obsessed with taking risks on his bike. When Rossi once tried to explain to another teacher he was something different, that during his absence he had come third in an Open Ducados race in Spain, she merely replied: "Well done, Rossi, keep on taking your little holidays, going racing with that bike of yours.That's the right thing to do, keep on enjoying yourself rather than studying."

It is not surprising to discover that, of all the various prizes and honours that have gone his way, Rossi treasures in particular the honorary degree awarded in 2005 by the Facolta di Scienze della Communicazione di Urbino. Who knows what the poor old teacher made of it all?

These days Rossi is based in London. Such is his iconic status, his huge popularity in his native land, he has been forced to escape to the relative anonymity of Piccadilly Circus. For a long period, every time you turned on the TV, there was Rossi - at times promoting ultra-fast broadband connections and at other times, ironically, promoting road safety. Rossi once said being famous, in Italy, was like a prison.

"I am Valentino Rossi, not an icon," he claimed. It would be impossible for him to "relax, maybe start a family and live a normal life" in Italy. So off he went to London in 2001, where he claims to appreciate the atmosphere of a truly multi-ethnic city.

One suspects, too, like Italian footballers such as Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola (at least in their early London days) before him, he appreciates his relative anonymity.

For long, most of us in Italy have known Rossi for two things. Firstly for his outrageous ability to win, even when he famously moved from Honda to Yamaha for the 2004 season. Different bike, same result - Rossi wins. We have also known Rossi for his terrific sense of humour, the stunts he has regularly pulled off, after winning yet another Grand Prix. Perhaps the best one came at the 2002 Gran Premio d'Italia at Mugello when he was stopped by "traffic police" as he went around on his lap of honour. With a pomp and circumstance alas only all too familiar to most Italians, the would-be traffic cops issued Rossi with a heavy fine for speeding, to the total delight of the Mugello crowd.

Eighteen months ago, however, in the midst of a bitter general election campaign, Italians got to see another side of Rossi when he appeared on a comedy/chat programme, Rockpolitik, hosted by the one-time rock and roller Adriano Celentano.

Various highly controversial figures appeared on this programme, journalists like Michele Santoro, who had been banished from the state TV airwaves by the Silvio Berlusconi government simply because he had dared to criticise (on air) Berlusconi. Another controversial figure to appear was the Oscar-winning comedian Roberto Benigni, who staged a memorable gag in which he took Berlusconi to task for censoring and banning his critics.

Simply being on this programme was to take a stance, an anti-Berlusconi stance.

Rossi showed a very different, fresh, even impish Italian face to his compatriots that night, reminding them it was possible to be Italian and go out into the world and be a winner - without corruption allegations, a drug scandal or a Mafia story attached. Not that Rossi talked much politics that night.

Rather he conceded to his host motor-bike racing was "very rock" while confirming (to the delight of Celentano) that yes, sometimes, his knee touches the ground when he is going around bends.

Rossi is a figlio d'arte in that his father, Graziano, was a motor-bike racer. Racing is very much part of the Rossi DNA. That night on television, though, Rossi reminded his compatriots of other aspects of his character. He appeared poised, intelligent and very likeable. We had all heard the stories of how on the night before a race, he liked to shut himself away in the "box" with his bike, on his own, putting on stickers and assuring the set-up (pedals, brake levers, handlebar height, etc) was as he wanted it. Listening to him talk about himself that night, it was easy to imagine him capable of fierce, solitary concentration.

For Italians, there remains one intriguing Rossi-linked conundrum. Could the fastest bike rider in town ever be tempted to switch sport and slip in behind the wheel of a Ferrari Formula One car? It would be a case of an icon driving an icon. In recent years, Rossi has whetted the Ferrari fan appetite by testing at Ferrari's Maranello circuit and also in Valencia in January and February 2006. That he likes to do a bit of car rallying creates more expectation. Rossi himself has seemed to play down the possibility, saying: "I really don't like being famous. But driving for Ferrari would make it far worse."

In the meantime, art-history teachers and the rest of us might be well advised to look on mopeds and their frantic young riders with a more kindly eye. One of them might just be the next Valentino Rossi.