Miles Teller (Whiplash, Top Gun: Maverick) is set to play Italian cycling champion and WWII hero Gino Bartali in upcoming biopic Bartali.

The films hails from directing duo E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who won an Oscar for their documentary Free Solo. They will direct from a script by Karen Tenkhoff (The Motorcycle Diaries), who produces alongside Vasarhelyi and Chin’s Little Monster Films.

Gino Bartali, OMRI, nicknamed Gino the Pious and Ginettaccio, was a champion road cyclist. He was the most renowned Italian cyclist before the Second World War, having won the Giro d’Italia twice, in 1936 and 1937, and the Tour de France in 1938. During the war, he would carry messages to the Italian Resistance while also helping Jews being persecuted by the Nazis. In 2010, it emerged that he had hidden a Jewish family in his cellar, saving their lives. Bartali passed away in 2020, having won the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France again after the war.