“We won everything”, pause, “at the Olympics!”. The childish exclamation of Stefano Tilli comes from the bottom of his heart, a man of almost sixty who first as an athlete and then as a manager has crossed eras of Italian athletics, some real deserts at the Dune, before arriving this week. Japanese and be moved like an enchanted child in front of the most beautiful, largest and most illuminated Christmas tree that exists. The most glorious day in the history of Italian sport took us by surprise, on the beach, in the countryside, in the garden or simply lying on the sofa with the air conditioning on. We will never forget it.
It is a truck of emotions that overwhelmed us by taking the chase from afar, moving up from the most hidden streets of our memory, from Mennea who overtakes Allan Wells in the eighth lane, from Silvio Fauner who burns the Norwegians in Lillehammer, Paolo Rossi who scores three goals against Brazil … We were annihilated, defenseless, even if the most astute of us had warned us that the truck was coming – those who realized that Lamont Marcell Jacobs had run the semifinal in 9 “84 new European record, and that Gimbo Tamberi was as perky as in the best of occasions because he hid a secret that like all the best secrets was kept en plein air, in the sunlight, written on a piece of chalk he has been carrying for five years. It would be a bad film, predictable and unlikely in its development, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s all true.
Tamberi begins to decline it according to the cadences of the Italian comedy: he always jumps and passes the bar, at first he flies over it with exemplary style, then at 2 meters and 35 he touches it with his heels but that does him the favor of staying up. Jacobs is filling up with adrenaline and is also charged with Tamberi’s inspiration, who calls the applause of an empty stadium with the exception of a few close friends including his father Marco, to whom an at least complicated relationship binds him. There are three of them left, however, one of whom, the Belarusian Nedasekau, is burdened by an error that prevented him from making the clear path that Tamberi and his best friend on the platform, the Qatari Mutaz Essa Barshim, with whom he shared the pain of same injury to his left ankle. When the IOC clerk reveals to him that given the scoring situation they could even agree to divide the gold, the matter becomes pure Ettore Scola, the rebellion that was successful, the world in the image and likeness of Italy: two is better than one. The most beautiful and cinematic gold in the age of individualism and more or less forced isolation, a stuff from “Moments of Glory” 97 years after “Moments of Glory”. As we have been used to in one hundred years of the Olympics, where athletics always served us joy with a severe dropper, one cannot yet imagine that it was only the appetizer.
Jacobs was born in El Paso, Texas, where Quentin Tarantino set the massacre at Bride Uma Thurman’s wedding rehearsal in Kill Bill. The cases of life made him become Brescia and gave him a neighbor (Alberto Papa, 59, former Italian long jump record holder over 50) who owns an athletics track in the garden, to be able to train even in darker months of the lockdown. His father is Texan but Marcell’s English sounds like that of his lake neighbor Jerry Calà in “Vacanze in America”. It has a natural tamarraggine that has risen together with the self-esteem infused by the mental coach Nicoletta Romanazzi, always at the top of the thanks of the following weeks. Many of us are still used to considering sports feats as a combination of talent and physical training, but above all these last Olympics have taught the importance of knowing how to recognize and crush the right mental switches, for better or for worse: the walker Massimo Stano , gold medal in the 20 km walk paired with fellow countryman Antonella Palmisano, began planning the enterprise by repeating himself over and over again that he was the strongest in the world (“sometimes the brain is deceived like this”). At 14:50 on 1 August 2021 Lamont Marcell Jacobs is the Christmas tree, all lit up and very bright even when there is to be still: he is the one that is least disturbed by the very false departure of the British Zharnel Hughes, who deprives him of the lane neighbor’s reference point. And when everything is valid, Jacobs is a shotgun ball that exceeds 40 per hour with admirable composure, without ever breaking down, without grinding his teeth. Beautiful to see and review in the next two hundred replays while in the live images he seems dazed by the enormity of what he has just done, and Tamberi is already waiting for him thirty meters beyond the finish line with the flag around his neck, in this Italian party that now admits no limits. nor inhibitions, so much so that an austere commentator like Franco Bragagna celebrates it by quoting Fellini and shouting “Marcelloooo!”, one of the most famous phrases ever that have ever been addressed to an Italian.
The vision of Paolo Conte takes shape in “Azzurro” who sang the boredom of August Sundays: Jacobs is that thing that we hear whistling over the roofs, an airplane that goes away. We will fully understand the extent of all this five days later, on a Friday afternoon when we struggle between a rational sense of fulfillment, similar to the satiety that overwhelms you on the sofa after a hearty dinner, and the state of exaltation of those who want more, that the time is now and that if the opponent to beat is Great Britain, then Great Britain is welcome. Even today that five months have passed, it is not clear from which corner of the mind Patta’s 10 ”56 and Desalu’s 9” 17 launched, also perfect in the collection of the baton by Jacobs. It is here, exactly at the instant 24 “3, while Desalu is closing the curve of the third fraction, that Bragagna, for twenty-five years RAI singer of great athletics without ever the joy of an Italian triumph as God commands, pronounces the historic phrase:” Something is going to happen ”.
That thing makes Filippo Tortu happen, a boy who in a few days had seen his status as the fastest Italian ever fade, the first to go under 10 seconds in 2019, eclipsed by comet Jacobs. Tortu does not love Jacobs, and how could he; he hardly looks at him even in the post-race interviews, but the script of the Italian summer gave him the ideal straight, the one in which there is not simply to maintain the position – and therefore you have everything to lose – but that where there is a comeback, an Englishman in the eighth lane like Pietro Mennea in Moscow in 1980, an Englishman in the eighth lane after having swallowed the gall of elimination in the semifinals for a week. What could be better? Maybe win the photo finish, by a penny, with the roundness of a 37 “50 (” 37 and a half, it’s not fever, it’s a horse fever! “).
Here’s what happened, a last 8 ”85 fraction !, and the meme packs itself up, with Chiellini clinging from behind to Englishman Nathaneel Mitchell-Blake as fosse Bukayo Saka and tugs just enough. Yes, Chiellini.
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