In rowing you have to be a little ‘dancers and a little’ woodcutters, he came to say once during a commentary. No other definition of the sport of oaring will ever be able to overcome – exactly – that sentence thrown there, as if it were a half-beat, from Giampiero Galeazzi. Rowing is a tiny little world, made up of exhausting work and a lot of voluntary work that produces the great pride of being part of it and that Olympic dignity that every sport considered to be “minor”. This article will not reveal that Galeazzi from the late 1980s to
early 2000s was the greatest testimonial of such an ancient sporting practice (the Boat race Oxford-Cambridge it has existed since 1829) and yet so forgotten, at least in the four years that separate medal from medal, when everyone rediscovers it. No wonder you can’t find the words to get over the shock either Giuseppe Abbagnale, that Galeazzi with his screams has catapulted out of the club a bit Carbonaro of rowers forever and is now president of the national federation.
The environment of the oar – up to the young rookies who today, tiny, will get on those very long boats, full of fear of falling into the freezing water – knows that Galeazzi was not just a figurine screaming for the benefit of the usual circus of sports journalism. Rather, he was the one who pulled this sport – “the most beautiful in the world” – out of a black hole.
Galeazzi had never gotten off the boat. The profession had made him lack for nothing – friendship with Maradona, Ninetieth Minute and the Sunday Sporty, the variety show – yet it was always the race course that turned its windsock. The tale of a somewhat strange sport – in which you race backwards like crayfish, slide up and down on a wheeled cart, move your legs and arms in a seemingly bizarre order) has become mythical thanks to his ability to combine technical competence with popularization skills, or rather, better will informative: can’t you see that it is the most amazing of all sports ?, get passionate with me.
Life is like rowing, sometimes the rowers think, perhaps a little presumptuous: to get to those unattainable goals, to see them from here, the only way is enormous effort and exhausting sacrifices. A single race of two thousand meters, of 6 or 7 minutes, to be built for the whole year with hours of technical improvement, enlargement of the lungs, strengthening of the muscles, of the legs in spite of what it looks like from the outside. This is why Galeazzi has always seen everything as a regatta field: the buoys all in a row, the starting piers, the tower that signals the finish line from afar. Three years ago, already in a wheelchair, a Sunday In, he said, light-hearted and melancholy: I have the last 500 meters left. It seems little and it seems like a lot: it is the last quarter of the race, when all the athletes have to do is go and look for the residual energy, and that is mental rather than physical. At 250 the red buoys begin, when the boats “crash over the finish line” he used to say, when it was time to let loose.
He had been Italian champion in doubles, with the Rowing Club Rome, in 1968 and yet he was not selected for the Olympic Games from Mexico City, something that still after fifty years made him take those five minutes: “I love sport and I hate it for this reason. It was the biggest disappointment of my life. I deserved to be a starter – he said in August a Giancarlo Dotto on the Corriere dello Sport – It burns me more than before. If I think about it, I become hydrophobic. One of the biggest sporting injustices ever. If it had been today I would have gone automatically and they would have brought me the suitcases. There was a political discourse underneath, the relationship between the company and Coni. If I was from Aniene I would go with the trumpet ”.
From the press gallery, as if he were on a boat, Galeazzi worked with the same heart, with the same head. A colleague of the Tg1 he once told him that he had three souls: the popular one of the stadiums, the aristocratic one of tennis, the romantic one of rowing. “The commentary of Steak it was a crescendo that left you breathless, almost in apnea to the end – he wrote long ago Eugenio De Paoli, former director of RaiSport – He, as a former rower, made you get on the boat, the tone and emphasis rose with the rise of the shots in the water, meter after meter you suffered with him and with the boys for that breathtaking point to point ” .
He could feel the races he saw on him. He told in one of his books (And let’s go win) that after the Abbagnale gold medal ended up “to release the tension I performed in one reckless somersault, there on the ground. Something I had never done before and I would never do later! But, as they say, I was literally mad with joy ”. Agonistic trance, lucidity, blow from the phenomenon of communication. One of the commentaries left in the collective memory – after that of the Abbagnale – is that of the gold of four sculls Italian a Sydney in 2000: while baptizing the four Azzurri as i Knights of the waters (expression still in use today after twenty years) and is almost breathless, he closes the picture with a final brushstroke, telling of a duck flying near the blue bow “and now nobody stops us anymore”.
At the same Games, in the race of the four without, Italy comes second by a little: on board the British boat there is Steven Redgrave, who at 38 takes the fifth gold in five consecutive Olympics and in fact will become a baronet. The run-up of the blue boat seems destined to catch up with the English bow and instead the finish line arrives too soon, Redgrave and the others are 38 cents early. In the naval battle of the last 300 meters, Galeazzi manages to list the measures of the oars, tell the attack of the Italians, cheer for overtaking and it seems that he does everything with one breath. Italy comes second but it is “with history and for history” because “this is rowing”. He suffered when the Italian rowing team did not take medals (“And let’s win, finally!” Is the liberating cry after the victory of the quadruple scull), he couldn’t wait to show his sport to others. Also for this ai Atlanta Games in 1996 he ended up in a half controversy with the technical director of the national team at the time because the medals did not arrive and in the commentary – it was the coach’s accusation – he always said that Italian weapons were overwhelmed in the last 50 meters (“and so now everyone they save themselves first ”was the conclusion of the dt, a bit exaggerated). He had time, in his last 500 meters, to see “break every prediction” a Valentina Rodini e Federica Cesarini, at the Tokyo Olympics, with that perfect technique that teaches all over the world and that phantasmagoric ending.
He had started telling others about his sport in 1972 on the radio: Mirko Petternella – then historical voice of rugby – had to remain at the sports hall where the fencing competitions were held. “And so I made my debut – he had told a Gazzetta.it – With this sentence: ‘There is a lot of wind here, the flags look like wood’. Do you think bullshit … From the studio Roberto Bortoluzzi he said: “Yes Galeazzi, go ahead”. He must have thought: if this is the beginning, we annamo well… Instead I got away with it ”. In forty years he has had everything from his professional history and yet three months ago he still complained: “They took me off rowing two years before retiring. A huge disappointment. He said Lello Bersani: everything is allowed in Rai except success, I paid for this “.
Rowing as his home, as his heart. Galeazzi is Galeazzi in the stories of these hours of everyone, colleagues and friends, also because he was born in that community in which, as always happens when we endure so much effort together, we become all a bit brothers, an understanding is immediately recognized, even before speaking. Dotto had asked him what he would have liked to comment, had he been in Tokyo: “I changed the style of interpreting the story of sports. Track and field is not my thing. I would have liked to tell the dark tournaments that nobody watches, those on the platforms, the carpets, the fight, these things here “. This is rowing.