by Piero Ceccatelli
L’Athletics is the sport made imitation of primordial gestures of man: running, jumping natural obstacles, throwing blunt objects or weapons to hunt or kill the enemy. If this is true, the very fast ride to escape an ambush, human or animal and the high jump they are the quintessence of athletics. Together with the Marathon, which arose not from the need for survival, but from the communication of victory in a battle, entrusted to the most resistant and fastest soldier. Today, one click is enough. The Marathon is not prehistoric fruit, but of history, it owes its nature and name to history.
Win the gold medal at the Olympics in the faster run that exists and in high jump has higher nobility than winning in any other discipline, as long as it is possible to dictate a hierarchy of dignity between sports, which exists sport more sport than others.
Marcell Jacobs with the golden medal
The hug that is worth a medal
That Italy did it in eleven minutes, with the gold of Gianmarco Tamberi in the high jump and that of Marcell Jacobs in the hundred meters it adds the theatricality of one perfect direction with very high contents in themselves, accentuated by the characteristics biographical and existential of the two Azzurri protagonists, who have added a third company to their respective extraordinary performances of athletes. The third feat is to have hugged each other nine seconds after Jacobs’ victory on the Tokyo track, with their faces covered in a single flag, as if wrapped in their heads are the protagonists of an immortal painting by Magritte.
Tamberi e Mancini
Tamberi is a extroverted from the Marches, at the moment in which the Marches in sport – you see Mancini – are King Midas who convert everything into gold in a non-metaphorical sense. And they transform sports dramas in triumph (Gimbo’s injury in Rio, the elimination of the Azzurri from the 2018 World Cup) imposing redemption philosophies, acting on individual and collective human values. And in the era of mandatory distances, freeing the hug – the one with Jacobs, the other with Vialli – from the role of dangerous contagion vector raising it to contagious trigger of joy and brotherhood. The only difference with Mancini is the renunciation of “penalties” to choose a winner by breaking the stubborn equality on the pitch. Athletics, a primordial sport, admits that two winners, a Qatari and an Italian (Renzi will bless). Football will never allow it.
Different twins
Tamberi and Jacobs are different twins. On the track, after the victory, the first is shaking in disbelief, theatrical, “very Italian” according to some iconography, lying down, shouting Franco! to the Rai commentator. The second welcomes success with a heart full of feelings that do not affect the measured, almost professional demeanor. The words come out with rationality and rigor. There head dominates the heart, despite this exploding with emotions.
The father present, the father escaped
Behind, Tamberi and Jacobs tell families that are more diverse. First of all for the dad. Tamberi’s jumper in valor is in the stands in Tokyo, a stage in a past life next to the son growing him as a man and as an athlete enough to be the coach. Jacobs’ father He left when Marcell was a month old, him soldier boy, enlisted in Korea and husband of one eighteen gardesana, known during his service with US troops in Vicenza. Korea was an excellent pretext for move away also from the eyes wife and child who always had been away from the heart. Marcell’s father never showed up. Like that of the singer Adele, of the player Cassano and of the political woman Meloni. Doing this to stardom of disowned children is doubly embarrassing.
Smooth out the splinters
Marcell Jacobs, that father has it recently researched and activate a report although limited to long-distance messages, it served to bring down a ghost, free the machine of muscles and waste nestled deep inside and in the unconscious. The “sport training coach” Nicoletta Romanazzi, which has been following him since late 2020 was decisive in smoothing out the sculpture by Jacobs le splinters that no one else dared to remove, linked to the unresolved relationship with his father. Within months, Jacobs won theEuropean indoor 60 meters, conquered the Italian European record and won the Olympics on 100 meters. Maybe it’s not just a question of muscles, immortal Oedipus.
Viviana Masini, mother of Marcell Jacobs
Mum take courage
With his “fugitive” father between Korea and his native Texax, Jacobs grows up around an exemplary mother, Viviana Masini. TV and newspapers have reported the emotional and technical statements of the last hours, those in which between the semifinals and the finals Marcell Jacobs went from hypothesis and promise to Bolt’s heir. On Rai Radio Uno, around 7 pm on Sunday that mother remembered the social difficulties deriving from being oneself married to the black man and have it immediately the rapid abandonment. They have not even passed 27 years old, Marcell went from the diaper to the muscle giant who wins the Olympics. One wonders if in the meantime also the company has grown if not as much, at least a little from that point of view. We think that the path to take is not as long as the Marathon but not as short as the hundred meters that Jacobs covers in the time of two breaths, of us watching him on TV.
“Italian down to the last cell”
When Jacobs claims to be Italian and to feel that “down to the last cell” he is not rhetoric. He tells the truth. He was raised by his mother, ha studied in Italy, speak out a perfect Italian, he treats the technical aspects of his sport with a vocabulary worthy of an economist. Yet, when he left the Rai microphones to approach those of the English-speaking stations, he confided that he hoped to explain himself well. Yet when yes text his father, which Italian has never learned, admits to resorting to Google translator. The one who once messed up a ministry.
Marcell had one native language but never one father-tongue, because he did not have a father. Speaks only Italian. Because he is Italian, in spite of the last name. And of complexion, if this still matters, in determining prejudices.
The sporting ius
The hope is that Jacobs, in addition to breaking the wall of records first in Italy, then in Europe, will serve to break the walls of prejudice and discrimination. John Malagò, president of Coni, asked that “a 18 years and one minute“Athletes become Italians to all intents and purposes. May the “sport ius” be recognized for those who grew up in sport in this land and immediately deserve the blue jersey. Because with Jacobs and Tamberi and their values, athletics becomes atl-ethics. And it makes more light the life.