It has revolutionized the methods of athletic trainingbuilding – because he built them – teams that made muscles and physicality their strength, their stylistic code, their password to glory. Gian Piero Ventrone is gone. Leukemia, he was only 62 years old. He had been hospitalized since Tuesday at the Fatebenefratelli in Naples, his city. Vetrone has been in the breach for thirty years. Last team Tottenham of his friend Antonio Conte. The two had met in the mid-90s, at the time of Juve. For years Ventrone was Marcello Lippi’s trusted man, who had had him as a collaborator for a year in Naples. He arrived at Juve bringing with him 43 computers and a database that no other colleague had available. With Lippi he lived the two periods in black and whitethe first from 1994 to 1999 and the second from 2001 to 2004, putting on the bulletin boards, various cups and the 1996 Champions which – together with the preparation for the 2006 World Cup won by the national team of friend CT Lippi – constitutes the highest point in the career of this professor that had earned the nickname of “Marine”. Because the methods were the same, from military barracks. Recently, a photo of Son – the Korean from Tottenham – who after a training collapses (literally) on the ground and collapses, and another of Kane who collapses and begins to vomit, circulated on the web. Fatigue as the maximum goal, pounding work as the only way to make sense of training.
His former players in these hours tell of how Ventrone has been fundamental for their growthbut at the time they cursed him for how much he squeezed them. He had invented the “Bell of Shame”: when a player couldn’t take it anymore, he would move away from the group and – with his head bowed – went to give the bell two blows, exposing himself to the public mockery. Roba da “Full Metal Jacket” applied to football. In lecture (in the early days at Juve he did daily 3-4 hour sessions) he put the ball music, and was one of the first. He was the son of a carabinieri marshal, he himself had been a bersagliere in the lagoon discipline in front of everything. Esteemed for his ideas, but not much loved by his colleagues, who did not like those methods so exasperated and that search at all costs in wanting to transform footballers into gladiators. One fact remains: the teams coached by Ventrone ran the most. And they never seemed to get tired. At Juve in the second half of the 90s Lippi managed tactical situations and – from the top of his personality – kept the level of motivation of each player high, but it was Ventrone who made the team run, transforming the pressing into an existential creed. “Those who survive their working methods have something special”Said the Juventus players of the golden years.
He was a workaholic, he even invented a working holiday with players at the seaside, engaged in relaxation and running on the beach. So she kept them under observation. It was a man who – with his methods – took calcium to a higher muscle level: in that epochal transition between the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, the players were subjected to 30% more games and ended up playing about sixty a year, at an increasingly frantic pace. The evident increase in muscle tone of some big names of those seasons – think of Vialli or Del Piero – caused much discussion, but the results of the field rewarded Ventrone’s work. Those were the years in which medical support – not only as general medicine but also as an analysis of physiological data, science and nutrition – became increasingly important in building a team. With some shadows: the use of creatine – which at the time was not prohibited – fueled the suspicions that later resulted in the famous doping trial. Ventrone was the maximum standard bearer of this new muscular philosophy, certainly the most successful. In his career he also coached Siena-just with Antonio Conte-Ajaccio in France and Jiangsu Suning and at Guangzhou Evergrande, with Fabio Capello and Fabio Cannavaro.
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