He was an athlete before a professional, a great sports fan before a sports journalist, a meme before memes were invented: he was and will remain an all-round pop icon Giampiero Galeazzi, face and historical voice of Rai who died at 75 years of age after a long illness. His wonderful cinema face: they called him Bisteccone. And he proudly claimed the nickname given to him by Gilberto Evangelisti who hired him on state TV. As a tank top he touched an Olympics, as a journalist he told six, all without ever taking himself seriously.
Between Maradona, Reagan and Gorbachev
This was his figure: you could sense it when, at the last strokes of the “two con”, he urged the Abbagnale brothers to take the podium, when he violated the Serie A changing rooms in celebration for the Scudetto until he was showered with sparkling wine by people like Diego Armando Maradona. There were no boundaries to his being pleasantly over the top: you gave him everything because he was the ideal guest to invite to dinner. One who honors the table and enriches the discourse with anecdotes that can range from Monaco ’72 to Reagan who shakes hands with Gorbachev in Reykjavík in 1986 and closes the chapter of the Cold War. He had gone there to follow Juventus on an international trip, he found himself telling the story.
The beginnings in rowing
Roman of Novara origins, he was the son of Enrico Galeazzi, European rowing champion in 1932 in the «due senza». As a son of art, sport is his first path: thanks to his size, at the age of 21 he graduated as the Italian single and double rowing champion in tandem with Giuliano Spingardi. He just misses the qualifications for Mexico City 1968 but in the meantime he graduates in Economics with a thesis in statistics. He also makes a step into the marketing office of Fiat, but it doesn’t last long. Still tank top, Rai hires him to follow the ’72 Munich Olympics as a radio correspondent. He replaces Mirko Petternella, who was fatally stuck in the fencing system, and immediately shows his competence and passion for the sport of fatigue that is his life.
I land it on TV
To become Galeazzi, however, Galeazzi has to wait for TV: it is 1976 and Emilio Rossi arrives as director on Tg1. For sport, Rossi listens to the advice of Tito Stagno and recruits this young man with an always ready joke: on the small screen Giampiero “hole” immediately and finds himself on the Domenica Sportiva led by Paolo Frajese and on Wednesday Sport. A lot of tennis, but also football. As a correspondent of the Domenica Sportiva, with those services played more on “color” than on technical details, in the Eighties he invents a real genre of which he is the greatest exponent: sport becomes a piece of costume, the interviewee is an accomplice of a emotional story, when it lends itself. And, with Galeazzi at their side, everyone lends themselves: from Rummenigge to the lawyer Agnelli, whom Bisteccone regularly ambushes in the underpasses of the stadium.
A little bit of a lumberjack, a little bit of a dancer
Sport can only stay close to such a character and so here he is embarked by Pippo Baudo in the cast of Sanremo 1966 or to give his voice to Mr. Swackhammer in the first Space Jam. A Lazio fan, he is fondly remembered by the whole constitutional arc of Italian football, that self-referential world accustomed to seeing the main problem of planet earth in the bias of the sports journalist. With Galeazzi it was not possible because not only was he good at telling that carousel in an original and light-hearted way: he was part of it. “In rowing you have to be a bit of a dancer and a bit of a woodcutter,” he said in one of his memorable commentaries. Right: it is valid in rowing and also in life, we add.