ROME (ITALPRESS) – Matches, results, records: sports journalism is not just the story of competitions and scores but a real tool to connect the public with the world of sports that has the power to bring people closer to sports disciplines, make them dream through the feats of champions and promote values such as passion, perseverance, respect for rules and spirit of sacrifice. Flavio Vanetti, sports writer and journalist for Corriere della Sera, has covered 16 Olympics in his career.
The upcoming Milan-Cortina ones will be “quite complicated because of logistics: never before will they be spread over several locations, even quite far apart. Definitely they will be more Olympics for televisions than for the press,” he explained.
Among his most famous interviews is the one with Leni Riefenstahl, the German director who shot “Olympia,” the documentary film about the 1936 Olympics. “It was really extraordinary, it was a bit like meeting a character who comes out of history.” Another famous interview is with Jonah Lomu, the ‘giant’ of the All Blacks, before his kidney transplant. “He had equipped his house basically as a hospital, because at that time he was undergoing dialysis while waiting for the transplant.” The interview that’s missing? “It’s the one with Michael Jordan: I followed him everywhere, but nowadays these characters” can only be approached “if there is a big sponsor” who organizes a meeting, “things are linked,” Vanetti says.
In addition to interviews, Vanetti has also written books, such as “Thumps and Triumphs. Sport as it could have gone and as it did,” which won CONI’s literary competition, in which he tells the story that didn’t happen and could have happened. “We journalists struggle against time and situations that can happen right on the edge of closure, so we often have to prepare two or more versions of an article,” he explained. In the book, “I told 15 stories: on one side is the real one, with the article that was published, and on the other side is one of the versions that did not happen.”
– photo taken from video Medicine Top –
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