Farewell to Giampiero Galeazzi, the voice (and the body) of our emotions

One of the protagonists of the golden age of Italian sports journalism has passed away, a travel companion who has accompanied us everywhere, around the planet, to conquer the world with a microphone in hand, between the Olympics and football , from the Abbagnale brothers to Diego Armando Maradona.

Giampiero Galeazzi was a giant – in every sense, considering his imposing physique – in the tiring and beautiful job of being an envoy. In addition to competence and passion, his gift was empathy. He was sweating empathy, it came naturally. It was a gift. Very few other colleagues capable of catapulting the spectator “into” the sporting event. He was 75 years old, he had been suffering from diabetes for some time, the last television appearance – very tired but always brilliant – a couple of years ago, guest of his friend Mara Venier, with whom he shared the happy years of “Domenica In”, transporting himself from the staid world of sport to the more pop and creepy world of entertainment.

But it would be a shame to remember only that Galeazzi on Sunday afternoon at Venier, the “Bisteccone” who lent himself to all kinds of jokes and skits from the show. Galeazzi was – above all else – a serious, competent, passionate professional, a constant presence for years in the two historic RAI broadcasts: «Ninetieth Minute», conducted from 1992 to 1999 and «La Domenica Sportiva». These are the years of its maximum popularity, spent in the football fields to tell the deeds of champions such as Maradona and consecrated by the presence in Sanremo – alongside Pippo Baudo – in 1996.

Romano, son of art, his father had been a rowing champion, himself an athlete of excellence – he won the rowing championship in 1967 and the following year he participated in the Seoul Olympics – then the passion for journalism prevailed. He spent forty years in Rai, until his retirement in 2011, ten years ago. The apprenticeship in the first years on the radio, then on television, becoming a permanent presence in the homes of Italians.

He supported Lazio, without ever emphasizing it. He has done everything, great popularity has given him football, rowing and tennis (his commentary with his friend Adriano Panatta is famous, who today confesses: “With him jokes and laughter …”). He made the sporting achievements that he recounted unforgettable, because he was not limited to that, but lived them, in the first person, alongside the rowers or the champions who perhaps then intercepted and kidnapped – literally – inside the locker rooms, the first in Italy to do so. and bring – for real – the spectators into that temple of lockers and benches and showers and soccer players in their underwear, exhausted and happy.

The colleagues and the many admirers who today remember him and celebrate him on social networks – a memory, a joke, a more or less sought-after gaffe – never cease to emphasize how much Galeazzi – of that time and of that sport – was a cantor of excellence. For what he told, but above all for how, for the overwhelming enthusiasm he was able to convey, for all the emotions put into circulation, for the future memory of those who think that sport is – really – the popular novel of Italy.