Italy inside out
How much can the world change in 12 years? A lot and the state of sport in our country is a perfect testimony to this. In just a few days, Italian athletes have witnessed two events that would have been just over fifteen years ago unthinkable: the failure to qualify – the third in a row – of the Italian national football team for the World Cup on the one hand; the second consecutive victory of an F1 Grand Prix by an Italian driver – Andrea Kimi Antonelli – on the other, with championship leadership for the Bolognese who was just seven years old in 2014.
The ball and the racing cars they have always been among the greatest passions of Italians. There Italian national team has been for decades among the most successful, competitive and successful in the world and Ferrari was there to hold the white, red and green flag high on four wheels, not surprisingly considered by many fans as the ‘National’ of motors. Even the years of the last successes are close: in 2006 came the last World Cup won by the Azzurri, in 2007 and 2008 the last titles won by the Prancing Horse. Now, however, the noticeboard, in Coverciano as in Maranello, is struggling to fill up, while surprisingly we have rediscovered ourselves capable of ‘producing’ (horrible verb, speaking of people, but it gives you an idea) steering wheel aces.
From zero to Kimi
In 2014, the year of Italy’s last football appearance in the final phase of a World Cup, our country had no driver to represent it in the Circus and it seemed difficult to even imagine going back to having an Italian starting at the wheel of an F1 team, despite the fact that in 2012 Davide Valsecchi had won the GP2 title (now Formula 2). Imagine if someone had dared to say that Italy could have had its own representative at the top of the Drivers’ classification: one would have at least doubted this man’s sanity.
12 years later, the panorama has completely reversed: now for Italy, four times champion, participation in the football World Cup has become a pipe dream While a very young driver of just 19 years old leads the F1 championship. In these 12 years there have actually been many sports in which Italy once struggled to become vice versa flagship of our country and it’s nice that F1 is also among these. Not forgetting that in addition to Antonelli’s crystalline talent there is also another young man, Leonardo Fornaroliwho after winning the F3 and F2 titles is champing at the bit ‘on the bench’ at McLaren and many other talents who are trying to make their way successfully in the minor categories.
Perhaps we are not and will no longer be a country of footballers, but we could go back to being – in motoring, because in reality we have always been in two-wheels – a country of great pilots.
