It is not that the neighbor’s grass is increasingly green is only that (perhaps) outside our boundaries there is a slightly different idea of legality. A couple of days ago, upon arrival of the 17th stage of the Tour de France in Valence, a man plunged on the bike on the finish a few minutes before the group escaping, it is not known how, at the checks in the last kilometers.

Probably a goliardata But he paid dearly. Two agents of the gendarmerie “knocked down” him without too many compliments, throwing him on the ground and then dragged him, semi -seventeenth, towards the barriers. Rescue was then stopped, handcuffed, and yesterday judged to be a very direct one where sentenced to 8 months in prison, with a conditional suspension of the sentence to “have entered an area of sports competition disturbing the performance of the tender, having refused to obey the orders of the police and to have used violence against a public official”, declared the Valence attorney. The thirty -year -old was also forbidden to access any sports facility for five years, he will also have to pay 500 euros of damages to the police officer who threw him on the ground before falling in turn.

This is how he goes to France. But it goes even elsewhere except with us. And then what to the Giro, on the finish line of Naples, had happened, had happened a short time ago when a protester had tense a tube on the final goal just as the runners in full sprint were reaching seventy at the time. Fortunately, nothing had happened. For the 67 activist, a Daspo had been issued which should (the conditional is a must since it will not be easy to check) keeping it away from sporting events for two years. The difference between what happened to Valence and what happened in Naples is not in the entity of the convictions but in the attitude, in the widespread culture that accompanies the work of the police abroad and in our country in which they tolerate, when they do not justify, the actions of the demonstrators who put at risk of sporting events, athletes, who smear monuments, which devastate historical centers and more could be added. There are rights (and that of manifesting is a sacrosanct right) which, however, must be exercised without breaking the laws and above all without endangering the life of those who are competing. And it is to bet that if the Italian policemen had acted with the same determination that they used French colleagues would have been put on the cross by most of the public opinion if not investigated. Because many would take the parts of the “poor” cyclist …