The Righteous are neither saints nor heroes. They are people who courageously saved the lives of others but also their rights and dignity. And sport embraces them by recounting the exploits of athletes who have chosen Good and Truth and who have broken the dogma that that world is sufficient in itself and is not interested in what happens around it. Stories collected in a book, «The righteous and Sport» published by Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina in the Campolibero series of the Gariwo Foundation with the premise of the historian and writer Gabriele Nissim, founder and president of the Gariwo Foundation and edited by the journalist Gino Cervi. Stories of wars, of anti-Nazism, of lives hidden, chased, saved, of struggles, of conscience and courageous gestures. A beautiful journey through time, from the 1930s to today, which rediscovers and allows us not to forget eternal champions told by the pens of writers and journalists such as Gianni Mura, Giulia Arturi, Giovanni Cerutti, Joshua Evangelista, Cristina Giudici, Fabio Poletti and Alberto Toscano. Sportsmen who with class and imagination have interpreted their disciplines in different eras and have become symbols of the spirit of their years
So how can we not remember Augusta Fornasaria worker-cyclist who by pedaling became a partisan relay in the Venturoli Garibaldi brigade and in the spring of 1945 began her Resistance, guaranteeing the connection between the clandestine formations. Or Nasim EshqiIranian freeclimber, a life of climbing, who made her Instagram profile available to activists and has become the voice of Iranians who want regime change. Or how not to tell the story of Matthias Sindelar, Austrian footballer, one of the greatest center forwards in history, the Mozart of football who opposed Nazi violence. After Austria was annexed to the Reich by virtue of the Anschluss, the national team was essentially disbanded. The last match was that of the “reunification” organized at the Prater in Vienna on 3 April 1938. A match that was supposed to establish the union with the passage of the Austrian players into the ranks of the Third Reich national team. The Gestapo leaders allowed Ostmark, as Austria was called, to take the field for the last time with a red shirt and white shorts but on one condition: they would have to lose. It didn’t end like this. Sindelar scored and led his team to victory, then refusing to give the Nazi salute to the authorities and to be part of the Reich national team. On the morning of January 23rd he was found dead in his apartment together with an Italian girl, the Milanese teacher of the Jewish religion Camilla Castagnola. And other more well-known stories. From that of Gino Bartali, champion who crossed the 20th century from one end to the other carrying dispatches on the frame of his bicycle to keep the families of the persecuted between Florence and Assisi and that of Albert Richter«Aryan», one of the greatest track racers in history who challenged the Fuhrer to defend his great friendship with the Jewish coach Ernst Berliner and was killed in prison with a shotgun. And again Emil Zatopek and his wife who fought against Soviet tanks in Prague. Zatopek, the “human locomotive”, was something more than a great athlete: the only one in history to win, in 1952 at the Helsinki Games, three gold medals in the 5,000 meters, the 10,000 meters and in the marathon where he decided to participate at the last moment. He also ran through the history of his country, Czechoslovakia. An inconvenient talent for the communist regime of which he was leader but of the most democratic wing. He didn’t escape anything. Not to the spring of Prague, nor to its decline, nor to the confinement in Siberia to work in the mines. And when, having been repatriated, he ended up working as a garbage collector, he continued to run after garbage trucks amidst the applause of the people. Against the regime and against racism. Thus, raising our fists to the sky on an Olympic podium. The black gloves are those that wrapped the hands of in 1968 Tommy Smith And John Carlosat the stadium in Mexico City during the medal ceremony of the Olympic 200 meters in which the two American sprinters came first and third. When the notes of The Star-Spangled Banner ring out in the stadium, they lower their heads and raise their fists to the sky in what has become one of the most disruptive images of the twentieth century, symbol of a decade of protests for black civil rights. Gianni Mura in telling their story actually told that of the Australian Peter Norman who came second. He, a white man, who joined that protest and paid dearly for it. He disappeared, was canceled by the Australian Federation which did not allow him to participate in the 1972 Munich Games for which he had qualified and did not even involve him in the organization of the Sydney Olympics. He died on October 3, 2006 and at his funeral his coffin was carried on the shoulders of Smith and Carlos. Carlos said to Norman’s family: “You have lost a great soldier, to me he was a brother…”.