The truth is concrete, claimed Bertolt Brecht, a man who did not practise exactly what he preached, with the incredible vividness of a carpenter. I will behave according to what an effective advertising slogan today on "ethics and sport" would be. I'll do this by reviving a document blackened by over twelve years of "political journalism darkness", and then I'll try to comment it. Please follow me and don't get alarmed when Coni, these pages' editor, is mentioned: don't worry, it all goes back to the winter of 1984-1985, pure prehistory.  
"Social analysts maintain that the transmutation of ideals in myths in a mass society could be very dangerous. Our recent history marked by years were terrorism was rampant demonstrates this. Let's see whether such transformation could be seen in another evident aspect of Italian society today. Let's start from a piece of news spread at the end of the year that received very little attention and comments, maybe because it was mingled with the triumphal accounts of Italian sport's golden year.  
According to this piece of news Coni filed a statement at the Public Prosecutor's Office against one of its federations, baseball: the supposed malfeasance would range from embezzlement of public funds to peculation, from abuse of public documents to unfair balance sheet. Cattle-stealing is not mentioned, it would be a precious crib for a law student. The whole problem would have been caused by Federbaseball accumulating a deficit of 2 billion 600 hundred Italian lira over the past period.  
The most striking aspect of the whole story seems to be Coni's behaviour that "reported one of his federations" with resoluteness, timeliness etc., in order "to set the good example". In other words, this would mean that even in such a regrettable situation "sport's image was saved and offered the umpteenth example of its moral cleanness and efficiency". The brackets in the last sentence were added by me, and somehow they are the diacritic translation of people's feelings, of the confidence of an image: sport's real sponsor in Italy always seems to be Ethics.  
There is no much to add about the baseball mess: yes, Coni's outgoing president, Carraro, did the right thing when he reported the "black sheep" federation that is institutionally under the Organisation's control (but which one), although he tried to wash his dirty linen in public until the end. When things had already gone out of control, he took the bull by the horns, and tried to strengthen his position above all suspicion. The inevitable question, to end the periphrasis on bovine and ovine, is whether the oxen haven't left the stable yet, in other words whether there are other different cases, apart from the baseball affair. If this is just the beginning and the same malfeasance were involved, it would be necessary to have a specific strategy, which would be the following.  
There is a federation today that can accumulate the deficit I mentioned earlier and that once would have been unthinkable because the Italian sport business is one of the nation's few sectors overwhelmed by billions of lira. If they are not peanuts yet, maybe some figures might give an idea of what I'm talking about: in 1979 Totocalcio, the football pool company, paid about 150 billion lira to the federation of the federations, Coni, and to its followers. 600 were estimated for 1985. No other country in the world is so generous towards sport when it comes to "small" financing.  
The so-called civilised countries, both in the East as well as in the West, have much stronger traditions and facilities, and the State's voice is frequently heard even in the most different situations, in a free trade policy and in government control. This is not so in Italy: the state takes money from Totocalcio but squanders all this money on one organisation, the Italian National Olympic Committee, that institutionally "organises the Olympic Games", the sport of the champions that becomes a sport show due to its intrinsic necessity (the passages reported are abridged for schematic shortness). Furthermore, they do so using both excuses and blackmails because they know that nobody but soccer teams make the pools coupons work.  
Italy basically finances its own sport show but "does not manage" to finance its own motor activity (hence the still unclear distinction between product and service, continual complaining on the school system and so on and so forth).  
Judging by the figures we have, an economic question rules Italy's original approach to sport. But there also is a political aspect to be considered. The always great and lastly - for the past five years - even extraordinary political nature of sport is evident for whoever wants to consider it and strives to "see what is under one's eyes". These things, however, belong to the sociology of the circenses.  
The political nature I am referring to is the "same old one", that is that of political parties: what would the passage of Coni's president to the presidency of another organisation, like RAI or a bank, be but this? Besides, since the position of a top manager is so sought-after, how is it possible for these careers to follow a different path with respect to all the other Grand Commis in Italy? And what about the eagerly awaited and imminent congress of Coni's National Council with the participation of the representatives of the sport's promotion bodies, the parties' driving belts? Could we conceive it in non-political terms?  
It could be possible: just don't do it. Just consider in a speculative way (in both senses) sport and show in the same and indistinct hotchpotch of the "main recreation" of this country. The economical question does not exist, the political question does not exist if we don't want them to exist. It would be clearly too easy for the government, the parties, the managers and the mass media if things remained like this, in a very reassuring way in the end. But... what about the moral question?  
Yes, maybe the baseball case with which we started rightfully belongs to a moral question, to a moral question raised to the nth power. If such a consideration is valid for the political class that has "different relationships" with moral par excellence, just think what a widespread moral question might mean for a field that is essentially sponsored by Ethics' image, by the image of the "may the best man win", of the rhetoric of cleanness and efficiency.  
Just think what a mess this would be: what would it happen if citizens, readers and television viewers were induced to reflect and agree that "sport is like everything else", that their participation - as subjects - to sport events is fictitious, manipulated, uncontrollable, that their ethical investment in the sport show is "unreal", that all is left to them is only the "esthetical" one that is normally devoted to other kinds of show like cinema, theatre, opera or rock?  
This is clearly "inflammable social material". The young man is serious. Do Sport managers realise this? Can they handle it? If the ideal now disguised as a myth was shattered, the offence would certainly concern unfair balance sheet but a metaphorical one and on a social scale. Do we want to talk about it?  

I wrote this article in January 1985, almost thirteen years ago, for "La Repubblica" a daily I was then working for but it was never published. Censorship. If I have now recalled and reflected upon a case instead of dealing with the culturally "refined" topic of ethics and sport, of the values that naturally belong to sport, the Pindaric heritage and so on, I did it because I had the following three goals:  
1) to historicize the issue in time and space, in the mid-eighties and in Italy. This method makes it possible to draw a comparison with today, mention Maradona and then Ronaldo, today's myths in the post-idealist transmutation, reason on Schumacher and the ethics in Formula 1 racing and so on.  
2) To ponder over sport's "normalisation" way towards an increasingly macroscopic development form an industrial (as well as political) standpoint and, at the same time, some sort of ethical limbo, of suspension of ethics, of the inethical dimension in the years that followed my article.  
3) To think about the fact that, at the end of the millennium, even Economics and Politics - rigorously capitalised - seem to unearth Moral or the need of some of it: will sport really miss out on all this? It would be a clamorous paradox.  
4) Focussing on these deeply cultural issues is still very hard today. They are either removed from a context of facts, figures, organisations, people or ultimately Powers or they are ignored. Editor Scalfari did not publish what you have just read at the time. Far from being eversive, I think. Or am I being wrong again?