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Amsterdam
1928 Olympic Games. Italy participates with a 164 athletes squad. Among
managers there's the former athlete Giorgio Zampieri, who knows Gabriele
D'Annunzio. At the departure from Milan on train, Zampieri receives
a message from the poet: "I send you and your athletes the token of
my friendship. Greet for me the great and noble Amsterdam an go on pilgrimage
to yield to the Night Patrol and the Representatives of the Corporation
of the Masters Chandeliers".
D'Annunzio
meant two celebrate paintings by Rembrandt that are at the Rijksmuseum
in the Holland town. Los Angeles 1932 Olympic Games. Among spectators
some stars of Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, Claudette Colbert, Gary Cooper,
Jeannette McDonald, Douglas Fairbanks.
Even them applaud the parade of the Italian athletes, nicknamed "Mussolini's
boys", in a way that recalls the Broadway musical reviews rather than
sport. As regard to the American stars it is at the Olympic Games of
Paris in 1924 that Johnny Weismuller becomes the king of pools, with
three golden medals. He'll be later the Tarzan of the movie: the director
Van Dyke that directed him in "Tarzan the Ape Man" defined him as "a
very beautiful giant with the most stupid look ever seen ".
Olympic
games cannot be talked about without remember Jesse O-wens, the most
striking athlete ever seen worldwide, born in Alabama in 1913 and dead
in Tucson (Arizona) in 1980. He was the dominator of the Olympic Games
in Berlin in 1936 where he won four golden medals.
He
got there with the stunning result achieved on May 25th 1935 at Ann
Arbor in Michigan; in 75 minutes he defeated the three world records
and equalized a fourth one. 1936 Berlin was the Berlin of the Hitler
age that must mark the triumphs of the Arian race.
The
Afro-American Owens streamlined the sport dreams of the Nazism under
the Fuehrer hallucinate and incredulous eyes. One of the Owens's records,
long jump, lasted 24 years.
They
called him the black antelope, the ebony flash. With the collaboration
of a reporter, he wrote his autobiography and the title was, naturally,
"Jesse, the man that beat Hitler".
He
was born poor; he had been shoeblack, messenger, gardener, newsvendor,
and ice-cream seller. That's why the man that 'did not run but flight'
confessed in that book that victories "are conquered only by a bit of
despair ".
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