Italy upside down
How much can the world change in 12 years? A lot, and the state of sport in our country is a perfect testament to it. In a few days, Italian sports fans have witnessed two events that just over a decade ago would have been unthinkable: the failure to qualify – the third consecutive time – of the Italian national football team for the World Cup on one hand; the second consecutive F1 Grand Prix victory by an Italian driver – Andrea Kimi Antonelli – on the other, along with the championship leadership for the Bolognese who was just seven years old in 2014.
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Football and racing cars have always been among the greatest passions of Italians. The Azzurri national team was for decades among the most titled, competitive, and successful in the world, and in four wheels, Ferrari was there to hold the white, red, and green flag high, not surprisingly considered by many fans as the ‘National Team’ of motorsports. Even the years of the latest successes are close: in 2006 came the last football World Cup won by the Azzurri, in 2007 and 2008 the last titles won by the Prancing Horse. Now, however, the trophy cabinet, at Coverciano as at Maranello, struggles to fill up, while surprisingly we have rediscovered ourselves capable of ‘producing’ (a horrible verb when talking about people, but it gets the point across) aces of the steering wheel.
From zero to Kimi
In 2014, the year of the Italian football team’s last appearance in the final stage of a World Cup, our country had no driver representing it in the Circus and it seemed difficult even to imagine having an Italian starter at the wheel of an F1 team again, despite Davide Valsecchi having won the GP2 title (the current Formula 2) in 2012. Imagine if someone had dared to say that Italy could have its own representative at the top of the Drivers’ standings: at the very least, their mental health would have been doubted.
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12 years later, the landscape has completely flipped: now for Italy, four-time champion, participation in the football World Cup has become a chimera while a very young driver of just 19 years leads the F1 championship. In these 12 years, there have actually been many sports in which Italy once struggled that have instead become a flagship for our country, and it is pleasing that F1 is among them. Not forgetting that besides the crystalline talent of Antonelli, there is also another young man, Leonardo Fornaroli, who after winning the F3 and F2 titles is eager ‘on the bench’ at McLaren, and many other talents who are trying to successfully make their way in the minor categories.
Perhaps we are not and will no longer be a country of footballers, but we could return to being – in motor racing, because in two wheels we have actually always been – a country of great drivers.
