The elegance of Livio Berruti

On 9 August, we lost a reserved and serene man who objectively changed the history of Italian sport. Livio Berruti, Olympic champion in the 200 metres at Rome 1960, passed away at the age of 87, taking with him the very embodiment of sporting elegance – the kind where style is not merely an accessory to the result, but the very fabric of it. Berruti was a man as swift as he was upright, so much so that when Sergio Giuntini decided to compile Gianni Brera’s writings on athletics, he did so with the respect of a witness who had, over the course of his career, witnessed something that is likely to be unrepeatable. Brera was a sharp and formidable journalist, capable of scrutinising sport to the very depths of its soul. Alongside unforgettable passages on football, that spirit emerges in Gianni Brera (edited by Sergio Giuntini), "L’abatino Berruti" (Book Time, 2013) – which is not a biography, but a gallery of sketches, reflections and epigrams spanning some forty years of athletics. And within those pages dedicated to the ‘queen of sports’, Brera observes Berruti just as an entomologist observes a rare insect: through a microscope and with eyes hopelessly in love. “I’ve dreamt of writing this article my whole life. Now that I can write it, I’m as drained as a medium after a long and exhausting séance.” This is precisely how Brera begins his account of the 1960 Rome Olympic medal for Il Giorno – a piece which, on its own, is worth reading the entire anthology for.

Claudio Gregori, however, in "Livio Berruti. Il romanzo di un campione e del suo tempo" (Vallardi, 2009), takes a different approach. Gregori delves into Berruti’s life, beginning with that spring of 1982 when the Olympic champion was involved in a very serious car accident. This serves as the narrative starting point from which to recount everything in retrospect: his childhood in Stroppiana (in the province of Vercelli, where he was bid farewell for the last time by his loved ones), his training, his hunger for victory, his loyalty to his teammates, the icy silence he knew how to maintain when sport became a political commodity, and countless anecdotes illuminated by insights into philosophy, society and values.

The dialogue between these two books is compelling: Brera sheds light on athletics and Berruti’s profile, whilst Gregori fills that profile with life, flesh, blood and reality. Brera observes Berruti as a witness to an era that is already drawing to a close: he sees in him the anomaly, the man who does not give in. Gregori, on the other hand, delves into his inner feelings, exploring the tension between ambition and integrity, between the desire for victory and the refusal to betray himself. Two sides of the same fear that sport might, even back then, be capable of selling its soul to the devil. In the 1960s, when Berruti was running, sport was already a theatre and an instrument of power; the Olympic Games had already become (and would increasingly become) an instrument of soft power; doping was about to come knocking; and money was beginning to tempt champions, turning them into money-making machines. And yet, men of integrity held firm, and Berruti was one of them. Reading Brera and Gregori together, now that Berruti is no longer with us, raises a question that weighs like a boulder: is there still, in today’s sport, room for such elegance?