To give Eugenio Monti the nickname of Flying red was Gianni Brera, sports journalist, extraordinary creator of neologismsnot for the flaming red bob as one might think, but for the carrot hair, because at that time Monti was a talented, daredevil and passionate skier, who dreamed of emulating the exploits of Zeno Colò, to whom he also corresponded with beautiful, cultured letters: unthinkable words among athletes in the age of social media.
I knowno geological eras ago, made up of natural slopes, groomed on skis, gullies to be covered with very long wooden skis, designed not to come off in the event of a fall. Monti was 23 years old when he fell during training in Sestriere and broke the ligaments in his knee, in an era in which that kind of injury means disintegrating a skier’s career, Monti insists, it breaks again.
NEW LIFE AND A “POST” TO ZENO COLÒ
At that point the dream of the boy from Dobbiaco also falls apart, but he cannot find peace and finds a way to invent another career in the ice gullies. As Monti himself tells it in a letter in response to a note from Zeno Colò.
Monti sends his writing to the ski champion recipient and then copies it to his journalist friend Rolly Marchi: the counterpart comes out ante litteram of what is now a post on Instagram, the great-grandson of the open letter: «Inside me I was moaning», writes Monti of that time of forced rest, of premature retirement with a tight neck, «at night I dreamed of tracks and race numbers and even during the day my sporting elf knocked every now and then on the door of my imagination, tormenting my resignation and my calm intentions of revenge. One evening I was at the tavern with some of my mountain friends, and between one glass and another we started talking about bobsleigh. One said he would like to try his hand at beating someone who was sitting at our table and who had already been racing for a few years. I, almost as a joke, entered the conversation and launched a proposal: “If you beat him, I’ll try too. Let’s play dinner.” Now, dear Zeno, I’m not going to tell you who won or not, it’s certain, in any case, that the waiter didn’t present the bill for the balance to me. The bob, already at the first meeting, had fascinated me, almost like when you happen to dance with a beautiful woman who is suddenly introduced to you and you dance and you don’t know what to say to her. And then you invite her to dance a second time and she accepts and you continue to remain silent, because the meeting is pleasant and it seems to you that this is enough. Bobsleigh thus became my second passion.”
The forerunner of the post on social media comes out as a leading article on the Sports Journal.
RED CHANGES FLIGHT
Eugenio Monti’s nickname changes meaning as events change: the red of his hair gives way to the red of his bob, everyone thinks of a snow Ferrari, in reality the blue bob becomes red because that is the color of the heaviest and cheapest paint (the bob needs ballast to run and Monti weighs little). Red returns to flying, in Cortina 1956: he leads two-man bobsleigh and four-man bobsleigh (the only Olympic ones at the time) but stops at silver with both crews. Cortina is home, but it will be the following year, 1957, that of international consecration in which Monti will win the first of his nine world titles paired with Alverà.
THE DONATED BOLT AND THE LEGEND
Everyone is waiting in Innsbruck, which is not home but we are close to it, compared to Dobbiaco just one hundred kilometers across the border, for the flying red, which however, despite dominating the world, does not fly beyond third place. One of those haunted dynamics is triggered in which the five circles ensnare the champions, the Olympics almost becomes a torture of Tantalus.
It was in 1964 that “Genius” Eugenio Monti became the hero of the Games, but in a different way than he would have imagined and wanted: he didn’t win, he came third. But when Monti finds himself second, behind the other Italian crew in the lead, while the English crew of Anthony Nash and Robin Dixon still have to go down, having the best time and being the last to go down, the English break their bobsleigh. A bolt is needed, which Monti sportingly gives up by drawing on his reserve. The English win. And Monti becomes a legend: the following year in the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, on the proposal of the British Olympic Committee, he received the international Fair Play award.
Monti who, despite being a star, has his shyness and is a man of the field and of the mountains, suffers a bit from the golden legend, also because the story swells, anticipating the concept of post-truth before social media: from story to story it becomes established, viral ante litteram, a story even more suggestive than the truth, but less true: many still believe that Monti loosened a bolt when dismantling his bobsled and thus lost a certain gold. The bolt, however, was a reserve, and in the lead in Innsbruck there was another Italian crew: Monti did not lose the gold but the silver following the noble gesture, which was and remains noble. But Genio Monti, who has not yet given up on winning on the field, will always repeat, dismantling all rhetoric: «The English bobsleigh didn’t win because of my bolt but because it went faster». Point.
WITHDRAWAL AND GRENOBLE
Grenoble 1968 is far away. In 1965 Monti announced his retirement, then thought better of it. In ’66 he won another World Cup, in Cortina. And in 1967 he went to try the Alpe d’Huez slope, destined to host the Grenoble Games, inside him the missing Olympic gold was the small, large empty space that prevented him from leaving satisfied.
The test doesn’t go well, Nash overturns, Monti goes off the track and suffers injuries that will forever give him the look of a veteran. Sergio Siorpaes comes out badly, with a broken arm, bad stuff for a brakeman, but little compared to the moment in which the rumor spreads that he is dead, even if it is not true. He will go on to build bobsleighs by patenting a model that bears his name.
Forty years at that time are not something to face on the track, no one believes in Monti in Grenoble 1968except Monti who decides to get back into the game, with a young, heavy and fast brakeman recruited from athletics.
THE MEETING WITH ROMOLETTO
De Paolis is the son of a Roman butcher, he runs around the countryside secretly from his father who wants him in the butcher’s shop: his name is Luciano De Paolis, but his Roman accent gives him the nickname Romoletto. He lives everything like a fairy tale, runs strong at the start and knows how to push: Monti and Romoletto win the two-man bob and then also the four-man bob with Zandonella and Armano on board, when it was now believed that the Olympians had definitively turned their backs on the flying Rosso.
The chronicle of that event, from inside the bob between the legend and the boy, is in the pages of Luciano De Paolis’ diary. Many of the anecdotes contained therein gave life to the novel The Flying Red, the legend of Eugenio Monti and his incredible bob, written for Solferino by Stefano Rottawho dedicated it to “Amilcare, pioneer of the ice”, the notary grandfather who he did not know and whose secret he discovered only by digging into the history of Monti and Romoletto, learning that a certain Amilcare Rotta had presided over the international bob and toboggan federation between 1960 and 1980 and that it was not a case of homonymy.
HISTORICAL RECOURSES
The book has the preface of the protagonist of the fiction broadcast on 23 February 2026 on Rai Uno the day after another Olympic flame went out in Cortina, 70 years later, where a new, controversial bobsleigh track named after Eugenio Monti was born who, in the race, made the Italian sledders happy, capable of two gold medals in the women’s doubles with Andrea Vötter and Marion Oberhofer and in the men’s doubles with Emanuel Rieder and Simon Kainzwaldner, as well as two bronzes with Dominik Fischnaller and with the mixed relay. The four-man bob of Patrick Baumgartner, Lorenzo Bilotti, Eric Fantazzini and Robert Mirce, returning to the chromatic tones of blue, instead placed fifth, 25″ from the podium. Who knows what they know about the gentleman who gave his name to the facility on which Italy will be divided for a long time to come.
Eugenio Monti, exhausted by illness and mourning the loss of a son, died from a tragic gesture on December 1, 2003. His legend lives on: for the history of five circles he remains the man who symbolizes the Olympic spirit for the help given to the adversary against his own interests.
