Three lives, no death, to paraphrase the title of a film from many years ago, because Alex Zanardi will never die, what he experienced and represented was too strong, too intense. Alex Zanardi remained Alex Zanardi even after the last accident, the unfortunate one on 19 June 2020 on a handbike, which left him under the strict secrecy and discreet love of his family who protected him with tact and intelligence from morbid curiosity: out of respect for himself and for him, so as not to feed him to the public, so as not to expose his frozen time, because Alex Zanardi, who passed away on the evening of May 1st 2026, was like the sea, he existed only in perpetual motion and so, only so, should he be remembered.
A direct personal memory, emblematic yet secondary, at the Ceremony of the Golden Collars in the CONI hall of honor in 2016: Alex coming out in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, impeccable, on his cane (he walked with two), regularly gripped in his left hand, engages in a “T” shape the other he has removed from his right hand to leave it free and use it to grab the spiral handrail of the staircase and walk along it from top to bottom. cross-country with spectacular agility, bounces, downhill: a harmonious, athletic, elegant, uninterrupted movement.
On that descent it was all Zanardi: they tell you that with two prosthetic legs just below the groin you will never climb stairs again and it is the trigger to prove to yourself and to the world that you can.
Thus Alex Zanardi has always reacted, with the horizon of pioneers, with the spirit of explorers to the many, too many accidents that life has thrown his way, transforming the rosary of “you can’t” that his existence could have become, after the accident in Formula 1 in 2001, into a continuous exploration of his own new possibilities: road racing, hand biking, an infinite sequence of Paralympic successes, and the ironmen, literally iron man, an extreme Triathlon, which was a narrow definition for Zanardi, because iron rusts. Zanardi instead glitters, because he gave the world the lockpick of hope by example.
A symbol in spite of itself
When we asked him at that moment what the burden of being symbols meant, he replied: «It’s not an encumbrance, because I don’t feel the duty to represent something for someone. I don’t feel entitled to it. Then I know that the things I do make me a reference for others, because I do them after what happened to me. But I don’t go to the Ironman to prove something to someone.”
Not even to himself? «No, it would mean going there with the doubt of not getting to the end. I, on the other hand, set myself a realistic goal, in which I saw nothing magical. Doing the ironman without legs in my opinion is a simplification not a complicationexcept that when I say it they don’t write it willingly: it ruins a bit the romanticism of Zanardi’s story as a hero, which flatters me, let’s be clear, even if it seems less realistic than how I see it.”
To then add: «When watching the film Born on the 4th of July in which Tom Cruise remained in a wheelchair, I said to myself: “If it happened to me I would kill myself”. I think I made a superficial reasoning in the belief that it wouldn’t happen to me. Then when you’re the one in a million, you don’t care about the statistics and you roll up your sleeves. And when you’re in it you discover you’re more gifted than you thought. The idea of suicide never crossed my mind afterwards, ever.”
In front of Zanardi you had the sensation of being in front of a resolved man who knew how to observe himself with self-irony and lucidity, who when asked about fear and that accident in Formula 1 which gave birth to his second life, replied: «An accident like that in those circumstances, even in a risky sport like Formula 1, happens to one in a million, but that one was me: I’m normal, believe me, I just got a monstrous chestnut. Guys, sorry for the Latinism, the point is that bad luck exists.”
He said in an interview with Christian family in 2019, written by Fulvia Degl’Innocenti, of the importance of the family: «in particular my wife, Daniela, was a bit of a directorwith some choices he made that were all better than the ones I would have made. When I returned home after my 40-day stay in Berlin, there was already a car with steering wheel controls in the garage. My family rallied around me, allowing me to stay focused on myself. I wanted to return as quickly as possible to being the best father for my son Niccolò.”
Zanardi had read that car in the garage as an indication of the attitude to have, the idea that it wasn’t a question of stopping to lick his wounds, but of starting to live again with other means.
The second life
Since 2007 he has run handbike marathons, including the one in New York (fourth with only 20 days of training). Two golds and a silver at the London 2012 Paralympic Games, and three golds at the Baie-Comeau 2013 World Championships. Most recently, on 11 October 2014, he participated in the Ironman. He also returned to racing cars, in the Blancpain GT Series. At the 2015 Nottwill World Championships, in Switzerland, gold in all the races he entered, in the time trial, in the road race and in the relay.
In 2016, just before turning fifty, he was again a protagonist at the Paralympics. In Rio de Janeiro a gold in the handbike, time trial category H5. The following day silver in the handbike online test. Then, gold again with the Italian team, in the hand bike mixed relay road test.
He’s done it all: the tutor, the athlete, the motivator, the frontman: «It sounds rhetorical, but it’s the truth», he once said, «I’ve squeezed a lot of things into it in these fifty-three years. The day I lost my legs it didn’t seem like life was offering me a great opportunity, but it has become one, perhaps the best of my life. All the things I do today are a consequence of my new condition.”
The last project, the one in which he found the last accident, was called Objective Tricolore and was dedicated to Paralympic athletes like him who had great strength and ability, but perhaps less means to be able to get to the Paralympics. For this reason, Zanardi had begun to collaborate with Rio Mare by having some scholarships financed for the most deserving athletes. The relay around Italy in June was intended to be a concrete sign also for the country that after the tragedy of the pandemic it could get back on its feet. As he had done, as many Paralympic athletes had done who had chosen to travel the country on handbikes. Fate decided otherwise. His handbike had ended up against a truck, on 19 June 2020, along the provincial road 146 near Pienza: a tragic fatality, an accident, for which the truck driver, an admirer and desperate for not having managed to avoid the champion despite the emergency manoeuvre, was then definitively cleared with a dismissal. From there Zanardi was surrounded by privacy, the same for which today the family asks for respect while waiting to communicate the circumstances of the funeral.
TV, the challenges
In his second life, in elegant clothes, Zanardi also hosted the splendid sports program on RaiTre between 2012 and 2016, with his two prostheses and his two sticks Challengescreated by Simona Ercolani, paving the still very difficult road to disability on TV. «Challenges», he told us, «can only be won if you want to do what is needed before attempting them. There would have been no Maradona without the child who climbed over the net of the pitch to go and play alone. My luck is being able to do the things I likethe fact that they took me to experience a few afternoons of glory is a very pleasant added value. Then, of course, out of narcissism, between two equally exciting challenges, we all choose the one with the audience applauding at the end.”
A resolved man
He had never hidden his admiration for others, he was sorry that he hadn’t had time to tell his father Dino, a plumber, who passed away shortly before the two world championships won by Zanardi in Formula Cart in 1997 and 1998, that one evening in 2016 he had finally met Dino Zoff, a much admired man, the boyhood hero of his father who until the end had called Alex the “cit”, the child.
We will remember his eyes as clear as the sea, capable only of dreaming like in the Italian version of The weatherGeorge Moustaki’s masterpiece: Alex, who was a stranger in life, however, was never even in the most difficult moments, because he sowed important relationships everywhere.
Even with strangers to whom he transmitted, without wanting to, by living, the message that there is always a second chance.
(Antonio Sanfrancesco collaborated)
