One evening at the end of July 1996, in the lobby of a Holiday Inn hotel in Atlanta, Gian Paolo Ormezzano came up to me and said to me. “The day after tomorrow the competitions will debut at the Olympics mountain biking. Do you know how many Italians have a bicycle in the garage mountain bike? In my opinion it is a service worth doing. Do you want to go together for a little Christmas Eve?”.
How could you say no to a master of journalism like Ormezzano? It was also an opportunity to spend a little time next to the journalist whose articles I read as a kid, when I was passionate about cycling. When I confided to him that with my first pocket money I had bought his “History of Cycling” published by Longanesi, he hugged me with emotion, adding that that book was also expensive, so it must have been quite a sacrifice for a teenager. The next day getting to the competition field was long and complicated, also because the logistics at the Atlanta Olympics were terrible. We left very early in the morning. We first took a very expensive taxi, then a bus, and finally they took us to the competition field with an electric machine similar to the one used on golf courses. The long journey was the ideal moment for Gian Paolo to tell me (a radio circuit had asked me to do so) about his Olympics, both summer and winter. In the flow of memories, the most beautiful and moving one concerned the Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, in 1972. Gian Paolo emotionally recounted that at a certain time in the afternoon, before sunset, the light and the snow took on rosy colors that they left me enchanted. “You know”, he said, “I was admiring that pink snow and I was sorry to be there alone, without being able to share that beauty with someone I loved”.
When we arrived on the competition field, the technicians of the blue team of mountain biking they looked at us amazed. They were on the phone with the other Italian journalists who remained in the press room in Atlanta, who were asking for news on the phone. Ormezzano, on the other hand, was there, well into his sixties, with the reporter’s notebook in hand, asking questions and seeking curiosity. Hers was not only a lesson in journalism on the field, but also a winning intuition, because the following day Paola Pezzo’s gold medal arrived in the women’s race.
On the long journey back to Atlanta Gian Paolo began to write the piece, partly on the bus and partly in a taxi, holding the computer on his knees. Every now and then the clicking of the keys stopped, then I discovered that Gian Paolo had fallen asleep. After a couple of minutes he raised his head and started writing again. I realized that these micro-sleeps of his were frequent. He also indulged in them in the evening, perhaps in the din of the press gallery in the Olympic stadium during the athletics finals. These naps were his way to recover energy and maintain the frenetic pace of his work. You met him for breakfast before 7 and discovered that in the early hours of the morning he had already made telephone connections with various radio stations, written one or more articles, sent his columns to the editorial staff of Christian family and of Newspaperof which he was a historic collaborator. The day after the 1996 attack on the Olympic Park in Atlanta (one dead and 111 injured) I asked him for a quick comment on the radio. Standing with the breakfast tray in his hand, he spoke for almost two minutes without any hesitation, impeccable even in his punctuation. He was truly a monster of talent.
Generous with time and advice, he was always ready to lend a hand to colleagues when needed. At the 1994 World Cup in the United States he found himself with a knee swollen like a grapefruit, but even with crutches he was present alongside his colleagues from La Stampa until the final in Los Angeles which was lost on penalties by Italy. “You can always count on Gian Paolo,” the late Marco Ansaldo, his colleague at the Turin newspaper, confided to me.
Generosity, curiosity, competence and joy are the words that can summarize the formidable career of Gian Paolo Ormezzano. He always managed to bring joy, even in the most tense and complicated moments. He managed to find the strength to joke even when years ago a circulatory problem made him faint live during the radio broadcast Front Page of Radio3. Admitted to hospital, he recovered within a few days. When I phoned him in the clinic he played down the situation with a formidable joke from a Torino fan: “You know, suddenly the light went out and I lost consciousness, but I wasn’t afraid of dying. Only one thing terrified me: waking up as a Juventus player.” Rest in peace GPO.
