«The Gian Paolo Ormezzano journalistic prize would certainly have made it smile if not laughing at taste. And he would also have a little embarrassed. He would have told us that we took him too seriously, that we all fell, but he would have done a lot of pleasure. “ Timothy Ormezzano thanks, on behalf of the whole family, for “this splendid initiative”: the institution of the prize named after the memory of the father. He tells anecdotes, like the one who tied him to Enzo Bearzot, who had been “captain of his beloved Turin”. It was 1978 and the police of the Argentine dictator Jorge Videla had paved the rifles against them considering them terrorists before the resolutive intervention of Omar Sivori. And then he adds: «My dad had a life full of fortunes, but he also said that luck is not enough, we must also believe it and buy many tickets. Those who won the first edition of this award believed in it, bought many tickets and won », he concludes by calling on stage, in the frame of the CONI Hall of Honor, in Rome, Elisa Chiari. For her, GPO was an example and a friend, almost an adoptive father. With that “capacity », as the director of Famiglia Cristiana, Stefano Stimamiglio, pointed out,” to be a teacher. Having matured in addition to the journalistic dimension, also the human one ».
A meeting, the one between Elisa and Ormezzano, almost marked by fate when, at 12 years old, browsing a number of the newspaper, weekly for children of the periodicals San Paolo. It is dedicated to the Los Angeles Olympics and opens with a long article by GPO that explains the Olympic event and boycott, “to say what the newspapers for children were then”, underlines Elisa. It is like a love at first sight that it fans her even more to sport. Until you find yourself with Ormezzano “when FC put me in the team, in 2001”. Gpo called every morning or almost, Elisa tells, “wishing a lot and looking for fairly sporty interlocutors at least from an armchair and keyboard with which to dialogue and exchange ideas: from that moment he has also found me. It was a dialogue all at a distance Turin-Milan ». And then, when “on May 4, 2002, he called as always and asked me:” What day is it today? “, I healed. He requested it with a higher voice ». When Elisa associates with the date the tragedy of the 1949 Superga GPO tells her. “You saved yourself” and I social laughing “with his round laugh like him. He laughed at my fright, because I did not immediately understand that that sort of exam was a burland. Not so long later he asked me another question, but serious and calm: “Sorry, but how old are you?”. We had never seen each other. When he understood that I had 29 he asked me: “And why is your memory on sport is so old?” ». And when Elisa reveals that sport is her curiosity since she was small he asks her why she didn’t deal with sports for work. “That time he touched me to laugh, because he seemed to me a question out of the world on his part:” Because you are you, Ubi Maior “. He laughed in my face too, to make fun of me again, but above all to open the door of his racing, ball and rebound: “Sorry, but the doctor who cannot work together ordered it?”. In that answer there is all GPO, his immense generosity without calculation and without savings: not only because I was the latest arrival and he the former director of Tuttosport, sports publishing in the press. And it was a bit as if Zoff, in 1982, had asked Galli, the third goalkeeper: “But why don’t you play?” ». Between GPO and Elisa many shared years of sports and human values. Until today, which, underlines Timothy, “it is right to deliver to Elisa” for having shared her professional growth and a lot of work with GPO “, and for many others Cos, but” above all because … “why yes”, as my father would cut very very short, who deeply esteemed Elisa as a person before even as a colleague “.
