There was a time, in the mid-1990s, when Julio Velasco often ended up in sports magazines, in the culture pages of newspapers, in magazine photos, on entertainment and in-depth television programs, among the hypotheses of political candidacies. Velasco at that time was coaching the Italian men’s national volleyball team, which was made up of a generation of players considered the strongest ever. But he was not only an important coach: he was also described as a teacher, guru and philosopher. He was often asked about questions that did not concern sports: most of the time he refused to answer, but when he did he always said something intelligent, often “inspiring”, which ended up fueling that phenomenon.
Today Julio Velasco is 72 years old and coaches the women’s national volleyball team that will play the Olympic semifinal against Turkey tonight at 8:00 p.m. Thirty years later, the interest around him is no longer what it was then, but Velasco continues to obtain important sporting results, as well as numerous media attentions: the Italian women’s team, which he has coached since the beginning of 2024 and had never reached the semifinals at the Olympics, did so by winning all four matches and losing only one set.
From the 1990s to today, Velasco has had a career full of experiences. Among other things, he has coached several national volleyball teams (including both the men’s and women’s Italian teams in the 1980s and 1990s), he became a football manager and began holding leadership and team building courses for private companies. In May 2019, he announced the end of his coaching career and went to work as the technical director of the youth sector in the Italian volleyball federation. Then, however, in April 2023, he surprisingly returned to coaching, with the Uyba Busto Arsizio women’s team (Serie A1 team), and in November he finally agreed to return to being the coach of the women’s national team in place of Davide Mazzanti.
Julio Velasco during the 1996 Olympics (LA PRESSE)
Velasco was born in La Plata, Argentina, to a Peruvian father, who died when he was six, and an Argentine mother of English origin. He studied philosophy during the years of the Argentine military dictatorship, then abandoned his studies a few exams before graduating to move to Buenos Aires. At that time he was a communist militant, he had seen some friends arrested and also a younger brother, of whom he had no news for a few months. He said he wanted to change cities and acquaintances also to be less “observed”.
He approached volleyball during his high school and university years, starting to play (but never at a professional level) and then to coach youth teams. In Buenos Aires he did various jobs and there too he coached first youth teams, then first division clubs. In 1982 he was assistant coach of the Argentine national team that won bronze at the World Championships. Some Italian players recommended him to the president of the Jesi team, who entrusted him with the team in 1983. He began to achieve great success in Italy when he moved to Panini Modena, in 1985.
He won four championships in a row, but at that point his fame was still limited to the world of volleyball. Things changed when in 1989 he was called to coach the Italian national team: at the time, Italy’s volleyball team had won practically nothing. The clubs, even highly funded and reinforced with some of the best players in the world, also won in Europe, but the national team was regularly beaten. There is a very powerful phrase that for years has been attributed to one of the first speeches that Velasco gave to introduce himself to the national players. It is not clear whether he ever actually said it and whether he really said it like that, but the mere fact that it circulates is emblematic of the charisma that has been recognized in him for decades: “You Italians are the best in the world when it comes to eating, drinking and living well. Or at least you think you are. But between these yellow lines here, the ones that enclose the 18 meters of the field, you always get hit by the Soviets, the Bulgarians, the Poles, East Germany. Your first enemy is you. From now on, you play to win.”
That same year he won his first European Championship, and began the cycle of what was called the “generation of phenomena”: two World Championships (1990, 1994), three European Championships and five World Leagues (an annual competition for national teams recently replaced by the Nations League). His national teams included great players, such as Lorenzo Bernardi, Luca Cantagalli, Andrea Lucchetta, Andrea Zorzi, Andrea Giani, Paolo Tofoli, Pasquale Gravina, Marco Bracci and Andrea Gardini. They also became known outside the world of volleyball, but above all, in the media consideration, there was Julio Velasco.
His Argentine accent, his analytical skills, his catchy phrases and his famous definitions, such as “the eyes of the tiger” that he asked his players for, made him very famous.
In the early years, the media attention on Velasco, not expressly sought but not shunned either, helped the team. Cantagalli said: “Julio makes everyone believe he can be a champion”. Italy always won and everyone liked Velasco, without political divisions, even if he expressed political opinions, so much so that he was indicated as a possible candidate for the left, sooner or later. It was the moment in which he was in all the newspapers, even when Italy was not playing, and in which he was invited on many television programs, to give lessons: on sports, on leadership, on values, on life.
Velasco was able to transform sports talk and volleyball anecdotes into symbols of bigger things. The best-known example is the culture of alibis, in which spikers, setters and receivers blame each other for a bad attack. Over the years Velasco repeated it several times, with more details or within a broader speech. All are worth listening to, the one below is one of the first, in which the ending is missing in which the receivers have no choice but to blame the electrician for a badly placed spotlight, or the janitor for not darkening a window properly: “If we change the janitor, we win the games!”
His fame even surpassed the first disappointment, an elimination in the quarterfinals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Four years later in Atlanta, Italy lost again in the final, against the Netherlands. Some players had privately begun to complain about the overexposure of the coach, who resigned after the elimination: “I’m leaving because I simply gave the best of myself and because there was too much identification, which is bad for me and for the team. Too much pressure, and then the identification of the team with me. Just think that during the Olympics some newspapers headlined “Velasco faces Yugoslavia””.
The following year he became coach of the women’s national team, then he led the Czech, Spanish, Iranian and Argentine national teams, but also four Italian club teams. In between there was his experience in football: in 1998 Sergio Cragnotti, owner of Lazio, called him to become general manager of the club. Cragnotti was the owner of Cirio (which later went bankrupt) and in those years he spared no expense: there was talk of a contract of one billion lire per year (almost one million euros today) for four years.
Velasco had no football skills, but he had to bring “winning culture”, organize the company, supervise: in reality his tasks and powers were not well defined and led to an early separation. When he was freed, Massimo Moratti hired him at Inter, as head of the physical-athletic area.
Julio Velasco general manager of Lazio in 1998 (ANSA/DM)
He returned to volleyball, but he also returned to talking about other things. Even today he holds lessons in the corporate field, whose aim is to inspire managers and employees to achieve more results and better working conditions, with a series of principles and speeches developed over time. Sometimes they are simple and effective, such as the invitation to take risks (“One cannot have a permanent job at the Post Office and a reckless life like Vasco Rossi, at the same time”), other times they are less classic and more elaborate, such as the analysis of the concepts of victory and defeat or the definition of talent.
2024-08-08 09:11:47
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