Many Neapolitan champions are protagonists from water polo, swimming and rowing to boxing, judo and fencing
In Naples, more than anywhere else, sport has always been synonymous with belonging. It may happen that you remember some athletes from the past not so much for their results, but for their origins and provenance. Not to mention the great champions who proudly won with the colors and roots of their city tattooed on them: the Abbagnales, the Maddalonis, the Porzios and many others, together they made history and were Italians by birth, rather than by merit. sportsmen.
water
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Blue like water, which is life: the brothers Giuseppe and Carmine Abbagnale learned it first in the family countryside, growing flowers not far from Pompeii, than at the nautical club of Castellammare di Stabia, where they learned the art and toil of boating. Then, from 1981, the year of the first world title in Munich, their surname became the symbol of a rowing dynasty that still dreams today with the last heir, Vincenzo, present at the Paris Games. The rest is history: 17 world titles and 9 Olympic medals, including the three gold ones in Seoul 1988, which also bear the signature of the third brother Agostino, in his first adventure in five hoops on the four sculls. Pino Porzio also owes everything to water, with his brother Franco: the two legends of Italian water polo have won 25 championships and made Rudic’s Settebello great, with the last Italian Olympic gold in Barcelona 1992 (plus a World Cup, a World Cup , one European and two Mediterranean Games). But it is Naples as a whole that remembers the three volleyball eras that made the city invincible: Rari Nantes, Canottieri and finally Posillipo. Massimiliano Rosolino also passed through the prestigious hilly neighborhood: the Olympic champion in Sydney 2000 and world champion in Fukuoka 2001 in the 200 meter medley, he was also a fourteen-time European champion and a sixty-time medalist. Another sporting legend, now a television personality, son of Naples.
lecture
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Other Neapolitan champions were born in the gyms scattered around the city, often real life training centers. Patrizio Oliva experienced family hardship in a reality as far from easy as that of Poggioreale, before getting into the ring and giving himself up to boxing. Fifteen kilometers on foot every day to go and return from the Quartieri Spagnoli to the Fulgor gym: one of the strongest Italian boxers ever grew up there, gold medalist at the 1980 Moscow Olympics and then, as a professional, Italian super-lightweight champion, champion of ‘European super lightweight and welterweight, super lightweight world champion with 57 victories out of 59 fights. With the same courage and self-sacrifice Gianni Maddaloni, O’ Mae’ owner of the Star Judo Club gym and father of the world champion Pino. His free initiation and preparation for martial arts in the heart of Scampia is worth more than any medal. Sport and legality, a positive message that was also picked up by the Neapolitan fencer Diego Occhiuzzi (in the wake of the Olympians Ferdinando Meglio and Sandro Cuomo and the world champions Raffaello Caserta and Luigi Tarantino), silver at the London Games and world champion in 2015, leading the national team of Prandelli in Quarto on the “anti-Camorra” camp.
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