Giro d’Italia organisers are hoping recent police investigations and an easier route mean the race, which starts in Sardinia on Saturday, will escape the doping scandals that have blighted it in past years.
Italian sport
Archived Posts from this Category
April 4, 2007
Sir Alex Ferguson once claimed before a European Cup tie in Milan that “when an Italian tells me it’s pasta I check under the sauce to make sure”. He has chosen his words more carefully ahead of tonight’s quarter-final against Roma but Manchester United’s capacity for upsetting Italian hosts has resurfaced in the form of an extraordinary diplomatic row.
February 21, 2007
The Italian rugby union team may be a cause for some derision. Shades of the Jamaican bobsleigh team … or the British Davis Cup team come to that. Their election to the front rank of European rugby nations in 2000, as the Five Nations became the Six, and the Italians became regular whipping boys for the other countries (with some very honourable exceptions) has also occasioned some grumbling. The argument is, of course, that the ‘big’ countries don’t get proper practice against lowly opposition. Just as with cricket Tests against Bangladesh, a rugby fixture against Italy is sometimes seen as a waste of valuable match practice - scant preparation for facing South Africa, Australia or the All Blacks.
But the Italians have more of a rugby pedigree than they’re given credit for. And if it hadn’t been for the curious intervention of Benito Mussolini, they might be more of a power today. Rugby had been introduced in the early 1900s although it never enjoyed the popularity of soccer. Il Duce, leader of Italy from 1922-43, detested football whether it be rugby or soccer, because of their English associations, so he attempted to suppress them and pushed a game called Volata (supposedly based on forms of football played in classical times, such as harpastum, and therefore indigenous to Italy). It never caught on of course, and the new code was abandoned in 1933. The fledgling sport, which didn’t have the stronger league structure of soccer, never recovered.
Italy in the Six Nations from the Guardian
