At the 1936 Olympics came the gold medal

In the thirties there were problemsItaly to mid august They didn’t care about holiday club revenue or compare with prices in Albania, but our country was grappling with fascism and the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. A few months ago, the war ended in Ethiopia and a few days later Polonia won their third championship, led by Arpad Weiss.

In the summer they held The Olympic Games in Berlin from August 1 to 16and was marked by the anti-Semitism and delusions of grandeur of Adolf Hitler, who spared no expense and built sophisticated structures at the time to show the world the greatness of the Third Reich.

Germany won the most medals (89), inevitably ahead of the United States (56) and Hungary (16) who only topped the podium in football, polo and basketball.

Pozzo with his children at the Berlin Games. (Photo courtesy of the FIFA website).

Specifically in the football tournament, it wasItaly to Vittoria Puzowho started among the least favored and managed to edge out the USA, Japan and Norway to the final match against Austria.

After the first World Cup in 1930, the Olympic tournament was reduced in size and it was decided that only amateur players would participate in the latter. This novelty brought some problems to the coach, who had won the World Championship on home soil two years earlier, and also repeated it in the 1938 edition in France.

So Pozzo had to call up the players registered in the university or in the higher institutes, but it was not an easy search and the selector was the same that said: “I had to hold on to the students and called the players one by one, determined not to send off whoever I summoned. In this case, too, I had to get to the number twenty-two. I had previously participated in the Universiade in Bologna, and I never lost contact with the student environment In Florence, Bologna, Livorno, but mainly in Pisa, in a specially organized match, I saw some players who were very well prepared technically, who were in our alley. I gathered information, and one of them even followed closely. One by one, they flocked All of them: Piccini from Fiorentina, Baldo from Lazio, Biagi from Pisa, Marchini from Lucchese, Cappelli from Viareggio, Scarabello from Spezia, Venturini from Sampdoria. All true students, men from good families. Then came Foni and Rafa from Juventus, and Bertone from Pisa, The last of them were Frosi and Locatelli, already about to be snatched away by Ambrosiana.

In the final chapter at the Olympia Stadion Berlin, he played August 15, 1936The crowd was mostly in favor of the Austrians but the Azores were turned away in the usual fashion Hannibal Froesewho bet because of his shortsightedness.

The national team advances with the goal of the player who will also win the top scorer classification (7 goals)for 70, but ten minutes later Kinberger equalized and took the match to extra time. To resolve the situation, Frosi once again thought it over, and put his signature on the indelibleThe only Olympic gold for Italian football.

Annibale Frosi wears the Italian jersey at the 1936 Olympics (photo from the FIFA website).

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That was another masterpiece of Vitorio Pozzo, who in his coaching career went back to two World Cups and two World Cups (1934 and 1938): “For me, that was the greatest inner joy I extracted from my long sporting career. I had some satisfaction of duty successfully accomplished. This is the top: starting from nothing, and in two months of closed, hard, tireless, almost obstinate work – and yet Full of feelings – conquering the Olympic Games.

The boys on the soccer team gave Italy one of the eight gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, of which the blue delegation finished with 22 medals.