At the forthcoming Roma 2024 European Athletics Championships, which will be held in the Italian capital between 7-12 June, the host nation will have a host of potential winners and medallists wearing the famous Azzurri colours.
Reigning Olympic champions Lamont Marcell Jacobs, Gianmarco Tamberi, Massimo Stano and Antonella Palmisano are just a few of the names that could climb the podium for Italy.
However, 50 years ago, the last time Rome staged the European Athletics Championships, prospects for a victory were significantly leaner and almost the sole focus of attention was on one man: Pietro Mennea.
Mennea, who hailed from Barletta in the southern region of Puglia, had already started to be known as the Freccia del Sud - Arrow of the South – but his feats at Roma 1974 would see his nickname cemented in the public imagination.
He was wildly heralded as the man who was a racing certainty to deliver a gold medal for the host nation in the wake of having won the Mediterranean Games 200m gold medal in 1971 at the age just of 19 and then bronze over the same distance at the Munich 1972 Olympic Games.
However, first he had to defeat the double Olympic sprint champion from Munich, the USSR’s Valeri Borzov.
Borzov the big threat
The 100m went the way the pundits had predicted. Mennea was the fastest man in the first round on the opening day, clocking 10.46 into a strong breeze with Borzov also winning his heat in 10.49.
The semi-finals the following day saw Borzov win his race in 10.39 but consternation tangibly enveloped among the Italian fans when Mennea was beaten to the line in his semi by France’s Dominique Chauvelot who clocked a championship record of 10.28 with Mennea – remember, still only 22 – one-hundredth in arrears.
In the final later on the second day, Borzov won in a championship record of 10.27 for his third successive 100m title with Mennea taking the silver in 10.34, despite a lacklustre start.
“Even the most chauvinistic hometown fans could appreciate it was no disgrace to lose to Borzov,” wrote the respected British magazine Athletics Weekly.
However, the parochial Italian fans were also almost certain Mennea would turn the tables over the Soviet sprinter in the longer sprint.
Mennea himself wasn’t so sure and in conversations with his coach Carlo Vittori, he also fretted over the threat from West Germany’s Manfred Omner.
In the end, Borzov controversially didn’t appear for his 200m heat on the third day, later telling reporters that he wanted to save himself for the 4x100m and that he felt he could run no faster than 20.5 although, ironically, that would actually have been sufficient to defend his title in the longer sprint.
Italy expects, Mennea delivers
Knowing that Borzov was no longer an issue, a confident Mennea breezed through his heat, doing just enough to progress and then showed some of his cards in the semi-finals on the fourth day, running 20.83 to win his race.
“With no Borzov in the 200m it was unthinkable to their [the Italian fans] hero could lose,” added Athletics Weekly in its event report, and so it proved.
Mennea, in lane two, battled with the tenacious Omner in the lane to his outside over the first 150 metres before the local star pulled away down the home straight over the final quarter of the race before being roared across the line in 20.60, a breeze into sprinter’s faces slowing down the times.
It was 14 years almost to the day since Livio Berrutti won the 1960 Olympic Games 200m on the same Rome Olympic Stadium track, albeit a cinder one in that era, becoming the first non-North American to win the event, but at Roma 1974 Mennea took over the baton from him as Italy’s most revered and adored athletics hero.
“This was the night that turned Mennea from a cult athletics figure into a household name,” was the headline in one Italian magazine.
As expected, the Rome Olympic Stadium, filled to capacity with 50,000 fans most of whom were Italian, erupted in delirium.
However, celebrations exploded all over Italy, not least in Mennea’s hometown of Barletta.
“I come from a small town called Barletta,” Mennea told reporters after his victory, just in case they didn’t know. “They nearly tore it apart last month when I won the national championship. I imagine there will be chaos there tonight.”
More medals
Mennea wasn’t finished gather medals at Roma 1974. He anchored Italy to 4x100m silver medals on the final day, although even he couldn't stop France – with Chauvelot having an outstanding the final leg to make up for his poor 100m final – as their quartet ran a championship record 38.69.
In total, Mennea’ was involved directly in more than half of Italy’s medals at Rome 1974 with 10,000m man Guiseppe Cindolo and high jumper Sara Simeoni also taking bronze medals.
Mennea went on to win both the 100m and 200m at the next European Athletics Championships four years later in Prague, his last European Athletics Championships although arguably his best races in his favoured long sprint were still to come.
In 1979, he ran 19.72 at the World University Games in Mexico City which was to remain a world record for 17 years and is still the European record after almost 37 years.
The following year, at the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games, he won the 200m Olympic title.
In total, Mennea competed for Italy no less 52 times, retiring from the sport after the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, his fifth Olympic where he was honoured with being the Italian flag bearer in the opening ceremony.
He went on to an illustrious post-sporting career as a lawyer and politician but sadly died of pancreatic cancer in just 2013.
At Roma 2024, many of his contemporaries will be present to remember the legend that is Pietro Mennea and his iconic 200m victory 50 years ago.
Mennea has also been commemorated with a special Roma 2024 coin that was issued in February this year, one of many fitting tribute a half-a-century after he ascended to being a household name in Italy.
Phil Minshull for European Athletics