Genoa – Abdon Pamich reaches the age of 90, the oldest Olympic champion. Born on 3 October 1933: eight months earlier, Adolf Hitler had become Reich Chancellor, the origin ofdomino effect that turned his life upside down.
For many years Pamich, a graduate in psychology and sociology, has been speaking, collecting and writing about a lost multi-ethnic and multicultural society: Italians, Slavs, Austrians, Jews, Hungarians. “For Hungarians, Fiume has remained Fiume, it is not Rijeka. Because if Trieste was Vienna’s outlet to the sea, Fiume and Pula were the ports of Budapest”. And the nostalgia ends up including the “compatriot” Ezio Loik, swept away in the tragedy of Grande Torino, and all the others: the Triestians, the Istrians, the Dalmatians, the Zadarians: Giorgio Oberweger, Nereo Rocco, Nino Benvenuti, Agostino Straulino, Gabre Gabric, Ottavio Missoni, even two mountaineers buried somewhere on Mont Blanc. “De Gasperi chose Alto Adige where they are German, not Italian Istria”
Pamich, the Fiume native who became Genoese, which ended up in the sights of the keen eye of Giuseppe Malaspina, who wore the amaranth Amatori shirt to invent a white one of his own: Esso Club Genova. From San Martino to via Assarotti, in the offices of the oil company: it was a first warm-up before the evening training.
For many Abdon tends to be reduced to that race of almost sixty years ago – it was 18 October 1964 – a those 50 km walk that awarded the Olympic hour medal on streets shiny with rain, to his progress in a canyon of livid buildings, to his duel with the British railway worker Paul Nihill, to his “stop” to free his intestines while around him Japanese policemen in white gloves formed a square like the grenadiers shielded the Emperor having a bowel movement, to his gesture on the wool thread (it was still there…) which in an instant made him go from anger to transfiguration. He had waited and his day had come.
«There are many who summarize me in that day, in those gestures, in the events of that race which included two 25 kilometer segments in the middle of the city. That was not the moment of perfect joy. It must be looked further back, to ’56, when I went to Prague-Podebrady which was then a classic, a 50 km world championship. When I arrived, I took a look at the list of starters and said to myself: if you find a place in the top fifteen, you can be satisfied. I won.” That of Abdon, of Pino Dordoni, of their adversaries and friends, was the expression of the “sporting pace”, a broad compass: now we go very fast, with feverish steps, and certain women travel faster than those who for Abdon is the term of eternal comparison, of esteem: the East German Peter Frenkel, the British Kenneth Thompson, the Ukrainian Soviet Vladimir Golubnichy.
After that Bohemian success which, at the age of 23, sent him onto the stage, a few months later Pamich finished fourth at the Melbourne Olympics, reached after an interminable journey, in the day of glory of Norman Read, New Zealander, and on a torrid afternoon in Rome ’60 he snatched the bronze medal behind Thompson and the Swedish veteran John Ljunggren, another champion with patience, gold in ’48 in London. It was something, it wasn’t what he wanted. And so he waited some more and the day came to Tokyo as if persistence, according to empty adages, should be rewarded. In reality, what counted was the will, the ability to react to the twists of fate: in his case, those pains in his lower abdomen. He had been marching for ten years, he would have added a second European title to the one in ’62, he would have continued for another ten seasons, he would have taken part, without luck, in two more Olympics. How many kilometers? «Never counted. Many”.
#Pamich #legend #reaches #milestone #years