Francesco, the Pope of Sport. Pier Bergonzi’s comment on the Gazzetta

Francesco, he wanted to be called only like this, will be remembered forever as the Pope of the last, a Pope in his revolutionary and popular way in the highest sense of the term. But it will also be remembered as the Pope closest to sport ever. Wojtyla was also, but Francesco had sport as a travel companion of all his life and he knew how to speak the universal language of sport like no other. That it was a pope destined to make history had been understood since that March 13, 2013, when the conclave chose him, the first South American and the first Jesuit.

“My cardinal colleagues went to take him at the end of the world …” he said with the irony that he characterized his speeches. He chose to simply be called Francesco, like the saint of Assisi, paladin of the poor. He chose to live in a Spartan dwelling of Santa Marta, no red slippers but comfortable boots. He immediately proved to be refractory to every protocol, enemy of the splendor and of the due. An uncomfortable Pope for the nomenclature and also loved by the atheists. We had the privilege of interviewing him and collecting his deepest thought on sport. In mid -December 2020, in the middle of the Covid era, he received us in Santa Marta. There were Stefano Barigelli, director of La Gazzetta dello Sport, Don Marco Pozza and Don Dario Viganò, two enlightened priests who had reached Francesco’s heart because they shared their passions. The Pope arrived dribbling every protocol and for an hour he talked about “his” sport. When, as a boy, he played football and dreamed of becoming a star from San Lorenzo, his team, but it was a “Para hard …“, A brocco, and then they put him on goal” great school of life … “. When he played basketball, his dad’s sport, and his weakness for rugby. He talked about the happy childhood and the”Pelota de trap”, The ball of rags that was enough to make happy children who had nothing.

That “ball of rags” was the metaphor of his way of understanding sport: game, fun and growth. He talked about Gino Bartali, “a big one because he left the world a little better than he had found it”. By Alex Zanardi, “I am amazed by the life force of the athletes who carry some disability impressed in their physique …” and Diego Maradona, “a fragile man, who was a poet on the field and gave joy to millions of people”. At the end of the chat, Francesco gave us the answers to 31 questions that we published in the Gazzetta dello Sport and on Sportweek of January 2, 2021. The Pope himself called that document a secular encyclical on sport. Francesco had synthesized for us 7 keywords that characterize sport, and for closer inspection also his magisterium:

–loyalty (“Doping is a shortcut and cancels the dignity of the athlete … better a clean defeat of a dirty victory”)

–I commit (“talent must be kept and trained”)

–sacrifice (“Sport is sacrum facereis the sacredness of fatigue “)

–inclusion (“against the culture of waste … no one can and must be excluded”)

–group spirit (“Team, nobody saves himself and belonging to a group is to admit that alone it is not so nice to live, exult, party”)

–asceticism (“go to discover new limits”)

–redemption (“Sport is full of people with sweat on the front who trained more hard and beat who was born with talent in his pocket”).

For the Pope, every athlete must do everything he is in his possibilities to win, “but whoever wins does not always know what is lost, because the defeat brings with him something wonderful that is worth more than the thrill of a success”. And in the end he always returned to the “Pelota de Trapo”, the ball of rags from which everything starts. Here are those phrases, those sparks of wisdom, we can find the pope who condemns all violence, the pope who through life has fought against the arrogance of power and the ostentatious wealth. The Pope. The revolutionary pope who ran as a marathon runner to the end. Who wanted to stay in the running even when he realized he was at the last kilometer … the pope who asked to be buried in the bare earth with the name only Francesco. The Pope of the last. The Pope of Sport.