One of the great “hidden” protagonists of sports TV, a name known to all fans, has passed away in Rome. He worked on the Games from Barcelona ’92 to Rio 2016 before retiring
For a lifetime he was one of the many faceless names that filled our afternoons, our evenings on the sofas at home, glued to the television screens. “Directed by Nazareno Balani…”. How many times have we heard this phrase, coming from voices familiar to us, to which we knew how to associate a face, a physiognomy. He, on the other hand, operated in the shadows, but he was one of those indispensable cogs to make the machine work, that is, the production, the broadcasting, what we saw, the emotions they conveyed to us. Nazareno left, away from the spotlight, on the other side of the cameras, just as he had lived.
Olympics
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He died in Rome, ten after leaving Rai, his second home. He had worked in many Giri d’Italia, World Cup football championships, and had been THE director of the Olympics, an uninterrupted streak from Barcelona ’92 to Rio 2016. He was always attentive to the human aspect, as he told Il Fatto Quotidiano in an interview five years ago, on the occasion of the Tokyo Games: “We, like all the other big networks, added cameras in the stadiums where we thought we would medal, in order to capture the faces of our athletes, their expressions. This is fundamental to talk about sport. Think about the fourth place finisher, but in truth it is a great result. They are all emotions that risk being lost.” One thing is certain: his legacy, his memory, will never be lost.
