FOOTBALL
Top - The great protagonists of the calendar year will remain Juventus champions of Italy and Chelsea champions of Europe. The Bianconeri have a fantastic 12 months, in which they win the Scudetto and the Italian Super Cup and are still leading Serie A this season: they only leave the Coppa Italia to Napoli in May and in the league they don't lose a match until November, when they surrender to Inter at home and then to Milan. Conte's team play great games and have finally rediscovered their winning pedigree. The goal for 2013 is to win the Champions League, which this year was daringly won by Chelsea thanks to the great champion Didier Drogba and the work of an Italian coach, Roberto Di Matteo. To remember the heroic feat of the Camp Nou (from 2-0 to 2-2 in 10 against 11) and the crazy final in Munich against Bayern, resolved by the blows of the Ivorian. They deserve mention too Europa League and European Super Cup winner Atletico Madrid and world champion Corinthians, while among the players in addition to the usual Lionel Messi (record of 91 goals in the calendar year for him) emerging players should be mentioned Radamel Falcao, protagonist with Atletico Madrid, e Edinson Cavani of Napoli, top scorer of the Italian calendar year with 45 goals. At the national level, the European Championships in Poland and Ukraine have seen the umpteenth triumph of Spain already champion of Europe and of the world, who outclassed Italy in the final with a net 4-0.
Flop – If the top is Juve, the flop is the anti-Juve: whether it's Milan, Inter, or Napoli, no team has been up to the black and whites both from the point of view of the game and from that of results. Merit of Antonio Conte and his boys, true, but also a demerit of the others, as indeed emerges in the European field, where everyone is struggling (at times, to tell the truth, even Juventus). And if in that phantom "anti-Juve" that can't even tickle the leaders, the inadequacy of Italian football were hidden, increasingly distant from the technical and above all economic canons of other realities in the rest of Europe? Maybe, and certainly our image will not improve after the story of football bets, already dark in itself and made even more gloomy by how it was managed: scattered lines of inquiry and with different timing, confusing sports justice, alleged "bombs" announced by the confessions of the "gypsy" Gegic (someone has heard nothing more ?) or by the Chief of Police Massimo Manganelli himself, and many perplexities. Extremely floppy result: a first sheet of penalties and disqualifications arrives correctly within the summer, for others (see Naples) you have to wait until halfway through the championship, while the more delicate positions in the early stages (see arrest of Mauri and blitz in the blue training camp for Criscito on the eve of the European Championships) are those of which nothing more is known. Initial coup de theatre? Subsequent cover-ups? Clockwork justice? May 2013 give us back a healthy and fair football: both in playing it and in judging it.
TENNIS
Top - If the extraordinary Novak Djokovic accepts it, who in the end closes 2012 exactly like 2011, as first in the standings and with another Grand Slam won (Australia), but this is indisputably the year of the great redemption of Roger Federer: the timeless Swiss champion, who seemed to be on the inexorable sunset after closing 2011 without any Slam won, won his seventh Wimbledon in July and his 17th Slam (absolute record). Not only that: following this triumph, he returns to number 1 Atp for several months, surpassing the only record he was missing, that of weeks at the top of the standings. Sampras' record (286 weeks) is pulverized and Roger breaks through the 300m wall, reaching 302m. Still on the grass in London, he also wins the Olympic silver, losing in the final Andy Murray, which is the other top of the season. The Scotsman gets rid of the complex of the eternal second and after the Wimbledon final lost by Federer, he wins his Olympic revenge and in September he wins his first Grand Slam, triumphing at the US Open.
Flop – Very difficult to find a flop, especially in the year in which the so-called Fab Four divided the stakes equally, winning a Grand Slam each. If we really have to choose one, given that Djokovic is number 1 in the end, Federer rises in a big way and Murray makes the expected leap in quality, it's the Spaniard's turn Rafael Nadal the award of the worst, with the extenuating however of the knee injury that stopped him for the entire second part of the season. But even before the problem suffered in the Wimbledon tournament, and perhaps also because of that, the best Nadal had not been seen: he wins his seventh Roland Garros and makes history, but he also loses a final already won in Melbourne against Djokovic and is not never as brilliant and convincing as in the past.
FORMULA 1
Top - Little to say: better car or not, for three years now, and that is since the duel between Fernando Alonso's Ferrari and Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel, only the young German won, the youngest in the history of F1 to win three Drivers' World Championships. With all due respect therefore to Domenicali and Montezemolo, and to the Spanish driver himself who in a tweet proclaimed himself the best driver of the season: while recognizing their enormous work, we remind them that after Monza Alonso had a 39-point lead and since then, incidents aside, he has always been inferior to Red Bull. Merciless judgement? No, objective: Vettel won without stealing anything, with a faster but also more unreliable car, because if the Ferrari drivers curse Grosjean, the German too suffered more than one retirement due to that famous car "which Alonso drove he won the World Cup hands down”.
Flop – La Ferrari, for the above reasons, but only for the final part of the season. In fact, the first few months are exceptional, the team works for Alonso and despite the initial gap, the Spaniard does his best and takes the lead in the World Championship. From that moment on, however, Red Bull works better, the Prancing Horse perhaps thinks too much about managing the advantage and also makes a fall in style after the last Grand Prix in Brazil, aiming to have Vettel disqualified for non-existent impropriety in order to be awarded the desktop title. The glorious tradition of Maranello would impose greater fair play.
OLYMPIC GAMES
Top - 2012 was clearly the year of the London Olympics as well as the European football championships. The blue expedition closes with a good eighth place in the medal table: 28 podiums, in line with expectations or even slightly better (but there are also many regrets, it could have been more than 30). Equaled the Beijing 2008 expedition, but on that occasion we won one gold less (7 instead of 8). Therefore, all 68 Azzurri medalists go among the top. PRAYED: Men's team archery (Michele Frangilli, Marco Galiazzo and Mauro Nespoli), Women's individual foil fencing (Elisa Di Francisca), Men's K1 canoe slalom (Daniele Molmenti), Women's team foil fencing (Elisa Di Francisca, Arianna Errigo , Ilaria Salvatori, Valentina Vezzali), women's skeet shooting (Jessica Rossi), men's team foil fencing (Valerio Aspromonte, Giorgio Avola, Andrea Baldini, Andrea Cassarà), men's 50m rifle shooting three positions (Niccolò Campriani) , Taekwondo category +80 kg men (Carlo Molfetta). SILVER: Men's 10-metre pistol shooting (Luca Tesconi), Women's individual foil fencing (Arianna Errigo), Men's individual saber fencing (Diego Occhiuzzi), Men's 10-metre rifle shooting (Niccolò Campriani), Men's rowing for two sculls (Romano Battisti , Alessio Sartori), Men's Pit Skeet Shooting (Massimo Fabbrizi), Men's Heavyweight Boxing (Clemente Russo), Men's Super Heavyweight Boxing (Roberto Cammarelle), Men's Water Polo (Matteo Aicardi, Maurizio Felugo, Pietro Figlioli, Deni Fiorentini, Valentino Gallo , Massimo Giacoppo, Alex Giorgetti, Niccolò Gitto, Giacomo Pastorino, Amaurys Perez, Danijel Premus, Christian Presciutti, Stefano Tempesti, coach Sandro Campagna). BRONZE: Women's individual foil fencing (Valentina Vezzali), Women's Judo 52 kg category (Rosalba Forciniti), Men's team saber fencing (Aldo Montano, Diego Occhiuzzi, Luigi Samele, Luigi Tarantino), Men's artistic gymnastics rings (Matteo Morandi), 10 km swimming women's cross-country skiing (Martina Grimaldi), men's triple jump athletics (Fabrizio Donato), men's Taekwondo -80 kg category (Mauro Sarmiento), men's super light weight boxing (Vincenzo Mangiacapre), men's volleyball (Andrea Bari, Emanuele Birarelli, Dante Boninfante, Alessandro Fei, Andrea Giovi, Michal Lasko, Luigi Mastrangelo, Samuele Papi, Simone Parodi, Cristian Savani, Dragan Travica, Ivan Zaytsev, coach Mauro Berruto), men's mountain bike cycling (Marco Aurelio Fontana), women's team rhythmic gymnastics (Elisa Bianchi, Romina Laurito, Marta Pagnini, Elisa Santoni, Anzhelika Savrayuk, Andreea Stefanescu). Among the top moments of the Olympics we must certainly mention the athletic feats of the Jamaican Usain Bolt, who scores the double treble (first in history to do so) repeating the gold medals in Beijing 2008 in the 100m, 200m and 4×100m relay, and in swimming by the American Michael Phelps, which reaches 22 medals at the Games, including 18 gold: both are absolute records.
Flop – The two big flops of the blue expedition, the first sporting, the second not even, are Federica Pellegrini and Alex Schwazer. The national Super Fede, returning from an excellent 2011 as double world champion for the second time, this time takes the cue, and with her the whole swimming expedition sinks, which ends with zero medals in the pool and the only bronze for Martina Grimaldi in the 10 km basically. Pellegrini betrays expectations both in the 200m and 400m freestyle, even if in hindsight the results are nothing more than the normal consequence of a poorly prepared Olympics and a 2012 that was already lackluster in the pre-Olympic phase. The Venetian champion has decided that she needs a semi-sabbatical, let's say "soft" year to find her motivation and present herself again as competitive at Rio 2016. Those who will certainly not go to Rio on the other hand are walker Alex Schwazer, former medalist gold in 2008 in Beijing in the 50 km, caught with his hands in the jam for using doping and therefore expelled from the blue expedition and later disqualified for 4 years by the IOC. The South Tyrolean is caught positive for Epo a month before the Games, and aware of having been taken in the chestnut he decides on his own not to show up for the 20 km race, prior to the announcement of the doping case by Wada. His case, although reprehensible from a sporting point of view, however, has sparked a debate from a psychological and human point of view around his reaction: his tears and public apologies have been interpreted by many as a forced choice in the face of evidence facts, but how many champions of the past and present have we seen denying the evidence to the end? Surely guilty, but no doubt sincerely repentant.
