There is a dark fate that accompanies a football team, mine. A cruel and bloody fate: the history of Turin is full of tragedies. Sometimes immense, like the Superga air disaster on 4 May 1949, which destroyed the Grande Torino then, according to many, the strongest team in the world. With that of 1949 (there were two games left) he had won five league titles in a row. But the "cynic and cheater" fate has continued to rage ever since.
The latest news is from yesterday. The players' coach, returning from the ringing (3 to 1) away match in Verona, where he had even broken the historic record for consecutive away victories (five), was crossing the ring road tollbooth when he was violently rear-ended by a BMW, which got stuck under the platform and caught fire.
With great presence of mind the players and accompanying persons got out and doused the flames with water from their bottles (it turned out later that the toll booth was not equipped for emergencies). A generous gesture, but which did not save the life and two young passengers of the car, while the 24-year-old driver is still dying to the Turin CTO. But the gloomy touch of this umpteenth tragedy is another: the BMW was thrown against the Bull's bus by a stolen lorry and the two thieves managed to escape.
A tragic fate linked to the grenade shirt. On 7 October 1967 it was played at what was then the Stadio Comunale Torino-Sampdoria. The Bull won 4 to 2 driven by an overtime Gigi Meroni, a very talented young winger, also loved for his very nonconformist life, which at the time was described with the term "beat".
The "grenade butterfly", as Nando Dalla Chiesa defined it thirty years later in a beautiful book, that evening he had dinner with his teammate Fabrizio Poletti. On leaving the restaurant, the two crossed Corso Re Umberto in a fairly dark area away from the traffic strips. In the middle of the aisle they had to stop because a car was approaching at great speed, but behind them Attilio Romero's 124 coupé was arriving, a young super-fan of Turin (he kept Meroni's photo on the dashboard), one of the most well-known personalities of the granata curve.
Romero braked, but was unable to avoid them: Meroni died, Poletti got away without too much damage, Romero was acquitted because he was not at fault and 34 years later he became president of Turin bought by the industrialist of the Fiat related industries, the owner of Ergom, Francesco Cimminelli.
In 2005 Turin went bankrupt, two years later Cimminelli also went bankrupt and Romero, a pleasant and substantially adamantine person, even recovered a criminal sentence. This is Turin.
A tragic and gloomy fate that knows no stops. On the morning of Tuesday April 17, 1979, returning from the Easter weekend, on the Autostrada dei Fiori near Andora (SV), Paolo Barison lost his life, former champion of Italy with Milan. An articulated lorry loaded with cars had suddenly skidded and broke through the guard rail ending up in the opposite lane.
Barison traveled to Turin aboard the Fiat 130 Coupé of the coach Luigi Radice (the one who won the 1976 championship, the last of Toro), who was with him and who suffered serious injuries, but managed to save himself. Enrico Elia, father of the showgirl Antonella, also perished in the car crash, overwhelmed by the mad vehicle.
On the night of August 3, 1993, Gianluigi Lentini, who had just moved from Turin to Milan amidst the ire of the grenade fans, crashed with his Porsche on the Turin-Piacenza road while returning from a trip to Liguria where, according to the undenied vox populi, he had met the wife of a striker from the Juventus. At the start of the journey Lentini had had to replace a punctured tire with the spare wheel, but he had forgotten to slow down. He sustained serious injuries, returned to play, but his career, which seemed unstoppable, collapsed.
A tragic and gloomy fate and not just for the deaths. On 3 October 1977, after a Scudetto and a second place by one point at the end of a head-to-head match with Juventus in which all the records of the sixteen-team Serie A were broken, Davide Garbero, 4 years old, nephew of the president of Turin Orfeo Pianelli was kidnapped, great industrialist of the Fiat related industries, manufacturer of assembly lines spread all over the world, even in Togliattigrad, in the then USSR. Almost a lightning seizure given the times: David was returned on October 27 against the payment of a ransom of 1,5 billion lire.
The implacable fate sent Pianelli into a liquidity crisis which in the meantime saw its assembly lines set aside for Cesare Romiti's robot revolution. He even ended up in jail for fraudulent bankruptcy, but he was acquitted of it: the missing money ended up in the pockets of the kidnappers and the judges took it into account. There was bankruptcy, not fraud. Pianelli had to sell all his properties.
This is Taurus.
