Boxing, farewell to Nino Benvenuti: he was Olympic and world champion

Paolo Valenti's radio story on that 17 April 1967 kept between 16 and 18 million Italians awake: Nino Benvenuti beat the American Emil Griffith and became Middleweight World Champion. An event that entered by right into the history of Italian sport and beyond. The great boxer from Trieste passed away today at the age of 87. He was undoubtedly the greatest Italian interpreter of the 'noble art', a worthy heir to the legendary Primo Carnera.

Born in Isola d'Istria on 26 April 1938 to Istrian exiles, Benvenuti was Olympic welterweight champion at the 1960 Rome Olympics, and was previously two-time European amateur champion. In the professional ranks he was World Superwelterweight Champion between 1965 and 1966, European Middleweight Champion between 1965 and 1967, and World Middleweight Champion between 1967 and 1970. A complete, calculating and precise boxer, Benvenuti made technique and speed his best weapons in the ring. Qualities that kept him at a high level well past the age of 30, which for the time was a real feat.

In 1968 he won the prestigious Fighter of the year award, to this day still the only Italian to have achieved this accolade. His first match of the trilogy against Emile Griffith was named 1967 Fight of the year, an award also given three years later to the match he lost to ArgentineCarlos Monzón. Benvenuti was the only Italian boxer to have held the world title in two weight categories (middleweight and superwelter). Before him, among European boxers, only Marcel Cerdan had managed to win the middleweight world championship on US soil. His four consecutive middleweight world championship defences put him behind only Marvin Hagler and Monzón. The International Boxing Hall of Fame (1999) recognised him among the greatest boxers of all time, the only Italian boxer together with Duilio Loi. His induction also into the National Italian-American Sport Hall of Fame consecrated him (as well as legends such as Rocky Marciano and Joe Di Maggio) to the most glorious pages of Italian-American sport worldwide.

Growing up in a Trieste still divided in half between Italy and Yugoslavia, in the mid-1950s Benvenuti began to showcase his boxing skills at national level. The consecration came at the Rome Games in 1960 where he won the gold medal in welterweight by beating the Soviet Jurij Radonjak in the final. In addition to the gold, Benvenuti also won the prestigious 'Val Barker' cup, awarded to the technically best boxer of the tournament, ahead of middleweight Cassius Clay. The professional career in superwelters and middleweights saw Benvenuti as the protagonist of three legendary rivalries: in Italy with Sandro Mazzinghi, internationally with Emil Griffith and Carlos Monzon.

The rivalry with Mazzinghi divided Italy in the 1960s like that between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. Tall, blond and with an elegant bearing, Benvenuti was the idol of women. Short and stocky, Mazzinghi was the classic boxer from the street. Benvenuti won both bouts in 1965 valid for the superwelter world championship. There was never good blood between the two, until peace was sealed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of their legendary fights.