Alfredo Ambrosetti would have opened the 'Forum' to Velasco
From a totally Italian Sunday to a… beastly Sunday. Italian Volleyball rises to the top of the World Championships a year after winning the Olympics, but the South Tyrolean team sees the Spaniard regain the tennis crown, Pozzecco is swept away by Doncic, the Slovenian basketball phenomenon, and Ferrari fails to repeat its feat in Monza. It's also the Sunday of farewells to Armani and Ambrosetti.
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Sunday, September 7, 2025, was a day of ordinary Italian sporting intoxication, between Ringhio1, who beat Estonia 5-0, and Ringhio2, who awaited Israel in the climb to qualify for the World Cup we miss the most, the one for Gattuso's national football team, to emerge victorious by a single goal in the final 5-4.
What happened on this brutal Italian Sunday?
14:00 PM; Montmelò-Barcelona, Spain, MotoGP: Marc Marquez can celebrate at home with the Made in Italy Ducati despite (and thanks to) his brother Alex's crash right before his eyes. Alex quickly recovers from the slip-up, forcing Marc to postpone his date with the world championship helmet by at least one round. The fact remains that Ducati celebrated even better on Sunday than it did on Saturday.
14:30 PM; Bangkok, Thailand, volleyball: After their historic victory over Brazil, Julio Velasco's women, battling Turkey for the legendary world title, extend their legendary run to 36, both for themselves and their legions of fans, raising the Italian flag on top of the world twenty-three years after an equally historic triumph. Velasco thus becomes the third coach of an Italian national team to win both Olympic and World Championship titles in a row, following Vittorio Pozzo (soccer) and Ratko Rudic (water polo).
15:00 PM; Monza, Italy, Formula 1: The Italian Grand Prix beckoned to Ferrari despite the blunders Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton made in Saturday's practice (and where does that leave Carletto's slipstream???), but the Maranello team's reds were pale pink.
17:30 PM; Riga, Latvia, basketball: Pozzecco's youngsters are testing their renewed ambitions for the European Championship final against Slovenia, unconcerned about Luka Doncic. But Doncic is a true phenomenon: a true genius, he's single-handedly scored 42 goals against Gianmarco Pozzecco's team. Everyone melts away: players and coach, who even claimed to have a defense comparable to that of Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini in football... Slovenia has the basketball equivalent of cycling's Tadej Pogacar. Both are unstoppable. Pozzecco ends up humiliated and, in tears, packs his bags... not only to return from Latvia, but also to leave the national team. For eternal president Gianni Petrucci, an age-old problem has arisen again: finding the ideal leader for the Azzurri bench, his Velasco, in short. His departure to the "Poz," especially when surrounded by guardian angels with impressive surnames, certainly wasn't a sign that the problem was solved. Who knows if the same will happen for Ringhio Gattuso with Gianluigi Buffon...
20:00 PM; New York, USA, tennis: Jannik Sinner challenges Carlos Alcaraz in the US Open. Carlitos is in fine form and crushes the South Tyrolean in four sets, reclaiming the world No. 1 spot. Meanwhile, in the stands and around the US stadium, a flurry of activity unfolds: security checks imposed upon President Donald Trump's arrival delay the start of the match by 48 minutes, ticket holders enter until the second set has already begun, spectators boo the Tycoon and applaud his "enemy" Bruce Springsteen with evident satisfaction, Spike Lee continues to jinx Sinner, and so on. And so, on September 8th, we wake up to the Spaniard returning to world No. 1 status after 455 days and 65 weeks of Sinner's reign, which on this occasion was clearly lacking in first-serve attempts.
From an Italian Sunday to a brutal Sunday for Pozzecco first and then for Sinner, overlooking Ferrari, who this time didn't touch the ball in Monza. The Grand Slam tennis season thus ends 2-2: Australian Open and Wimbledon for the Italian; Roland Garros and the US Open for the Spaniard. Sinner confesses the need to break out of what he now considers a sort of comfort zone in a game that has become predictable for his opponents. It really has to be that way. The numbers confirm it. The Spaniard leaves New York with his sixth win in his last seven direct matches.
Who knows why, but we see in Carlos Alcaraz for Jannik Sinner what Miguel Indurain was for Gianni Bugno and Claudio Chiappucci in cycling. When the giant from Navarre showed up at the start, the results were in the air for the Italians. This happened both in the Giro d'Italia and especially in the Tour de France. 1991 Tour: Indurain won the yellow jersey over Bugno and Chiappucci. 1992 Tour: Indurain prevailed over Chiappucci and Bugno. 1993 Tour: Indurain continued his saga against Rominger and Jaskula, but that year marked the beginning of a different story.
Images of those years chase each other in my mind as helicopters fly over Lombardy, escorting those returning from the Italian Grand Prix handed to Max Verstappen by bungling rivals to their destinations. And as participants depart from Cernobbio (Como) for the Ambrosetti Forum, a meeting now organized by The European House of Ambrosetti, an extension of the brilliant intuition of Alfredo Ambrosetti, the only person capable of bringing together the elite of global economics and politics, including in Italian, fifty years earlier.
Alfredo Ambrosetti passed away a few hours ago and rests in a funeral chapel in Azzate (Varese), just a few kilometers from the Silos theater on Via Bergognone in Milan, where the farewell to the giant of designer giants, Giorgio Armani, is taking place. Two great losses for Italy.
Alfredo Ambrosetti was the cousin of Alfredo Binda, the first absolute master of world cycling: the only one in the world to have been paid the same prize money as the winner of a sporting event because he would have surely won that Giro d'Italia (1930), killing the interest. Ambrosetti and Binda were grandchildren of the same grandfather... Alfredo. And when Alfredo Binda's heirs were preparing to celebrate the centenary of their forefather (1902-2002), World Champion, Alfredo Ambrosetti invited us to the Clubino in Milan, at number 3 Via degli Omenoni, for a working breakfast. There, in that sacred place of Milanese aristocracy and high finance – a place twinned on a reciprocal basis with Boodle's in London and Knickerbocker in New York – formerly the residence of the Omenoni family, Alfredo “Alfredone” Ambrosetti invited us to ask if we could compile a publication commemorating his famous cousin Alfredo Binda, tangibly celebrating his exploits in sport and in life.
The Clubino was subject to strict rules and only welcomed those wearing shirts and ties. Naturally, I showed up without a tie, and at reception I was politely and firmly invited to put on a clean one, which I had to return (!) upon leaving after an unforgettable experience.
It was 2001 or so. I proudly accepted the job without asking for a penny because I considered it a tribute to the man who had hosted me several times—the cyclist Alfredo—in his Milanese home on Viale Argonne and effectively adopted me through confidential information, which, as such, I am careful not to reveal. There I met his wife, Angela Ambrosetti, whom Binda had baptized and then… married when she was still a baby and he was already fifty. For a while, I also spent time with their two daughters: the brooding eldest daughter Lauretta and the mischievous (so to speak) second daughter Martolina. They were charming and sweet.
Alfredo Ambrosetti was a visionary of the global scene, and it was thanks to him that every year, starting around 2000, the Forum opened its doors to the greats of sport, punctually introduced season after season by the red-haired presenter Paola Saluzzi, well before Barbara Palombelli and Mariangela Pira arrived, through other channels.
Every year, sport offered the Forum prominent figures. If circumstances allowed, Alfredo Ambrosetti would certainly have embraced the 2025 invitation to the ItalVolley girls' team, captained by Anna Danesi and guided by Velasco, such a leader, such a visionary, such an inclusive, and such a philosopher, that he built the amazing bridge from Paris 2024 to Bangkok 2025! In other words, the exact opposite of Gianmarco Pozzecco, whose departure perhaps paved the way for the long-awaited arrival of true gurus like Luca Banchi and Sergio Scariolo, who at sixty or sixty-five are experienced men with a basketball cosmopolitanism envied around the world.
Banchi failed to please Giorgio Armani ten years before the designer's passing, having already saved the Olimpia Milano stadium fifteen years earlier. But that's another story. We'll rediscover it.
A Sunday of ordinary madness could only usher in a Monday of... "crazy" ones, to use Gennaro Gattuso's words, as his Azzurri side went from strength to strength against Israel, eventually prevailing 5-4. Well, 10 goals in two World Cup qualifying matches isn't something for the faint of heart, but those four goals conceded by Israel suggest they need to address the defense as well as focus on refining the two-striker attack. No? The road ahead is arduous.
