On 11 October 1969, Jury Chechi was born in Prato, the blue gymnast who dominated the specialty of the rings for all the nineties, one of the symbolic athletes of Italian sport of all time.
Jury Chechi as Gagarin
The parents decided to call it Jury in honor of the Russian cosmonaut Jury Gagarin, the first man in space. From an early age Chechi is an extremely curious and lively child, demonstrating a strong propensity for those games that any mother would define as dangerous, such as climbing on furniture and chandeliers in the house. The passion for gymnastics was born in these very first years of life and in 1977, one year after enrolling in the gymnasium of the Etruria Gymnastics Company of Prato under the supervision of the technician Tiziano Adolfetti, the little Jury conquers the first of the many titles he will win. placing first in the Tuscan Regional Championship. In 1984, at the age of fifteen, he moved to Varese to join the junior gymnastics team. Here the young man with reddish hair impresses everyone and improves his ring technique day by day.
The successes of the Lord of the Rings
La first participation in the Olympics arrives in 1988, in Seoul, where Chechi will finish sixth, just 75 points from the podium. Podium that will not escape the following year, at the World Gymnastics Championships held in Stuttgart: the blue athlete will get the bronze. From then on only successes for Jury Chechi with 4 golds at the European Championships, 5 consecutive at the World Championships (from Birmingham '93 to Lausanne '97) and, above all, the historic gold medal at the XXVI Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 where he reports a medal of the most prestigious metal in gymnastics thirty-two years after Franco Menichelli's victory in the free body at the Tokyo Games in 1964. It is the consecration for the Lord of the rings (from the novel of the same name by the British writer John Tolkien), that in 2004, after having missed the Olympics of the new millennium in Sydney due to the rupture of the brachial tendon of a biceps (the second Olympics which he had to give up due to an injury after the one in Barcelona '92 when a month before the start of the competitions the Achilles tendon), returns to the Athens Games.
Here will be the Italian flag bearer at the opening ceremony and, thanks to his immense fortitude and, of course, skill in the discipline, he will obtain a bronze medal that is anything but predictable at the age of 35.
After his retirement, Jury Chechi turned to television, participating in and conducting numerous broadcasts. In 2004 he received the honor of Commendatore Order of Merit of the Italian Republic from the then President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
