The 5 best episodes of ''Sfide'' A program that will never stop making us cry
Before pay per view took over the sport and Federico Buffa began to investigate Lionel Messi's great-grandfather, it was RAI that had absolute dominance regarding sports reports, and we are not just talking about ''90 Minute''.
From 1998 to 2016 it aired in the late evening on Rai 3 ''Sfide'', a program by Simona Ercolani that talked about sports in the form of an investigation, trying to provide a cause/effect order for each topic and character covered in - on average - fifty minutes of transmission. In the early years there was only talk of football and there were no conductors in the studio, but the narrating voices of Ughetta Lunari, Alberto Lori and Massimiliano Alto alternated but, over time, the program has broadened its horizons so as to assume as slogan "sport like you've never seen it".
From 2012 to 2016, with Sky already owning the television rights of any sporting event on planet earth and with some streaming platforms coming soon - see DAZN -, ''Sfide'' partially changes format, greatly lengthening the duration of its episodes and inserting a real presenter, Alex Zanardi. The latest episodes have no longer had a defined protagonist, but more generally we have talked about transversal and abstract aspects of the world of sport, such as "courage", "limits" and "perfection" .
The only constant from the first to the last episode - in addition to the cover of the program with a smiling child - is the acronym, ''Heroes'' by David Bowie, which brought with it nostalgia and emotion even before the start of the broadcast. Let's go over the best 5 episodes:
Alex Zanardi starts from Michael Jordan's symbolic phrase: "Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion". Jordan overcame his limits and fears to become the strongest basketball player ever. Like him, all the protagonists of the episode of Challenges are the testimony that sport can be the means by which a man and a woman manage to overcome fears. For example, Niccolò Campriani tells it, in the final of the rifle in Beijing 2008, he was caught by the syndrome of the last blow. He managed to overcome it and came to the Olympic gold.
