Rudi Vignotto | Venice: I am not making this up

Chasing the elusive crown

August 5, 2018 No Comments

D’Este and Tezzat in the red gondolino nose to nose with the Vignottos on the brown boat. A culminating moment from one year and then 38 minutes of rowing. This is what the fans live for. But where’s that pesky crown?

Over the past 15 years or so, attention in the world of Venetian rowing races has been focused, like the sun through a lens, on two pairs of rivals: Rudi and Igor Vignotto, gondoliers and cousins from Sant’ Erasmo who have been rowing together since they were nine and ten years old, and Giampaolo D’Este and Ivo Redolfi Tezzat, both of them also gondoliers, rowing together a modest 14 years until their last outing in 2015.

No need to say that the rivalry has been intense, which is what everybody wants in sports, and it created an equally intense partisanship among fans who pursued unwinnable arguments about why their idols are the best and what the hell is wrong with the other guys.

At the regata of Murano in 2009, Igor Vignotto took the lead from D’Este and never looked back.

These four men faced off in almost every race each year, but the race that matters most is the Regata Storica, a roughly 40-minute struggle in the Grand Canal on the racing gondolas called gondolinos.

Winning the Regata Storica is a wonderful thing, but what each pair really wanted was to win it five years in a row, a feat which is almost impossible. If you manage it you have earned the title “re del remo” (king of the oar), which sounds a little lame but which, in fact, is a very big deal. Nobody has accomplished this since 1985.

The Vignotto cousins have won the Regata Storica a record 15 times, but never five years consecutively. D’Este and Tezzat have won 7 times, also never consecutively. It’s maddening for everybody, but what can you expect in a race that depends on skill, strategy, and sheer luck? 2009 was the fifth year in a row for D’Este and Tezzat — THE FIFTH YEAR — and 7 minutes into the race they capsized and nobody was even near them. There they were, floating by their boat as everybody else rowed past them. How embarrassing is that?

D’Este and Tezzat stayed together for a few more seasons, but being disqualified during the next year’s Storica (2010) and again in 2015 — and maybe other factors also — appeared to expunge whatever desire they still had to earn the crown. They both retired and concentrated on work, or backgammon, or their kids.

Since then the racing world has been pretty lackluster, as the Vignottos just kept on winning, practically whiling away the time on the course by checking their messages on their phones and discussing where to go on vacation. I know they love all those red pennants, but racking them up without breaking a visible sweat isn’t much fun after a while. I’ve heard it said.

But this year — new drama! A possible fourth consecutive win was on the horizon for the Vignottos when the required annual physical examination revealed that Igor’s career is over. Something to do with his heart, and cardiac situations are not to be taken lightly, or even permitted when it comes to getting your health certificate for the racing season.

This is Igor Vignotto (2009) who clearly feels that the real beauty of winning is that the other guy lost. There won’t be any more of these moments for him.

And then Igor’s heart took a punch no apparatus could measure: His cousin Rudi called their lifelong rival, Giampaolo D’Este, to propose that they team up together. And D’Este said yes.

Rudi Vignotto astern. He’s just moving the boat out of the way, but this image from two years ago has suddenly become somewhat poignant. Nobody imagined ever seeing anybody in the bow position with him except Igor, to say nothing of imagining D’Este there.

I don’t presume to know their reasoning, but seeing that each of them could sink a small cruiser with the weight of the pennants they’ve won, it might not be the need for more pennants. And seeing that the prize money is less than a working gondolier might earn in a week, it probably isn’t the money either.

It can only be the kingdom, the kingdom of the oar at long last, that could tempt them, even though 2018 will be the start of the five-year clock all over again.

Is this exciting? Maybe. And maybe not. Of course they have already been dubbed the “SuperCoppia” (super duo), because that’s obvious. But while it will be reasonably exciting to see this Voltron racing, it doesn’t necessarily promise to inspire the wild, thrilling, throat-lacerating excitement from fans and enemies alike that was the norm when these titans were rowing against each other.

Setting aside the prognostications for a few young fast-rising competitors, it’s very possible that the new duo will also win while checking their emails. Not made up: Their first race, today at Pellestrina on pupparinos, had them so far ahead that they throttled back to a stroll just to keep the distance between them and everybody else to something kind of reasonable and not, say, two kilometers.

One commentator remarked that this new match has been made “in the name of sport,” but it doesn’t seem very sporting to me. At least one person who was talking about it made a very interesting observation. “Well of course they’re going to win,” he said. “What fun is that? Me, I think each of them should have picked some younger partner — then we could really have seen some competition.”

That’s undoubtedly true, and a very original way of thinking. But if they’d done that, they might never get those crowns.

The blessing of the gondolinos a few days before the Regata Storica (2017). Everybody acts friendly, more or less.

For anyone curious to see the seesawing of these champions from year to year, check this out; you can see how hard it has been to even get close to a fifth year in a row:

(V is Rudi and Igor Vignotto, D’E is D’Este with Tezzat):

2002 V first, D’E second (this is the first year D’Este rowed with Tezzat)

2003 D’E first, V second

2004 V first, D’E second

2005 D’E first, V second

2006 D’E first V second

2007 D’E first V second

2008 D’E first V (Rudi with Leone Mao, Igor undergoing a year of suspension) third

2009 V first D’E withdrawn, capsizing

2010 V first D’E disqualified

2011 D’E first V second

2012 V first D’E second

2013 V first D’E second

2014 D’E first V second

2015 V first D’E disqualified

2016 V first no D’E

2017 V first no D’E

2018 Voltron?

Venetian-ness

The best of “Burielo”

January 27, 2017 No Comments

A corteo is almost always preceded by a police boat which helpfully prevents collisions and hard words in the Grand Canal. This was, after all, a workday morning and plenty of people had other things on their mind than your funeral. (My, that sounded bad.) In any case, the first intimation of this corteo, just emerging slowly from the bulk of upstream traffic, is the police boat.

A few days ago (last Monday, if anyone cares) there was a funeral. In this city that hardly counts as news. But it was the funeral of a young man — I consider 61 to be young — who had had a solid if untrumpeted career as a racer. Umberto Costantini, nicknamed “Burielo,” was at the top of his game in his twenties, during the Eighties and early Nineties, and the newspaper was full of the glorious Venetian-rowing names, some of them much, much older than he, who came to do him homage.

The homage, according to what I read, was some of the best you could ever hope for, especially from this squabbling band. “A great athlete and a good man,” stated several re del remo, the greatest champions, some of whom had rowed with him. “In this world, full of controversy, he never argued with anybody,” said one of the greatest arguers of them all.

A few days before his passing, the paper reports, a group of the all-time great rowers went to visit him in the hospital. “Ostrega,” he said, using the preferred Venetian expression for wow, good grief, heavens to Betsy, “I must really be in bad shape if you’re all here….”

He wanted a corteo, or boat procession, for his funeral, like the one he participated in when Bruno “Strigheta,” his friend and fellow Burano native, died two years ago. And so it was.

Unhappily, it was on a workday morning, which cut into the number of participants somewhat. Not having been a rock-star name, that also may have left him somewhat unknown and unappreciated in the general rowing world. Even more unhappily, there were people who knew him who just went to work as usual — we passed two gondoliers who were also Burano natives, and racers, as we wandered around town, who were clearly planning to be in their boats soon, but boats full of tourists. That seemed harsh.

We thought about participating, but too many other factors intervened. So we stood at the vaporetto stop at the Ca’ d’Oro to watch the procession. The deceased had said that he’d like to have a corteo, and by gum, they did it for him.

As it happens, I have my own small memory of “Burielo” — small to me, but an event that was big for him. I hadn’t even heard of him till then. It was 1997, and I was watching the Regata Storica sitting in a boat not far from the finish line. Here the gondolinos came, thundering, so to speak, toward the finish line. It’s definitely the peak moment of a peak experience, the entire world was screaming and yelling and shrieking and so on.

Burielo was in the bow, and Bruno dei Rossi (“Strigheta”) was astern. They were in third place and rowing like mad to stay there, side by side, nose to nose, with the Busetto brothers, battling it out. The finish line was only, I’m guessing, 30 seconds away. Four men turbo-rowing — it was wild. But one man ran out of gas first: Burielo.

All at once, with that beautiful green pennant hopefully clutched in his (mental) hands, he stopped rowing, then collapsed. I remember seeing him crumple down in the boat. Just like that. Two boats passed as the gondolino slid forward on its own momentum — I can’t do justice to his state of mind, not to mention his partner’s — and they came in fifth. No pennant, and definitely no glory. The ambulance zoomed up and he was headed — in another sort of turbo-manner — to the hospital, where he was checked in for a serious tachycardia.

That was the last time he rowed a gondolino, that’s for sure, and evidently the last time he raced, period. You can understand that it would have been difficult to qualify for the required medical certificate. Maybe he didn’t even try.

The human part of me is very sad this happened. The secret mad-dog competitor part of me is sad that it happened before they could rip that green pennant from the (mental) hands of the Busettos.

The ten-oar gondolone, or “big gondola,” of the Francescana rowing club is rowed by some of the biggest names in the racing pantheon, some of whom were also his partners at one time or another. (Bruno “Strigheta” preceded him two years ago to the cosmic finish line.) In the bow, Gianfranco Vianello “Crea,” and astern is Franco dei Rossi “Strigheta,” his old partner Bruno’s brother, with whom the deceased had won the race of the “galleons” of the Four Ancient Maritime Republics. There were also Bepi Fongher, Giovanni Seno “Scherolin” and Luciano Tagliapietra “Panna,” three of his former race-mates, Palmiro Fongher, and Rudi Vignotto. Only Vignotto is still winning races, but they’re all still rowing, which counts as a victory, in my view.

Not everybody rows at the same speed (some rowers always think that being in a boat means it’s a race), so the relatively few boats here began to spread out. The motorboat to the left of the frame is the usual hearse, which probably brought the casket to the gondolone and will be waiting to carry it onward after the funeral.

Come on, everybody, this is a funeral cortege, not a wander through the park. Though admittedly an eight-oar crew on a ten-oar boat is going to go faster than these vessels.

And so they passed out of view, turning left before the Rialto Bridge into the rio del Fontego dei Tedeschi, and on to the basilica of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (may I note, yet again, that nobody calls it “Zanipolo,” no matter how exotic it sounds). A vast crowd was waiting at the church, but we were not part of it.

And good night, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye.

I forgot to mention that he had a life beyond racing. He was a molecante, a type of fisherman who catches crabs and cultivates them in submerged wooden cages called vieri till they reach the stage where they shed their shells and become moeche (soft-shelled crabs) and can be sold at the market for a freaking king’s ransom.

The general procedure is this: A fisherman (which used to be most, and now some still, men on Burano) goes out into the lagoon and strings his nets along poles he drives into the mud. He goes out and checks what has run into the net. He divests the net of whatever is in it — all sorts of fish, and lots and lots of crabs. (You can see these little crabs running around the shallows any time you are out in a boat. Lino says that if you walk around in the semi-soft mud and then retrace your steps, each footprint will contain a crab. He doesn’t know why. I confirm that I have seen this.)

The fisherman separates the various critters and sells them, except for the crabs. He’ll sort out the good ones, and put them in the vieri. Every day or so he’ll pass to check on them, and takes out whichever are ready for market, tables, and unnumbered Swiss bank accounts. They are currently selling at the Rialto for 60 euros per kilo, or $30 per pound, more or less. I don’t know how much the molecante makes from that. My experience of life leads me to assume that it would be dramatically less than that, but that’s not the point of this little cadenza. The cadenza is that Burielo used to do this, and now (I hope) he’s doing it in heaven, because he loved it.

In a side canal by Mazzorbo, which is near Burano.

I’m imagining that this is Burielo’s corner of heaven.

And every so often the poles are pulled up and the nets brought to land and strung up to dry for a while. A windy morning in April is an excellent moment for this.

Boatworld, Events, History, Tourism, Venetian-ness, Water

Another day, another Storica

September 7, 2010 1 Comment

The "bissone," the large decorative boats brought out for serious ceremony, are the centerpiece of the boat procession, and look just the way you want fancy boats to look in Venice.

Day before yesterday (Sunday, September 5, for the record) was the day of what is arguably the most important — certainly most spectacular — race of the Venetian rowing season: the Regata Storica, or “historic regatta.” Or, as I also think of it, the Race that Launched a Thousand Postcards — which depict, not the race(s) themselves, but the decorated boats loaded with rowers in costume. If you skrinch your eyes and don’t think, you could imagine you were seeing something from centuries ago. Sort of.

The commandant of the Morosini Naval School, Enrico Pacioni, and his wife are transported to the reviewing stand aboard an exact replica of the 18th-century gondola seen in paintings by Canaletto. — The commandant of the Morosini Naval School, Enrico Pacioni, and his wife are carried to the reviewing stand aboard an exact replica of the 18th-century gondola seen in paintings by Canaletto.

We were there, as usual: Lino in a boat (one of the red launches used by the judges, though which one depended on which race he drew), and me also in a boat (this year in the six-oar balotina, “Katia,” of the Remiera Casteo). Lino’s role was to administer justice; my role was to participate in the corteo, or boat procession, preceding the races, then to tie up somewhere convenient in a spot where we could get a good view of the races, then to scream our lungs out, if and when the spirit moved us. (It did.)

The balotina is essentially a largish gondola, but looks very fine from any angle.

Every year, obviously, is different, though there are equally obvious similarities. Boats of all types and persuasions, from tiny one-person s’ciopons to honking big motorized barges carrying entire clans and enough food and drink to support them till Christmas.

And of course there were the spectators — official estimates said 90,000 — massed together at certain key points: sitting on the steps in front of the church of the Salute, in temporary bleachers just beyond San Toma’, and in rows of chairs at the Rialto market. Maybe somewhere else further on that I didn’t discover. I’m not very clear on how 90,000 people fit into those very limited spaces, but I imagine the estimate includes all of us in the boats lining the Grand Canal, and the relatively few, those happy few, partying on the balconies of the palaces. In any case, there we all were. however many thousand we might have been.

IMG_0741 stor comp — I like the less grandiose boats better, like this mascareta belonging to the firemen.

I suppose it’s exciting to watch from the shore, wherever you find a space, but if you were ever to be in Venice on the first Sunday in September, I’d strongly urge you to smash the old piggybank and hire a gondola for two or three hours and watch it from the water. Don’t suppose you can just imagine how it would be. It’s not just the fact that you’re floating, it’s the fact that being in a boat makes you a participant in a way you can’t be if you’re merely pasted along the sidelines, waving.

Two things distinguished this year’s edition. One was the unexpected anarchy (I think it was unexpected, though murmurings a few days earlier may have been a sort of warning) that overwhelmed the corteo near the Rialto Bridge.

Or this pair, who I presume are father and son.

The Master Plan, as devised by tradition and the Comune (not always the same thing), was for the corteo to splash along all the way up to the train station, then return to the vicinity of the finish line at the “volta de Canal,” or “bend of the canal,” by Ca’ Foscari.

The first few years I engaged in the corteo, that’s what we did. Then the Comune, responding to the pressing programming needs of the RAI television wallahs, and who knows what other dark urges, decreed that we all stop on the return leg at the entrance to the Cannaregio canal to let the first one and a half races pass by. It was like shuffling a deck of cards, to get the corteo and the races organized in such a way as to leave not a second of the dreaded dead-air time in which people could, God forbid, get bored or something.

This was the mob in front of the church of the Salute. I'd have taken more pictures, but I had to pay attention to my rowing responsibilities.

So we did this for a few years, then increasing numbers of boats began to turn around and head back downstream before they got to the station. Then they began turning around even earlier, and so on, till we reached last Sunday, when suddenly it seemed as if some animal instinct urged the migrating boats to virtually all begin turning around just after the Rialto Bridge (which is where the last serious group of spectators are clustered, after which it’s just scattered random boats and who really cares who’s hanging around in front of the train station?). Or turning, as in our case, before the bridge, because the mass of confused retreating boats made forging ahead difficult, as well as pointless. The general atmosphere amid the boats could be summed up in the rude Venetian phrase, “Si ciava” (see CHA-vah, or “screw this/them/it”).

So that was entertaining. I’ve spent years here listening to rants from certain elements among the organizers about how it’s the Venetians’ festival and we should do it the way we want to, not how They tell us to, but this was the first time I’ve ever seen what “Take Back the Night” would look like in real life. It was kind of cool, actually. For anybody, of whatever race or clime, who is annoyed by being treated as a spear-carrier in somebody else’s drama, it was highly invigorating.

This dude had one of the best seats in the house, all by himself and his two oars. All that seems to be missing is a case of beer.

Not sure what the Comune has to say about it, though, because the Gazzettino was awash yesterday in the floods of rancor and glee from the four men contending for first place in the race of the gondolinos. Which brings me to the second thing that distinguished this year’s edition.

These “four men” would be cousins Igor and Rudi Vignotto, on the yellow (canarin) gondolino, and Ivo Redolfi-Tezzat and Giampaolo d’Este on the blue (celeste). To give you some perspective on this rivalry, the “Vignottini” have been rowing against d’Este and Tezzat since 2002, and against d’Este with other partners since 1995. And that’s just the big races; they all started this as kids. Speaking of being able to imagine things, I myself can’t imagine what fifteen years of battling in seven races each year adds up to when the crunch is on in the Grand Canal. But it could not, as the saying goes, be pretty.

Thirst, hunger, or loneliness were not problems facing the extended family on the barge behind us, who color-coded their loyalties.

So what happened was that the eternal triad (including the purple, or viola, gondolino of Andrea Bertoldini and Martino Vianello), entered the Grand Canal in a virtual dead heat, and remained so until the Rialto Bridge: celeste, canarin, and viola. And it’s not merely that they accomplished this feat, it’s that they did it for two miles (3.2 km). At top speed, or about 7 mph (12 km/h).

“When I saw those three entering the Grand Canal side by side like that,” Lino told me later, “I got a lump in my throat. It gave me goose bumps.” He and the judges in the other boats following the race literally could not hear each other through their walkie-talkies, even yelling, because however many thousands there were who could see the boats were all screaming their brains out. It was thrilling.

IMG_0802 stor comp — The three first gondolinos pass -- any ordinary mortals would long since have begun to fade, but not these titans.

This is a view of the race course. It's further than it looks, and all that twisting and turning means you've got all sorts of different tidal conditions to deal with, going and coming back.

Then, as usual, Something Happened. Last year it was Tezzat falling overboard and taking d’Este with him as their boat (celeste, as it happens — coincidence???) capsized. This year it was Something up toward the temporary piling in front of the station which marks the turnaround point.

The details are still coming out, and of course they’re as dissonant as a quartet by Charles Ives. The judges warned Tezzat more than once to alter something he was doing to the detriment of the “Vignottini,” which Tezzat evidently ignored. (I’m not taking sides here, I’m just trying to give the outline.)

When a racer does not obey the judge, after a certain number of calls the racer is disqualified. And that’s what happened. Three-quarters of the way through the race, suddenly one of its biggest stars was off the field, never to be seen again. At least not that day.

While down at the waterline, folks are chilling in their own special way.

One of the boys from the children's race consoles himself for losing at the last minute by eating several pieces of cake. It helps, at least for a while.

The next day the Rage of Tezzat reverberated through the pages of the Gazzettino; if this matter isn’t resolved (the “matter” being the injustice and infamy of the judge’s action), he says he’s going to hang up his oar, as they say, and quit racing. He won’t even show up to try for the final race of the year at Burano in two weeks.

To which one might reasonably reply, “Knock yourself out.” (“Fa di manco,” would be the closest Venetian equivalent, or “So don’t bother.”)

If there are any developments worth wasting electrons to report, I will do so.

Otherwise, I want to leave you with the joy of the bellowing, shrieking, hysterical crowds who got to see, if only briefly, one of the most dazzling moments in big-time racing anyone has witnessed for quite some time. That’s what I’m going to remember.