The blessing and the launching of the gondolinos
I may have mentioned that I was RUDELY interrupted on Sept. 2 by my computer, which cut my post into chunks and then wouldn’t give them back (hence only that brief mention of the Return of the Gondolinos).
Although a few days have passed, I won’t be happy until I’ve finished the job. So cast your minds back to last Thursday, when part of the “world of the oar,” as it’s called here, gathered for the annual ceremony of the blessing of the gondolinos and, unusual at this late date, the drawing of lots for the assigning of the boats to the racers. Who gets what color boat is random, and the drawing usually follows shortly after the last elimination has whittled the list of rowers down to nine competing teams plus one reserve team, to be called in at whatever moment before the starting gun it’s clear that one team is not going to be racing. It happens — not often, but I’ve seen the reserve boat actually win one time. Considering that being the reserve means that you barely squeaked into the lineup against faster men (or women) than you, this outcome makes it clear that all sorts of factors, apart from sheer speed at the trials, come into play in the race itself.
This may well be true in many other athletic competitions, but I’m sticking to what I know.
There is no significance to the colors; the boats are painted in order to make it easy to distinguish and identify them from medium to far distance. This ensures that the onlooker (say, a judge….) is identifying the appropriate boat as it crashes into its closest neighbor, or as it crosses the finish line. (Even in good weather, red and orange are almost impossible to tell apart.) Furthermore, in the non-official races in which people sometimes race on their club boats, there is almost no way to identify the boats because they’re all pretty much the same mash-up of colors. The relatives of the racers know who’s who, but the judges almost certainly don’t. To avoid any possible problems, the judges following the race in motorboats call out instructions and warnings by color, not by racer’s name.
As an extra security measure, which is very useful when there is rain and/or fog, numbers have been painted on the bow of each boat, as follows:1 white, 2 yellow, 3 purple (lavender, violet, whatever), 4 light blue, 5 red, 6 green, 7 orange, 8 pink, 9 brown, reserve: red and green.
The racers get a sash and a neckerchief to match the color of their boat; it used to be considered helpful. Now it’s just part of the tradition. The neckerchief was supposed to deal with the sweat (this was before terrycloth headbands), and the sash was intended to help truss up what sometimes, in the old days, were men who either did, or would soon, need one.
A truly Historic Regata
I have no doubt that calendars around the world were marked REGATA STORICA (“historic regatta”) two days ago. It’s been held on the first Sunday in September for the past 500 years or so (since 1489, to be exact). Calendars by now ought to be able to mark themselves.
There were several aspects of this year’s edition which made it notable — even “historic,” if you will, though I suppose everything that happens qualifies as historic in one way or another merely by the fact of its having occurred.
Historic Point 1: Our rowing club had three boats in the races, and each came home with a pennant: first, second, and third place. More on that below.
Historic Point 2, with gold stars applied by me: There were no fights. No hurled epithets, no banshee curses howled at judges or fellow racers, no demerits for breaking any rules. I know. I must have been hallucinating. But it’s still true.
Let me elaborate on these points:
Our club had two pupparinos in the young men’s race; the pair on the orange boat won the race, coming home with the red pennant. The pair on the brown boat finished second, earning a white pennant. We also had the red gondolino, rowed by Roberto Busetto and his brother Renato, who finished third (green pennant). This is not only wonderful, but exceptional, considering that Roberto hasn’t finished in the top four in the Grand Canal for the past eight years.
As for the harmony between the two giga-competitors of the past two eternal decades — Giampaolo d’Este and Ivo Redolfi Tezzat, and the Vignotto cousins (the “Vignottini”) — I don’t know what to attribute it to. But one does recall that after d’Este unburdened himself at the Regata of Murano of every opinion he ever had about the judges, he was penalized by having to sit out the next race. That might have had a slight sobering effect, not that I think that race was so important to him.
Or maybe the lack of conflict is an early sign of the approaching Millennium.
Or maybe they’re just getting tired.
Or maybe it was the unexpected exchange of views at the eliminations a few weeks ago. When the qualified nine teams were brought together to draw the color of their boats, d’Este announced, “I’d like to make a proposal. We eliminate the judges.”
To which one judge replied, “I’d like to make a counter-proposal. We eliminate you (meaning him and his partner), and the Vignottos. Because the only time there are ever any problems, fights, and general grief, it’s when you all are in the race.”
No more proposals were entertained and the meeting was adjourned.
But there had to be some sort of flaw in the ointment, as a friend of mine used to say. Everyone wasn’t humming like happy little tuning forks, as we discovered when the blood blister of rage broke in the mind of Davide Peditto, one of the boys on the brown pupparino. I say “boy,” but he’s 18 years old; not exactly a child.
He was so angry at not winning — horrors! finishing second!! has the world gone mad?? — that he wrapped himself in a cloak of fury so thick and black that no communication could reach him, and very little could come out. This is evidently an aspect of his personality already known to people who are closer to him than I am.
His only release was to take his white pennant and throw it onto the dock at our club and leave it there. “Carta da culo,” he snarled bitterly; toilet paper (literally, ass-paper).
This is not only an insult to Venice, to every racer who has preceded him, to every racer who competed with him (12 of whom would have loved to have had that very pennant, ten of whom would have loved to have had ANY pennant), but a real insult to his long-suffering partner, onto whose pleasure in this accomplishment he had just poured gasoline, so to speak, and then thrown a match.
One would like to help this splenetic young man re-think his ideas about winning and losing — or if not his ideas, at least his behavior. I’d suggest sending him the bits of the newspaper reporting the comments which were made by another racer who came in second on Sunday: Giampaolo d’Este, who had spent virtually the entire race head-t0-head with the Vignottos. When they crossed the finish line 95/100ths of a second ahead of him, he probably wasn’t any happier with the outcome than the young brat at our club — especially because he has enough red pennants by now to entitle him to think he might deserve another one.
But he did not compare his white pennant to anything else. Here’s what he said:
“Well, that’s the way it went. Either we or the Vignottos could have won, and they won. No recriminations — it was a beautiful race and it’s always beautiful to be its protagonists.”
He might have meant it, which would be excellent. But he said it anyway, and that’s about 95/100ths even more excellent. But if it’s too hard, in the glaring heat of the moment, for a youngster to say something that mature, I’d suggest that the next-best option would be silence.
And I don’t mean that thick black silence, either. I mean the silence in which the image, the shape, and the hope for next year’s race would already be forming in his mind, spirit, and gizzard. As far as I can tell, that’s the only way that true athletes, or humans of any stripe, manage to get those bitter pills down and keep going.
Light and shadow
Day before yesterday, like yesterday, began in superb form: One of those dazzling winter mornings — gleaming air, scintillating sunshine, cold (but not too cold), no wind. Perfect. Just the kind of morning that makes you take deep happy breaths and think of going to a funeral.
Of course that’s a stupid thing to say. Nobody wanted to go, least of all the suddenly departed. And whether it’s winter or summer, sunshiney funerals make me feel worse than rain and gloom.
I don’t make a hobby of attending funerals, though by now I’ve been to a considerable number of them. They almost always involve either someone in the rowing world, or a former colleague of Lino’s. He only goes to them because not going would be worse, but there are plenty of people who seem to find them morbidly enjoyable.
One of the most impressive funerals I ever attended was for legendary Venetian-rowing champion Albino “Strigheta” Dei Rossi in 2004. The ceremony was in the basilica of San Giovanni and Paolo, and the casket was borne to its final resting place in the center of the “Disdotona” (the 18-oar gondola of the Querini rowing club), rowed by 18 of the cream of the current champions. Thrilling, but it struck me as being more toward the spectacular and less toward the personally-moving end of the scale of mourning. I don’t recall any damp eyes or expressions of sadness.
But day before yesterday was different, and even more so was a funeral last August, maybe because they were ceremonies for people who would never be legendary but who would be deeply missed.
The most recent occasion involved Luciano Costalonga, a former president of the Canottieri Cannaregio rowing club. I knew him, though not well. By now I more or less know a substantial number of people in the rowing world, and many of them have (unlike me) been getting older. I wouldn’t have classified him as old –he was only 71. But he had recently undergone an operation (I don’t know for what), and a few days ago just dropped dead.
Something of the same thing, though worse, happened last August to a gondolier named Michele Bozzato (whom I didn’t know). Lino knew him, but naturally Lino knows — or in this case, has known — almost everybody.
Bozzato’s real love was singing, the obituary said; he had even sold his gondolier license (he kept working as a substitute), so he could devote himself to music full-time, forming a trio called “The Gondoliers,” with whom he cut a disk of Venetian songs.
He was tall, he was strong, he never smoked, he barely drank.
On August 8, he started to have trouble breathing. They discovered a tumor on his lung. They operated on him. Two weeks later he was gone. He was 49.
Bozzato’s farewell was amazing; it was more like what happens when a fireman or policeman dies. He had been involved in so many different activities, from soccer to basketball to rowing, and it appears that everybody loved him. The Gazzettino said there were a thousand people there, which I believe — I’m no good at counting crowds, but the church of San Marcuola was so crammed it was like a Turkish bath.
We stayed outside because there was no point forcing ourselves into a large sweaty room pumped full of carbon dioxide. Women were weeping. Men were weeping. I don’t mean wailing and keening, but there were many wet red eyes and the sound of many noses being blown. And the silences between people standing around together weren’t the comfortable “At least it wasn’t me” sort, but more of a stricken “Of anybody at all, it shouldn’t have been him.”
What the two funerals had in common, though, was the general sense of a family loss. I’m not sure if I mean the Venetian family, which is shrinking inexorably, or the rowing-world family, or the gondoliering family. I do know that everyone seemed to belong to each other, and for the few intense hours of the ceremony it was not only easy to see, but to feel.
On the whole, there seems to be some difference of opinion on who to feel sorrier for: The person who’s gone, or those who are left. Oddly (in my view), Venetian sadness is directed at the departed. They have a little rhyme: El pezo xe per chi ch’el mondo lassa, chi che vive se la spassa. (It’s worse for the person who leaves the world; those who are alive can keep having a good time.)
By the look of things at the churches on these two occasions, though, I’m going to have to say that the people who were alive weren’t enjoying it at all.
Enough craziness to give everybody a second helping
There’s a saying here — perhaps in all of Italy, perhaps in the whole world — that the mother of the ignorant is always pregnant. I’d expand that to include the mentally infirm, the ethically deficient, and a smattering of Venetian rowing racers, the race judges, the spectators, and anybody else who is evidently suffering from hormone overload in any situation more emotional than drinking coffee.
I pause to note that, once again, this post has no photographs due to multiple crises inside my computer, which is being taken to the hospital today for a major operation. So there will be a lapse in communication while it — and I — recuperate.
Back to racers and judges and spectators.
The Regata Storica of a week ago (September 2, 2012) will be remembered more for the catastrophe which I am about to describe than for the fact that the Vignottini won and their lifelong rivals (D’Este and Tezzat) finished — not second — but THIRD. You hear the sound of a page being turned in the annals of Venetian rowing, because even if D’Este and company were to win the next five races in a row, the chink in the armor is now too obvious to ignore. He also looked extremely and uncharacteristically blown apart by the race.
But as I say, that isn’t what everybody is babbling about. They’re babbling about the way the judge’s motorboat ran into the yellow gondolino, which was third, thereby knocking it out of the race. Because Fate sometimes shows a dangerously unruly sense of humor, it couldn’t have happened somewhere up in the distant reaches of the Grand Canal where only three cats are around to notice the race, if they’re awake. Of course not. This hideous, and, I think, unprecedented, little crash occurred right in front of the reviewing stand at the finish line, where assorted race officials and scores of invited guests and lots of the salt of the earth in their own boats could see it PERFECTLY. Also the national television station whose cameras were broadcasting the event live.
Like most systems, the way the judges’ boats are choreographed is perfect, but only if the plan is executed. In this case, one judge’s boat follows the peloton up to a certain point in the Grand Canal (the “volta de canal,” at the curve of Ca’ Foscari where the bleachers and judges and finish line are all together). At that point, in order that the judge’s motorboat doesn’t have to cross the canal and thereby potentially get in the way of the boats as they are racing upstream, the first judge’s motorboat stops, and a second one, waiting on the other side of the canal out of harm’s way, picks up the task of following the herd.
But this time the first boat didn’t pull over to the side and stop, to hand off the race to the next boat. It paused, and then, without looking (or thinking, or something), the judge aboard told the driver to do something which clearly involved gunning the motor. I was in a boat right where this happened, so I am a certified eyewitness.
Whether the judge wanted to follow the race, or reposition the boat in some way, isn’t clear. But doing anything at that moment, in that location, was not only wrong, it was crazy. Because the yellow (“canarin”) gondolino, steaming ahead at full speed in an excellent third position, was right behind the propellers when they spun. In two nano-seconds, the left hind hip of the motorboat swerved left, hit the ferro of the prow of the gondolino, threw the very narrow and moving-very-fast boat off balance, and sent it hurtling off-course into the scrum of boats tied up to the pilings.
You might think that the only crazy person in this scenario would be the judge on the boat who told the driver to move instead of standing perfectly still. And you’d be right.
Except that almost immediately, other crazy people began to wail and vociferate. Wild ideas began to be thrown around in bars and in the newspaper (and even, I think, among the judges), almost all of which came down to suggesting that the crew on canarin be awarded the third-place pennant in a tie with the pair that actually did finish third.
The Vignottini even offered to pay the prize money to the unfortunate ex-third-place boat.
The issue still doesn’t seem to be settled, but here is how I see it:
First, I don’t understand why anyone thinks it makes sense to give a prize to someone who didn’t win it. A consolation prize would be nice, of course (a house in the mountains, maybe, or a six-month cruise to Polynesia), but a prize for racing pretty much requires that you race. If the crash had occurred three yards before the finish line, you might be able to make a case for their deserving some sort of pennant and/or money. But there was still plenty of race ahead. Who’s to say that they would have finished third? They might have come in first. Or even last.
Second, a racer with any degree of self-respect (possibly a very small category, true) wouldn’t want either a pennant or money that he hadn’t won himself. Why degrade them with stupid offers that are only moderately able to make the onlookers feel slightly better? Not to mention make the guilty judge feel slightly less bad.
Third, I’m glad I mentioned the judge. Because while the rowing world is in the throes of what seems to be a hormonal solar flare, no one so far has turned from the victims to the perpetrator.
Why, I ask myself, and am now asking the world at large, is everyone so fixated on making the victims feel better without pausing to suggest, much less demand, that the judge deserves a serious punishment? Can you think of a sport in which a referee or a judge who directly and visibly damages an athlete in the midst of the game doesn’t receive even the tiniest murmured reproof?
It gets crazier. Because last year, at the race at Burano, there was a crash between the first two boats at the buoy where the racecourse turns back, knocking both of them out of commission. The judge overseeing that crucial part of the race was so rattled that he stopped the race right there. The prizes were awarded according to the positions of the boats at the buoy, even though there was at least half again as much race still to go.
Yes: That was the same judge.
I began this post with a saying, so in closing I invoke a special Venetian aphorism: “Un’ xe bon, ma do xe coglion.” (OON zeh bone, ma doh zeh cole-YONE.) The literal translation makes no sense, but here’s what it means: Screw up once, you can be excused; screw up twice, and you’re an asshole.
If anyone but me manages to reach this conclusion, I’ll let you know. But it’s not looking very likely.