Journalism loses the stories, the forgotten words and the tireless writing of Silvio Lancellotti

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In the days following the interview he gave to the Sheet in April of this year, Silvio Lancellotti, 78, was not worried about when the story would be published or even what it would be written about.

His priority was to get the pictures of him with his cats.

“I used to have dogs. Now I prefer cats. They’re more homely.”

The journalist died this Tuesday (13) due to sequelae resulting from a heart attack.

The three animals were the final companions of the journalist’s life. They walked nonstop around his room, lay on top of books, stretched out on the television.

Lancellotti had to learn to be like his pets: homebody. It was quite a change for someone who didn’t even like to spend a lot of time in hotel rooms on business trips. As he defined it, journalism is based on reporting and he didn’t consider himself just a reporter.

“I was a fucking reporter.”

That’s how he covered the 1990 and 1994 World Cups for Sheet. He quoted from memory the subjects he had taken, he remembered passages. He claimed to have been recognized by RAI, the Italian state TV network, as the international journalist who produced the most articles at the World Cup held in the country.

He drove 30,000 kilometers in 40 days with a car rented by the newspaper, he emphasized.

Lancellotti didn’t just like to tell what he wrote. He was more than happy to report the process, as it turned out in the submitted report. They were stories, often more fantastical than the text itself.

Like the claim that he jumped out of a helicopter while still in flight on his way back from Cagliari to Rome after a Netherlands-England match. Or how he claimed to have stopped his car in the middle of the road, in the United States, to call the newsroom and inform them that Maradona had tested positive for doping after the game against Nigeria in 1994.

In the columns he wrote as a columnist, he placed forgotten terms in the vocabulary of Brazilian football, such as “cotejo” and “pugna”, instead of “match” or “game”. Something that had happened the week before could be in the “next past.”

Lancellotti was proud to rescue these expressions. He believed he made a cultural contribution to sports journalism.

As a commentator for the Italian Championship, he marked his time at Bandeirantes between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then he would do the same for ESPN. His stories on the station have become legendary. And he seemed to have an unknown explanation for everything. Even for the real reason the Big Mac has pickles. It would be a tribute to Brazil, I swore.

The stories were so rocambolesque that the humorous group Hermes and Renato created Milton Bollotti, a character who used words in Italian and told exaggerated stories. The appearance, the way of speaking and the gradiloquence were clear references to Lancellotti. The honoree was amused. “I was dying of laughter” was his own definition.

“I think it’s cool. I put some videos in sequence and showed them to my grandchildren. Am I going to get mad? Before Hermes and Renato, when I still had a gastronomy program, Casseta & Planeta invented Silvio Lanchonete, made by Bussunda”, he recalls. .

The passion for food came before the fame of broadcasting international matches. The chef came before the journalist who owned the information that no one else had.

“If a Swedish defender stumbles in training, Silvio finds out about it”, praised narrator Luciano do Valle, before broadcasting the 1994 World Cup.

Graduated in architecture, Lancellotti has had cooking shows on Brazilian TV for more than a decade. He remembered recipes even in football comments. He has always loved gastronomy, another habit that went away with mobility problems caused by a car accident about four years ago. He had two prostheses, one in his hip and one in his left leg. It was one of the few subjects he didn’t like to broach.

Sitting too long caused him to develop peripheral neuropathy, an injury to the nerves in the nervous system. His ankles were locked. Among all these physical setbacks, what seemed to irritate him the most was vocal cord fatigue that left his voice fragile and hoarse.

“It sucks,” he complained.

The limitations just didn’t stop him from doing what he loved most: writing. He spent the last few years of his life sitting in front of his computer, typing non-stop. He was a blogger for the R7 portal and became the author of “police thrillers”.

One of them, “Honra ou Vendetta” was adapted into a telenovela on Rede Record under the name “Poder Paralelo”. The last one, “Abecedário Assassins”, was released at the end of August this year.

Lancellotti leaves his wife, Vivian, children Eduardo, Daniela, Giulia, Luísa and stepson José Renato.

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