Silvio Lancellotti no longer travels the world, but he never stops writing

Silvio Lancellotti doesn’t miss commenting on the Serie A on TV. Nor of being some sort of sports broadcast factotum, from sailing to baseball. He doesn’t miss being a columnist for Sheetthe vehicle through which he covered the 1990 and 1994 World Cups.

Silvio Lancellotti misses racing.

Your room, in a spacious house in the south-central area of ​​São Paulo, is the center of the universe of those who have traveled the world looking for celebrities and events. Books are on the bed. Television, tuned to news or sports channels.

Lancellotti, 77, one of the main references of the Brazilian press in international football, is almost always seated in a chair, in front of the computer.

“My mother used to say: ‘You write better than you speak’. I love to write. When I’m not doing anything, I’m writing”, he summarizes.

The memory of the races is when I was raising German Shepherds. Five years ago, she was in the passenger seat of a vehicle that was involved in an accident. He doesn’t like to remember or talk about it. A decade away from TV, except for sporadic appearances, with a long white beard and long hair, Lancellotti writes non-stop. Instead of dogs, he raises cats, more homely animals.

Columnist for the R7 portal, he is the author of police thrillers. One of them, “Honra ou Vendetta”, became a soap opera on Record. “The Alphabet Killers” is due out in May by publisher Gulliver.

He has walking difficulties. He has two prostheses on his body, one on his hip and one on his left leg. Inactivity caused him to develop peripheral neuropathy, damage to the nerves in the nervous system. Your ankles lock sometimes.

The commentator, writer and cook who provided non-stop information on sports broadcasts in the 1990s, a kind of football Google before the internet existed, has a fragile, hoarse voice, almost always low.

“I have this shit called vocal cord fatigue,” he complains, before chuckling at the question of whether it’s permanent or temporary.

“At my age, everything is permanent.”

Lancellotti created a style in sports broadcasts and in texts on Sheet. She reported on TV the amazing stories in which she was always an eyewitness or a participant. In the newspaper, she used terms different from the usual ones. When she wrote, a football match was never a football match. It was a “match”.

“Why do you always have to use the same words? Why not rescue others that are forgotten, but have the same meaning?”, he asks.

The stories he tells are still fantastic, rocambolescas. Like having returned from Cagliari to Rome, during the 1990 World Cup, as a stowaway in an Aeronautica Militare helicopter, the Italian air force, and having jumped from the aircraft while it was still in flight, close to the ground, because the pilot was not authorized to land.

“There were no more tickets, and I met him [o piloto] at the bar in front of my hotel. I needed to go cover England and Holland. I jumped with a camera, a suitcase, fell and broke my hand”, he says, explaining that the splint placed by the doctor made him create a habit he maintains to this day: typing with one finger of each hand.

It was the World Cup in which he remembers having become friends with Diego Maradona because he went to Trigoria, where the Argentine national team was, every day, with a tape measure to measure the diameter of shirt 10’s swollen ankle.

“He would see me arrive and laugh. That’s how we became friends”, he says, before remembering the lobster dinner he had with Diego in 1994 and having interviewed him inside the national team bus after the defeat to Germany in the final. of the 1990 World Cup.

With the title “Maradona leaves Italy and doesn’t know if he will play for Napoli again”, the article was published by Sheet in the July 10 edition of that year.

The style, the way he spoke, the Italian terms he used in the broadcasts and the stories became a hallmark. The humorous group Hermes e Renato created the character Milton Bollotti, a parody of Silvio Lancellotti.

“I think Hermes and Renato are cheap. I laugh. 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 [personagem que era] Silvio Lanchonete, made by Bussunda”, he recalls.

Since his debut as a commentator on a football match (a Milan v Juventus, he claims) or from the first text he wrote, Lancellotti has always considered himself not just a reporter, but “a fucking reporter”.

“In the 1990 World Cup, the Sheet gave me a brand new car to ride in Italy. I returned it with 30,000 kilometers driven 40 days later.”

In an hour-long conversation with the reporter, he used the word “friend” to define his relationship with Boni, Luciano do Valle, Otavio Frias Filho, Arnaldo Jabor, Diego Maradona. Roberto Baggio, Ronaldo Nazario and Erico Verissimo. He cited the award he received in Argentina for reconstructing the doping saga of the country’s ace in the 1994 World Cup.

He regretted having returned the title of member of Pinheiros, since his physical limitations prevent him from attending it.

He said that after spending a few days at the house of Verissimo, author of “O tempo e o vento”, he learned that writing is more perspiration than anything else. And Silvio Lancellotti, from a chair in his room, never stops writing.​

“What matters is the work, it’s what you do. If you do it with order, dedication and passion, inspiration strikes.”