March 21, 2023, was a day etched in athletics aficionados hearts especially those in love with the sport in Italy, because it marked a decade since the life of the legendary sprinter Pietro Mennea came to an untimely end.
However, Mennea also holds a special place in the annals of Mondo athletics history because he played a major part in the very first world record to be set on a Mondo athletics track.
Inaugurating the newly-installed Mondo athletics track in his hometown of Barletta on 21 July 1972 – with an estimated 12,000 spectators packed into the Stadio Comunale – many were expecting the prodigiously gifted 20-year-old Mennea to produce something special and he didn’t disappoint.
Anchoring an Italian 4x200m quartet and taking over after Franco Ossola, Luigi Benedetti and Pasqualino Abeti had done great work to not cede any ground to a talent-laden USA/Trinidad team, Mennea flew around the bend and down the home straight before stopping the clock in 1:21.5 to take two-tenths of a second off the previous world record.
Unofficially timed at 19.6 from a flying start – several tenths faster than the official 200m world record – Mennea elicited huge cheers from the delighted crowd and started his super-quick accession to being an Azzurri sporting superstar, soon to be nicknamed La Freccia del Sud (The Arrow of the South).
Watch in the video below when Mennea competed in Barletta, 200m (1980)
His future feats included running a 200m world record of 19.72 in Mexico City, which remained a world record for 17 years until beaten by the USA’s Michael Johnson in 1996 when the latter stopped the clock at 19.66 on another Mondo athletics track in Atlanta.
In the following video, from Rai archive, the world record over 200m, Mexico City.
The following year after his second official world record, Mennea triumphed in the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games 200m.
Relive the 200m final at the Moscow Olympics in the Rai archive video.
The 200m was certainly Mennea’s favourite, and most successful, event and he also posted world indoor bests on Mondo athletics tracks of 21.11 in Milan in 1978 and then 20.74 in Genoa five years later in 1983.
Later in life, he worked as a lawyer and politician, taking a seat as a Member of the European Parliament between 1999 and 2004.
The death of Mennea from pancreatic cancer at the age of just 60, an illness he had kept from all but a few close friends and family, was mourned across Italy and not just by sports fans but the entire population who had embraced him as a national hero.
Tributes to after his death, and the impact Mennea had made on the sporting landscape came from far and wide.
Thomas Bach, who became the International Olympic Committee President just a few months after Mennea’s death and who got to know him at the 1976 Olympic Games, added: “This is profoundly sad news, a great loss. The world of sport must honour the memory of Pietro Mennea, as an exceptional athlete and a great friend. His career was characterized by the promotion of the social values of sport at a national and international.”