Beppe Donazzan
Dakar. L'inferno nel Sahara

THE REVIEW

In its long history, the Dakar has claimed the lives of seven journalists. The first ever, on a treacherous stretch of the Transahariana, were two Italians: Giuseppe De Tommaso and Andrea Carisi. The most recent, Argentinians, Dakar 2014; identical dynamic and identical fate. The great story of the race demanded its blood tribute, like the race itself, and it couldn't have been otherwise in the adventure that also claimed the life of its own creator, like a wild beast, the more you try to tame it, the more it thrashes, bites, and scratches.
Donazzan is someone who has done the Dakar; printing machine, mind you, always following the race, the infernal caravan. It's not surprising, therefore, the confidence with which he takes over entire biographies, to translate them into his romantic language. Picco, Orioli, Winkler, Marinoni, De Petri, Terruzzi, Meoni, just a few of the sixty riders present here (artists, dreamers, rebels, as he calls them); many, but none superfluous, each told with acuity, an innate sense of detail, a radiography of gestures.
A long, historiographical book, as exhaustive as a simple book can be, about that masochistic, dangerous, often tragic yet irresistible experience called Dakar; a thing that, paraphrasing Churchill, produces more History than it can digest. And so god bless Gigi Soldano, his photos, for completeness: numerous, necessary, definitive; the hints of harshness in dusty suits, the air thick with dust, the nomadism of makeshift bivouacs, the African horizons, empty, beautiful, and indifferent.
Dakar, the hell in the Sahara: if you don't have it, buy it; if you already own it, then read it again, for the technique and passion with which it is written, the epic of sports journalism, the reason and value of the tribute paid.