It can sometimes be a short step, falling from the glory in the ring to the dishonor of prison.
It sure was for Loris Stecca, the youngest European and World Champion that Italy has ever had: crowned world boxing champion in 1984, when he was just 24 years old, today he works as a binman at a cooperative of community workers, after eight years in prison for attempted murder.
A hard fall, started with the only match Loris lost in the ring: the one against the Puerto Rican boxer Victor Callejas, the perfect nemesis of a sports career that Loris always went at fiercely, with the fury of a fighter. In victory and, above all, in defeat. So, after reaching the top in a season of successes that made Rimini dream, made a fortune for sponsors and commercial TV channels and made people all over Italy fall in love with boxing, Loris sank into the bitter abyss of an opposite destiny, dragging his loved ones with him. Starting with his brother Maurizio, who was a boxing champion at the Olympics in Los Angeles in those same glorious 80s, but who also was extremely different from him, in both temperament and fighting style.
Loris' life was one with no compromises, marked by the blinding and false lights of a glory that is no longer there. Now that the lights have faded out, that cumbersome past comes back to haunt him as the last opponent left for him to face.