Que Sera, Sera.

If there was an optics management competition and this team was my opponent I would win in a landslide.

Some of their greatest hits now include:

Never beating the not Italian enough allegations by making the wrong choice at every fork in the “nationalism” road. This Olympics gimmick is just one more variant of it.

Your whole schtick has been “these are the hometown Olympics” & “let’s lift the nation” &”I’m a skier” and now you can’t fire up the PJ for a single night in Milano? Ah, but the PJ does fire up if there’s a photo op to be had with a politician. Hmm.

Skipping the Davis cup for rest and conditioning to show up unprepared at the AO. Just say it was a sponsored trip between hotels and tourism and F1 and Patrick’s academy and keep it moving. Just own you didn’t want to participate. That’s fine. The results of that conditioning speak for themselves. Now everyone is feeding into panic over a single loss. Which happens all the time in tennis.

Clostebol saga? Whole thing was a focus on winning in court and losing in the court of public opinion. Not once did they apply any standard crisis handling rules, such as letting him speak first of his own volition and owning the narrative.

Instead the story exploded after months, without an initial press conference where he could set the narrative. No. He sat for a regular slam press conference instead where a mediator attempted to limit questions on the topic to a single question and the rest of the silence allowed BS to fill the vacuum.

If you love Maria Sharapova so damn much look to her to see how to operate in this instance.

Obviously he could barely show face when he was number 1 and banned so that limited any opportunities to promote the sport.

By the time the ban was over they allowed him a single interview for Italian media. You’re dealing with the world number 1 at the time. An international press conference was the play and that exclusive interview was to be secondary.

Rehiring the coach that vicariously contaminated him over some idea of comfort—speaks for itself.

Now it’s some strange overreaction to a loss as if that didn’t happen to all the greats in the history of the sport. Absolutely hidden in person but visible in every endorsement and sponsorship heading into the Olympics. A shell. A business.

You can tell these are people out of their depths with this provincial style of image management. Abysmal.

Every single time the temperature in the room needed to be lowered they failed by adding to it. He’s free to do what he wants, but he’s destined to be a victim of “loyalty” just like Totti with people like this managing his career.

Well. See the difference.