Paul Rouse

The way they did it was twofold.

It was threefold, really.

There's the projection of Mussolini himself as the country's greatest sportsman.

This imagery of him out skiing bare chested and out riding horses.

And there's images of him.

He looks terrible on a bicycle, but there's a brilliant photograph of him standing on a balcony with loads of Italian cyclists waving their bikes in the air.

It's an incredible image.

And the truth of it is he was anything but athletic.

He was a small, fat man when it comes down to it.

And he was not... Nothing wrong with that, Paul.

No, no.

He was athletic in no modern sense of the word that you would consider, although he wanted to project the idea that he was.

But he went for practical policies around it.

And you look at the building of sports fields through the late 20s into the 30s, an extra 3,000 sports fields built around sports.

Italy, because he was looking for mass participation in sport.

But he also put gyms and sports halls in villages and in towns around the place.

So this was a vast, ultimately fascist project to create men, and it was directed towards men or there were women involved in sport, who would be able to people an army.

And then the third layer was the development of a kind of an elite sporting world in which there would be elite sport within Italy,

but really that the best Italian sports people would be able to compete in cycling and in boxing and ultimately in soccer and in the Olympic Games when they went outside the country.

I think the scale of it makes it distinct.