Cesare Tifi

Cesare Tifi was an all-round athlete. Educated as a school gymnastics teacher, he later married also a gymnastics teacher. He founded the gymnastics team of the Società Ginnastica Roma to participate in the Olympic Games from 1906 until 1924 as a gymnast, team leader, trainer, and judge.

In 1896 he was the captain and goalkeeper of the first football squad of Rome in what later became the Foot Ball Club di Roma (FBC di Roma). A first “gymnastic football” tournament in 1899 was won by Tifi’s team. They repeated this feat in the following years. Tifi also refereed football games in Rome in the early 20th century gradually introducing the use of English FA rules in place of the gymnastics-based regulations previously used.

At the Intercalated Games in 1906, he was a non-competing team-leader of the Roma team, one of two Italian teams competing. Six years later in Stockholm, in his position as president of the Italian federation’s technical commission he was again leader of the Italian gymnastics team that won gold. During World War I, he served as an army officer in the 6th Alpine Regiment with the Alpini Battalion “Val Brenta” fighting in the alpine areas of the Italian front and training special forces called “Arditi”. Tifi fostered the integration of sports and gymnastics into military training and helped to found the Central Military School of Physical Education in 1921. As a major he commanded and trained the Italian participants at the 1919 Interallied Games in Paris. In 1928, he had his last Olympic appearance as a judge for women’s gymnastics at the Amsterdam Olympic Games.

He wrote many books about physical education including, for instance, track and field, basketball, boxing, gymnastics and fencing. Notably, he published “L’Educazione Fisica Italiana” (Italian Physical Education) in 1922. Tifi was secretary of the Federazione Ginnastica d’Italia (1929-30) and of Italian Basketball Federation (1930-31).