One hundred years ago, a sports legend was born in Rome. He still holds a number of records that are impossible to equal, together with his brother. It was March 4, 1923, and in a hospital in Italy's capital city, Piero D'Inzeo, the greatest horseman in Italian history, was born along with his younger brother Raimondo, who was born two years after him in Poggio Mirteto, a small town in the province of Rieti.

Piero began riding horses almost before he began to walk, because his father Carlo Costante D'Inzeo, a career military man, had been an Italian champion and founder of the Società Ippica Romana, a cavalry school that became famous for the many champions who trained there over the years.

He began at a very early age to learn the art of show jumping, and when he came of age he became an officer in the Italian Army, perfecting his technique more and more until he became one of the best in the world, winning dozens of competitions in the international competitions in which he participated, although his younger brother often managed to beat him: but when they competed together in the Italian team, the two were truly invincible.

Piero, became famous not only for his perfect technique, but also for his extraordinary ability to calculate the horse's every move and then guide it to perfection on every course where he competed.

In 1948, in London, at the age of twenty-five, he began his interminable adventure at the Olympic Games: he participated in eight editions, a feat achieved only by seventeen other athletes in the 100-year history of the event conceived by French Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896. His brother Raimondo also participated in the same number of editions of the Olympic Games, making them the only brothers in history to have competed together in such a large number of editions.

In his long Olympic career, Piero D’Inzeo won six medals, a haul that few riders in history have ever won, although he never managed to win a gold. After the first two editions, in 1948 and 1952, where he won nothing, in 1956 in Melbourne, Australia, he won the individual bronze medal and the team silver medal in show jumping. And four years later, at the Olympic Games in Rome, he won silver and bronze again, with his brother Raimondo winning gold just ahead of him in the individual event, writing a unique page of history, because never before had two brothers finished first and second in an Olympic competition.

They were so strong that the world press after that race called them "the invincible brothers." Piero won two more Olympic bronze medals, one in Mexico City in 1968 and the other in Munich in 1972. His last Olympic competition was in Montreal in 1976, when he had turned fifty-three!

In the history of the sport, very few athletes have been able to compete at such high levels at the age of Piero, who is a true legend of the sport in Italy, not least because he is the only rider to have won the Concorso Ippico Internazionale di Piazza di Siena, one of the most prestigious show jumping trophies in the world that has been held in Rome since 1922, seven times.

Another record that probably no one will be able to take away from Piero D'Inzeo who, nine years ago, at the age of ninety-one, passed away in Rome, the city where he was born and where he learned to whisper to horses.