Sports journalists at Rai, Italy’s state broadcaster, say they are going on strike — not to protest low wages or bad working conditions, but because their boss couldn’t tell the difference between American pop diva Mariah Carey and a much younger Italian actress.
Paolo Petrecca, the director of Rai’s sports division, made numerous gaffes while giving a running commentary on the Games’ opening ceremonies in Milan on Friday, spurring howls of outrage on Italian media for the last three days.
Adding to the outcry, the members of Rai’s union of sports journalists are now protesting Mr. Petrecca’s mistakes by withholding their bylines from Olympic coverage, after announcing on Monday that they will strike for three days immediately after the Games end on Feb. 22.
Mr. Petrecca has been head of the sports division for ten months and has worked for the state broadcaster since 2001. He opened the three-and-a-half hour broadcast by calling San Siro, a century-old landmark soccer stadium in Milan where one of four ceremonies took place, the “Olympic Stadium,” the official name of the main soccer stadium in Rome. He described Kirsty Coventry, the president of the International Olympic Committee, as the daughter of Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president.
He failed to recognize two members of Italy’s women’s volleyball team, who were torchbearers. He mistook Brazil’s delegation for Bulgaria’s and then, once he realized he was looking at Brazilians, remarked that “dance is in their blood.”
When Matilda De Angelis, 36, an Italian actress, took up a symphony baton to conduct people dressed up as famous Italian composers , Mr. Petrecca initially said she was Ms. Carey, who is 56 and who had flown in for the ceremony from the United States.
Mr. Petrecca did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Rai declined to comment.
“For three days now, we have all been embarrassed, without exception and through no fault of our own,” the journalists’ union said in a statement on Monday. “It is time to make our voices heard because we are facing the worst performance ever by Rai Sport during one of the most eagerly awaited events ever, the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina.”
Alessandro Antinelli, a representative of the Rai Sport journalists’ union who runs the group’s soccer coverage, said that three days before the opening ceremonies, he approached Mr. Petrecca to suggest that he hand over commentating duties to a more experienced sports anchor. “In our newsroom there are people who have covered ten, eight, seven, five Olympics,” said Mr. Antinelli, who is currently reporting on Olympic events hosted in Cortina d’Ampezzo. “He is not a sports journalist.”
The Italian news media has been unsparing about Mr. Petrecca’s performance. Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s main newspapers, called the opening ceremony “one of the most dismal broadcasts” ever aired by Rai, and La Repubblica said that both for Rai and “for all of Italy” the ceremony “was transformed into a Waterloo stuffed with gaffes, blunders, and ill-advised censorship.”
In one Instagram post, Lorenzo Tosa, a freelance writer, criticized Mr. Petrecca’s “embarrassing gaffes, sensational blunders, incorrect names, names not even mentioned and obscured,” writing that “as an Italian citizen, I am ashamed.” His post was liked 183,000 times.
Like many others on social media, Mr. Tosa pointed out Mr. Petrecca made no mention of Ghali, a well known Italian rapper of Tunisian heritage who recited a poem during the ceremony in Milan.
Ghali, who is known for his political lyrics in his music, had won fourth place at Italy’s songwriting competition in 2024 and concluded his performance by saying “stop the genocide” in an implied reference to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. A day later, a Rai anchor read aloud a letter, from the chief executive of the state broadcaster, expressing solidarity with Israel.
The sports newsroom had already protested the leadership of Mr. Petrecca, who has never been a sports journalist and spent a large part of his career covering politics. The union twice voted to reject his editorial plans last year because they, were “completely insufficient,” Mr. Alessandri said, and did not represent “the skills required to steer our newsroom.”
Most of Rai’s leadership is nominated by Italy’s government of the day, which since 2022 has been led by Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister. For years, the government’s influence over the broadcaster has led to recurrent accusations of bias, during both left-leaning and right-leaning administrations.
Journalists at Rai have previously accused the state broadcaster of being “reduced to a megaphone of the government” and gone on strike to protest what they described as the government’s “suffocating control” of journalists.
In this instance, Mr. Alessandri said the sports journalists, 40 of whom are covering the Games, are not motivated by politics but by their concerns over Mr. Petrecca’s ”competence and his skills.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Milan and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.
Motoko Rich is the Times bureau chief in Rome, where she covers Italy, the Vatican and Greece.
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