The book tells the stories of world-famous athletes who entered the myth through their results, their determination and their strength of will, and who at the same time saw their renown stained by mistakes, brave choices, complicated historical moments or wrong decisions and encounters: the rise and fall of heroes who, sometimes in an instant, changed their lives for good. In sport, as in life, greatness and perfection are not the same thing; it can happen that imperfection does not dirty greatness but completes it, makes it human, and that greatness cannot be born or grow without the shadow of imperfection. Never stop at appearances: there are champions who realised themselves also, or in spite of, moral or material limits, impurities of character, weaknesses of the body or the soul. The journalist and writer Maurizio Crosetti, always concerned to give back sporting events with a telling that goes beyond simple reporting, retraces the victories and the fragilities of the greatest athletes in history, accompanied by portraits of the people involved and by the images that made them iconic: the solitude of Diego Armando Maradona, the death of Marco Pantani, the deceit of Lance Armstrong, the flight of O.J. Simpson, and then Muhammad Ali, Ben Johnson, George Best, Oscar Pistorius, Greg Louganis and Nadia Comaneci.