Giorgio Pasotti turns 50: he lived in China, martial arts champion, 7 secrets

At 50, «quoting the good Jep Gambardella, whom I knew well, you no longer want to waste time with things you don’t give a damn about». Today Giorgio Pasotti – born in Bergamo on 22 June 1973 – celebrates his 50th birthday. Perhaps not everyone knows that he was a martial arts champion before being an actor. “I grew up in a place that, at the end of the seventies, was a bad neighborhood, where heroin spun and many kids ended up badly – he said -. Luckily sport gave me the right path: without martial arts, I don’t know what I would have become. I was a very lively child and also a little clumsy. To calm me down, my father took me to a gym in Bergamo at the age of 5 to try karate and it was love at first sight. At 13 I switched to wushu, a Chinese martial art halfway between karate and artistic gymnastics, in which there are several aerial evolutions so it’s more acrobatic and the effect more spectacular. In this discipline I have been Italian champion several times, European champion twice and I obtained a very important fourth place at the World Championships in Baltimore». In 1987 Pasotti spent a two-month period of study in China, to deepen his knowledge of wushu. He also returned to the country the following year, and in 1992 he moved to Beijing, where he stayed for two years.