Time has mythicized this potentially perfect love story for storytellers of an age that is only apparently ephemeral: Ayrton Sennathe Brazilian driver who has enthralled and modified F1 with his style, e Carol Alt, American model and actress authentic icon of that Italy that discovered fashion, business, its hegemony in sectors that have become economic assets. They loved each other. And intensely, so much so that only that cursed incident a Imola, which he tore Seine to life, to racing and consigned it to the myth.
Theirs was an absolute love, but never ostentatious due to their shy and reserved nature. And of the pre-existing and parallel relationships, which imposed painful choices. Perhaps also because, as he explained Carol Alt, then the caesura between the public and private spheres was tangible. And it had to be protected.
The beginnings of Carol Alt and the arrival in Italy
In Italy, Carol Alt she had found opportunities in America: a former soft girl, a pastry shop assistant, she had lost 20 kilos after giving up her job and because of her height she was unable to find herself, except in that newborn world of catwalks. Her biographies and some interviews narrate her almost by chance, but it was the beginning of a profession that gave her the opportunity to travel.
And it brought her new professional paths, even in the cinema here in Italy when her celebrity and her attractiveness – which has become truly representative of a sector in enormous expansion – tickled the fantasies of the brothers Vanzine who sensed his potential in front of the camera as well as the lens.
Landed in the beautiful country, in short, for Carol Alt it was success, thanks to that light and lively – but never false – cinema of the brothers Vanzina, who gave her roles that chronicled that decade of wonderful notoriety. It all started with Via MontenapoleoneHere in Italy.
Ayrton Senna, a legend of Formula One
Ayrton Senna, however, when they met it was already the myth Seine: the pilot of F1 three times world champion (1988, 1990, 1991), in an era dominated by Brazilians and a circus still unsafe, by today’s standards with halo to seal pilots.
Seine he is described – by his biographers – as a modest, polite man, very bourgeois by extraction and of an anomalous discretion despite his successes. Furthermore, to his cheerfulness and light-heartedness she combines a certain melancholy, which is often remembered as a trait of his temperament. He who had chosen to indulge his unstoppable passion for engines, for F1 when he could have dedicated himself to the family interests that he always loved and protected, even choosing to compete with his mother’s surname.
The meeting between Ayrton Senna and Carol Alt
They met, the pilot and the model, in Milan due to the commitments of her husband Carolthe ice hockey player of the New York Rangers, Ron Greschner. She didn’t know him at all, Carol Alt who had also married a sportsman with whom he lived a marriage of ups and downs.
In the searches carried out in the photographic archives of the agencies, the photos that see them together are very few and limited to a famous event in Milan, in the years of their love, at the Prince of Savoy and an appearance at TV Grand Prix.
Senna unique, true love
Decades after their first meeting, from their de facto denied and secret, yet well-known relationship, the model has once again confided the vicissitudes of that feeling in an interview given to very trueon March 25, 2023.
That story was kept secret, from 1990 until the death of magic, in the tragic accident at Imola in 1994. For the entire duration of that relationship, the actress and model was married to the ice hockey player of the New York Rangers Ron Greschnermarried 7 years earlier, in 1983:
“I met true love with him, only that ours wasn’t an official relationship because I was married at the time. Self Ayrton had he not been the victim of that terrible accident, I am sure that between us it could have lasted forever. I was close to leaving my husband to be with him.”
The first meeting
When the motoring champion was introduced to Carol, the model he thought it was the driver, or rather the chauffeur. The husband of the actress had left shortly before, after a furious argument.
From that first meeting and the first dinner they were inseparable:
“I didn’t know who he was, at a fashion show the photographers asked me to take some shots with him, he told me he was a driver and I thought he was the chauffeur. He was much shorter than me, my heart was pounding, I instinctively took off my heels. He smiled and said: “thank you”. Me: “No problem”. I was married. I was struck by his sensitivity, no boy before him had told me about God and the Bible. He said to me: we have to hurry, we don’t have much time ”, he declared Carol in an interview given to Corriere della Sera.
The tragic death of Senna on May 1st at Imola
They were almost four years of true love (between 1990 and 1994), marked by work and reciprocal commitments, but just as cheerful and joyous as the model herself describes them in the interviews that followed, decades later and after the dramatic accident on the Imola circuit.
“He knew he was doing a dangerous job. When he died I was in Florida for a TV series, I remember everything, my hotel room, how I was dressed… I threw myself into work”.
The next day, she decided to leave her husband for good and devote herself only to her profession. 60 years gone by and decades away from the tragedy that marked her existence and that of the loved ones of the pilot who became a legend, the void left by Seine it is still indefinable.
The indelible memory and dedications on Instagram
Unbridgeable, so much so that even recently Carol Alt keep calling Ayrton “the love of my life”.
On Instagram, Carol today that there is no concern and attention in protecting that relationship and occasionally shares portraits of that happy and clandestine era, more than 25 years after his death. A way to renew a promise and give thanks for those years together. Even though it’s “my only regret”, as she admitted with a mixture of regret and raw awareness of a time that won’t be able to return but that accompanies her, nonetheless. And this time he can admit it without any reticence.
VIRGIL SPORTS
