A special column on the Istituto Nazionale LUCE in the magazine “Cine Mondo” of June 5, 1928, stated loud and clear: “The Dutch government and the Olympic [Games Organizing] Committee awarded Istituto Nazionale LUCE the exclusive rights to filming the Olympics, acknowledging the institute’s perfect technical organization.” In reality, as reported by the “Official Report of the Olympic Games of 1928 celebrated at Amsterdam”, the deal with Istituto LUCE for the filming and distribution of footage of the Olympic games was done hastily after the Swiss production company O.F.A. (Olympia Film AG) headed by Arnold Fanck, initially chosen for the prestigious job had withdrawn. The unexpected opportunity was extremely appealing, and Istituto LUCE sent some of the best cameramen to Holland to document in detail the Olympic gathering, filming the opening and closing ceremonies and all of the salient moments of each sports event. The result was a feature-length film of over 4900 meters titled La IX Olimpiade di Amsterdam. Despite the unquestionable productive effort involved and the excellence of the footage, the Olympic reportage shot by the Italian unit met an unhappy fate: the precarious commercial agreements made with the Olympic Committee and the Society of Dutch exhibitors prevented Istituto LUCE from fully taking advantage of the international distribution of the film, which would be disseminated in various countries around the world in a second edition overseen by the German director Wilhelm Prager for the UFA in Berlin, with which the Italian film institute had just signed a binding cooperation agreement. From the research still underway it appears that La IX Olimpiade di Amsterdam, in its original full-lenght version, was never released in Italian theaters, but instead screened as excerpts from the film of individual events in various LUCE newsreels. The lukewarm reception of the Olympic feature-length film in Italy was probably connected to politically-motivated reasons; in fact, at the end of the games, Mussolini declared that he was deeply disappointed by the results of the Italian athletes, so much so that he stripped Lando Ferretti of the presidency of the National Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) and handed it to Augusto Turati, the powerful former secretary of the Italian National Fascist Party: under the circumstances, it is understandable how the grandiose release of a film that in reality only documented the failure of Italian athletics was completely unacceptable to Italian audiences.