Still a child, gifted with an uncommon articular flexibility and technique, Paolo Biotti is seen spar-
ring with Billy Superfoot Wallace while Linda Lee, Bruce Lee’s wife, looks at him for hours in Milan,
sitting in the evening on the ground of Tatami in CSKS of Via Maffei. He trains with Richard Sylla,
Andrè Panza, Ramon Dekkers and he traveling for a long time between Italy, Amsterdam, Cambo-
dia, Bangkok, Pattaya. and France, between Paris, Marseilles, and Strasbourg, where he became
friends of the high officers in the Foreign Legion and where he often goes with his friend Carlo
Fidigati, unfortunally tragically dead. After that it was the time for the english boxing.
Actually Biotti says “in my first match I knew very little about Muay Thai, I knew I could do anything,
even hitting with my knees and elbows, I felt the excitement in approaching a form of almost total
full fight that I had always dreamed of. I really came from Savate, and before my first muay thai
fight I had done for four times the Pao in a camp in exchange for a pair of original Levis jeans that I
brought from Italy, at the time a rarities in Thailand, in the camps where not even women could not
enter and were never accepted as well as foreigners fighters, unlike today with tourism”, continues
to remember Biotti “The matches were a success, for the geometry of Savate skills, I understood
that in the movements Savate was a great school, and because the Thai did not often perform
jumping and spinning kick, but the thai public fans loved it very much, certainly the elbows were
a problem because I got often wonded by them.
Back in Italy “I started to train only in Muay Thai, unfortunately the elbows became a normal re-
flex for me, but were never allowed in Europe, but for a few exceptions like in the The Netherlands,
when I said that I had fought in Thailand with the elbows all the people were shocked. Today in
the Italian championships the elbows are allowed, it’s normal, this is a case of history that show
the evolution of the combat sports. This mean that they can be safe if regulated and developed
by a competent organizations.”
Paolo Biotti in Full Contact style at 27 years old