Starace was a sports fanatic and instituted president of the CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee). He is remembered for such unlikely sports stunts as jumping through a fire circle at the Marmi Stadium in 1938 or horse jumping over a saloon car. He wanted party officials to look virile and fit and on official ceremonies had them parading at the "bersaglieri" pace, an Italian variant of goose-stepping. He is specially and more significantly remembered also for a policy of enrollment of the Italian people (either young or not) in fascist party-linked organizations that bore some semblance to the scout movement: "Opera Balilla", "Figli della lupa", "Avanguardisti", "Giovane fascista" and the labour-related "Organizzazione del Dopolavoro" (after-work sports). Sports were of particular importance in Fascist propaganda, heavily exploiting the successes of Italian athletes in international competitions (like boxer Primo Carnera or the Italy national football team), and Starace was quite instrumental in this field, tackling both the mass organisation and the elite side of Italian sports. In October 1939, Starace was finally dismissed as Party Secretary in favor of the popular Ettore Muti. He was made Chief of Staff of the Blackshirts and he held this position until being dismissed for incompetence in May 1941. He was succeeded by Enzo Galbiati. In 1943, following the demise of Mussolini's regime, Starace was arrested by Pietro Badoglio's Royalist government. He was arrested even though his real power under Mussolini had ended two years earlier. After unsuccessfully attempting to regain Mussolini's favor in the German-backed Italian Social Republic of Salò, Starace was again arrested. This time he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Verona and was arrested by his former colleagues on charges that he had weakened the party during his tenure as Party Secretary. Starace was eventually released and moved to Milan. On 29 April 1945, during his morning jog, he was recognized and captured by anti-Fascist Italian partisans. Starace was taken to Piazzale Loreto and shown the body of Mussolini, which he saluted just before he was executed. His body was subsequently strung up alongside Mussolini's. Starace was one of the main objects of political satire and popular jokes under fascism. The citations of his sayings are innumerable, and the majority of them, if separated for a moment from the tragic historical circumstances of their origin, are quite sufficient to demonstrate that Starace had moved away from practical sense in his pursuit of a path for propaganda for the regime: "I wonder why the expectation is still to consider the end of the year to conform to the metric of 31 December rather than 28 October [the date of the March on Rome in 1922].