Olympics Stories: Giulia Quintavalle, the first woman in judo in Italy

And that day – after the gold medal – Giulia Quintavalle joked about it and said: «From today call me Primavalle». Tatami colored in blue. On the highest podium, gold in judo category 57 kg, first woman in the history of Italian sport, after beating the fearsome Dutch Deborah Gravenstijn. It is August 11, 2008, Giulia is a young woman from Rosignano Marittimo in Livorno – she cares a lot about her country and mentions it whenever she can – she is twenty-five years old. In the memory of Italians remains the gesture with which she celebrates every victory: she puts her hand to her ear and waves it, as if to say: “I don’t know if you understood what I just did”. Giulia copied it from the national team’s center forward Luke Tony, who two years earlier – in Berlin – contributed to Italy’s victory in the World Cup. Her best friend, Antonia, asked her to replicate her celebration. And so it was.

But the face of Giulia Quintavalle is unknown to most. Judo, like many other disciplines, only comes to the forefront every four years, when the Olympics take place. The city of triumph is Beijing. Giulia has sweet eyes, an intense gaze, a lean physique that seems to be made with wire, a natural aptitude for elegance in a proud bearing. Her story – at least until that magical day in Beijing – tells of an uncommon tenacity and of many goals missed by a whisker. She started judo at the age of four, thanks to her mother, who enrolled her in a children’s course at the gym without telling her anything. For years Giulia Quintavalle was the one who always came second, behind the best, both in Italy and in the various competitions abroad. It’s difficult to shake off the label of «successful loser». She did it. With obstinacy, going down a category – from 63 to 57 kg – and relying on the expertise of master Felice Mariani, a monument of Italian judo since he was the first Italian to get on the podium at the Montreal Games in 1976.

What the girls (shy like her) don’t say is that behind every gold medal there is daily effort, the search for inner balance, the management of moments of exaltation (few) and those where the whole world it seems to slip out of our hands. That day – August 11, 2008 – remains the most beautiful of his life.. In the following years, the athlete of the Fiamme Gialle – she is based in Infernetto in Rome, near Ostia where she trains – wins another title that was missing from the Italian palmares, winning the European Team Championships with: Rosalba Forciniti, Edwige Gwend, Erica Barbieri, Assunta Galeone and subsequently wins three international tournaments in Lisbon, Rome and Abu Dhabi. In 2012 she takes part in the London Olympics, but fails to get on the podium. Last year Giulia Quintavalle entered the CONI Walk of Fame, returned to live in her hometown, is married to the former judoka Orazio D’Allura and is the mother of Leonardo and Zoe. And when she remembers that day she says that «Reality has surpassed even the dream». Quintavalle for life, Primavalle for just one day, but an unforgettable one.