This article is published in Vanity Fair issue 28-29 on newsstands until July 20, 2021
The one that will parade during the opening ceremony of the Games on 23 July will be the Italian team with the highest number of female appearances in history. The blue athletes took the stage. Sometimes establishing primates, always managing to defeat the difficulties and too many “can’t” that have been heard in the course of their lives. We have chosen seven. Seven emblematic stories that, however they go to Japan, already smell of victory.
“Running the 100 meters playing chess”: is table tennis according to Debora Vivarelli, the only one qualified for the Games in this discipline dominated by a single nation, China. They win, they command and they are everywhere, “whoever fails to get to the top at home takes another passport”. A supremacy that pushes the rest of the world to
join forces, “you play to get closer than to beat them.” Approaching it costs 6 hours of effort a day, 6 days a week, all year round, in a calendar that does not include stops, to synchronize speed with intuition, accustom the eyes and legs. Learn to calculate moves based on the opponent’s movements. There are different degrees of separation between the barbecue interlude between friends and professionalism. There are no relationships. Debora, at 28, is number 33 in the world and 72 go to Tokyo. She presents herself with a “masculine and aggressive” technique.
Sport is ahead of society and must push. I deserve to earn like a man, even with ping-pong
Table tennis has become more physical with the evolution of materials, which is why she has chosen a rock model: Lindsey Vonn. «A hundred times she fell and a hundred times she got up. Indestructible. Unattainable ». The essence of competition according to Debora, who looks at the numbers of parity reached at the Games and thinks of the ghost figures that resist behind the facade, of the differences in salaries and prizes: “here you certainly don’t earn as much as in tennis or football, but if one takes 50, one collects 20 ». This ball has to travel.
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