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.
Once it was Million Dollar Baby and that idea of ​​boxing that leads to the extreme and requires a woman to go beyond the limits just to prove that she is capable, of knowing how to use fists. Today, instead, boxing for us is Irma Testa, the first to represent Italy at the Games in the ring in 2016 and today the leader who returns more mature, convinced and in a group: there are three other athletes with her and no man. The first time in 100 years. Irma was lucky and immediately found a coach who believed in her, but suspicion snaked around the bag: “Dirty looks, she teased, as soon as my coach turned the corner they told me to leave, if he was absent they ignored me” . Who knows if they’re still there, grumbling as the world goes on without them.
“You were surprised not to have men with us in Tokyo, but the trend was clear. To think that at first they looked at us wrong
The journey from Torre Annunziata to Assisi, the federal center, is much longer than the kilometers that divide home from work, it is a leap into another dimension, «I knew I was entitled to a physiotherapist. I discovered America “. As a junior there were three girls with her, today she doesn’t count them and she finds them flying to Tokyo: «Now they have to give us a voice, it’s just us. It must be said that the federation has been doing it for a long time ». She returns every attention, pays every investment, focused on the sacrifices of those who have to pull hooks strong enough to open a path, a path so unique that it does not give points of reference: “I’ve never even seen Rocky”, and her example of motivation comes from Federica Pellegrini, one who swims but knows how to pull some backhand.
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