it’s time to take sports culture seriously

The Italy of sport packs up and goes home. From Tokyo we land in Rome, and in all the towns and villages where the Olympic champions of this Italian summer live. Luggage has never been so heavy. To make the scales wobble are the 40 medals that we put around our necks. Let’s hope that the kilograms fall within the airline’s cap: the ten golds are massive and the difference is felt. Never so many medals since the Olympics have existed. Italy follows the path of the Sun and from Japan it falls beautifully back to the West, bright like few other times. In the Los Angeles and Rome Games we had already done a lot (38 medals), but Tokyo 2020, played in 2021 and in the dystopian confusion of post-Covid, was something more. The first gold of taekwondo with Vito dell’Aquila opened the dances and in a riot of emotions the successes came a little at a time. The 100-meter race was the definitive explosion.

The 9 seconds and 80 hundredths of Marcell Jacobs they broke down the doors and since then athletics have won 5 golds, an absurd result. It is as if an unwritten rule had been canceled: no longer Jamaica or the United States, but Italy. In the most anticipated – and most beautiful – race of all the Games, for the first time in history, an Italian participated and arrived first of all. The rush of gold of Gianmarco Tamberi in the high jump a few minutes earlier brought tears down, but Jacobs was able to turn them into winning adrenaline, all to be put on the 100 meters of track to be walked on to cross the finish line.

This is why we will remember these Tokyo Olympics for a lifetime. Wrestling sports, rowing, track cycling, clay pigeon shooting or archery, have thrown a bucket of fresh water in our faces: there is not only football, and above all we are not only good at football. . The Europeans won in the home of the English – tragicomic end repeated with the 4 × 100 men’s relay – were the first reason for Italian pride in this unique summer 2021. Too easy, however, to say that Chiellini and his teammates paved the way for the Olympics. Each victory came for individual or collective sporting merit. But it is also true that the whole sport, in the last 60 days, has acted as a team.

For a while the front pages of the newspapers gave way to sports heroes. For a few days the media went to delve into the lives of athletes and showed us all the sacrifice that can be behind a medal, such as the interventions that Vanessa Ferrari underwent before winning her first second Olympic place. Sport as a metaphor for life and training as a metaphor for hard work. Defeats and lifts are part of life, and to get to the top it takes courage and calluses on your hands. And then what one wonders is: what good was it? Besides the beauty, the emotion, the wonder of rejoicing and putting your hands in your hair, what can be extracted from this year’s sporting miracle?

The hope is that sport was not just a parenthesis. But the expectation is to see hundreds of children attending athletics schools since September. To see young, suburban girls start throwing punches in a boxing ring. To look at children and adults not to throw themselves down at the first defeat but to get up, fight and continue with their heads held high, after the various injuries that getting involved inevitably entails. The hope is to have the sensitivity to be moved in front of a 14-year-old diver – Hongchan Quan – who will use the Tokyo gold money to treat her sick mother. And also to see young children learning to crochet – like Tom Delay – and sew over the most colorful designs.

These images must generate the desire to go down the street to run, to take a ball and throw it against a wall, to have teammates who dry their tears or drag them to victory. The task of Italy, understood as an institution, however, is that of make all of this possible. A young student should have the opportunity to play sports, even at a competitive level, without falling behind with homework and struggling with school performance. A city administration should receive adequate funds to renovate gyms, swimming pools, basketball or volleyball courts. The school should create detailed Physical Education programs, in which sports history and the history of sporting miracles would be taught, as well as the importance of individual physical exercises in two hours per week.

The video of Tamberi’s broken exultation after his 2.37 meters of flight, the philosophy of “until the end” of the canoeists Rondini and Cesarini, the tears that never stopped streaming down Filippo Tortu’s face after the final sprint: channeling these stories between the school desks is a fundamental opening. To be taken seriously therefore, in a nutshell, must be there sports culture. Considering sport as a culture and teaching it as such is the first step. Between history, geography, poetry or equations, the importance of sport must find space. Let’s rub our eyes and understand that sports are many and are distributed between genders. That telling them is fundamental for the growth of the little ones and to rekindle the sporting passion of the older ones. Only in this way the 40 medals will not be just a metal. Only in this way will this year’s Italian record really make sense.

© reserved reproduction