From a small oratory in Bovisasca to the Champions League with Novara, through the youth national teams with which he had won the European Under19 gold in 2022 as mvp.
It had all the contours of a fairy tale that of Julia Ituma, the 18-year-old volleyball player of Nigerian origin found dead on Thursday morning in IstanbulL. And instead it turned into a tragedy without explanations, where the heartbreaking agony of the many people who knew and appreciated it remains. “She was very polite and reserved”, Danilo Turoti, the president of the San Filippo Neri sports club where ‘Titu’, as childhood friends called her, she started playing volleyball at the age of 11 after her first experiences with basketball.
“She was beautiful and good – recalls Sister Luisa -, here they understood that he had talent and made his way. He often ran around here with his mother, they drank together at the fountain and then Julia entered the gym for training”. A pain that also overwhelms Club Italia, the federal academy that discovered it almost by chance in 2018 – the team he was in the second division, he didn’t play in the youth tournaments – and where Julia played until last summer, until she moved to Novara.
At the Pavesi Center Julia is remembered as a concrete and punctual girl, with few crickets on her mind, very focused on the goals to be achieved and a strong determination. With good academic performance: after 4 years at the Itis Ettore Conti in Milan he was preparing his high school diploma in a private institute in Novara. With a very present and affectionate family behind her: Elisabeth, her mother, Vanessa, her older sister, and her little brother – now 15 years old – often sat in the stands cheering her on. And no one can understand what happened. Not even her former teammates, all in shock: some of her, engaged in a school trip, were warned by the managers of Club Italia; others, on the other hand, because they were busy in class and therefore unreachable on the phone, learned the news in a lightning-fast way, from social media and information sites. The athletes, who left upset and in tears before the end of the lessons, will be assisted by the psychologist who usually follows all the girls of the federal project to make sense of this misfortune which has no sense.
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