Today the inauguration in Tokyo, until 5 September we will be in the company of the Paralympic athletes: among them also Monica Contraffatto who lost her leg during the Italian mission in Afghanistan
Today at 1 pm the Paralympic Games will start in Tokyo and we will be able to follow them until 5 September. There will be more than 4 thousand athletes from 135 nations. During the opening ceremony the flag of Afghanistan will also be paraded, to support the sportsmen who cannot be present due to the serious internal situation in the country.
A record-breaking Paralympic Italy
For Italy the records begin even before the races. We present ourselves in Tokyo with the largest delegation ever: 113 athletes, 61 women and 52 men. So, for the record, the female presence exceeds the male one. Our sportsmen will be engaged in engaged in 16 disciplines: Athletics, Badminton, Canoe, Rowing, Cycling, Horse Riding, Judo, Swimming, Fencing, Sitting Volley, Weightlifting, Taekwondo, Shooting, Archery, Triathlon.
Our standard bearers will be Baby saw, fencing champion, and Federico Morlacchi, swimming champion. And for years Bebe Vio has been the strong and smiling face of the human challenge, not just sports, of those who have a “before and after” in life.
An illness, an accident knock out, overturn every perspective and dream. Paralympic athletes are all obstacle course champions, regardless of their discipline. We follow them not only to experience the thrill of competition, but to see that – precisely in the body and not only in the soul – the wound is the occasion for an impulse. There are obstacles, let us not delude ourselves otherwise; our forces are lame, let us not delude ourselves to the contrary. Yet our presence is capable of finding great resources when it rests on its limits.
Different races for each type of disability = more medals
We are still galvanized by the achievements of the Italian athletes at the Olympics. This trail of enthusiasm will also accompany our Paralympic athletes. But how do their competitions work?
An example. We have seen Marcell Jacobs whiz in the 100 meters flat, the athletic discipline par excellence. Here, at the Paralympics there is not a single 100-meter race, but 16.
To indicate disabilities and sub-categories, a complex categorization system is in use to ensure an adequate and fair level of competitiveness. In track and field, for example, the classification of events begins with the scope in which they are organized: “T” indicates track and road events, “F” indicates throwing events.
The prefix is followed by numbers that indicate the type of impediment and the difference between the various classes. The abbreviation T which goes from 11 to 13 (T11-13), for example, indicates events for athletes with visual disturbances starting from the races in which the presence of guides is expected. T20, on the other hand, indicates the races for athletes with brain dysfunctions, while T33-34 are the handbike races, the models of which may vary depending on the impediments. At the Tokyo Games there will be sixteen different categories in the men’s 100 meters alone and fourteen in the women’s ones, for a total of thirty gold medals to be awarded.
Gives The post
More medals, many more medals. This is a great sign, it seems to suggest that disability makes opportunities for personal growth flourish – rather than wither. And it also applies to those who stay at home. One can be amputated in the physical or in the mental faculties, and it is a very hard test. The hypothesis we see on the pitch at the Paralympics is that a subtraction becomes multiplication. As happens in the garden: where you prune a rose, many new shoots sprout. It is not the first branch, the trajectories change, but just where there is no longer a bud, others can be born.
Faces and stories
So who are our Paralympic athletes? What stories bring to our attention? Let’s get to know some of them, wishing everyone to enjoy the effort and sweat of contention, the moment I am to the test, stretched to the finish line carrying burdens and hopes.
1, Veronica Yoko Plazzi
The scars cannot hide them. Today at 25 and will go to Tokyo to win a medal in the Triathlon. Her childhood dream was to become a dancer when she was 15 fulminant bacterial meningitis he has removed the phalanges of her hands and feet. It has taken away a lot more from her and we can only vaguely guess what it means for a very young girl to see her body amputated and covered with marks that cannot be hidden.
Sport helped me a lot to become familiar with my “new” body and my scars, it made me understand how many extraordinary things such a transformed body could still do, so how can I not love it?
Running, swimming and biking. He has chosen a discipline that contains three. Because? Because – he says – when he no longer felt he had a reason to live, his body offered him a thousand.
2 Monica Counterfeit
It is to be believed that Monica Counterfeit will race with an extra boost in Tokyo. We will see her on the track in the 100 meters flat, but athletics was the landing place after an accident that changed her life. Monica was Corporal Major of the Italian Army and was on a mission to Afghanistan. On March 24, 2012, during an attack on the Italian base in the district of Gulistan, in the province of Farah in Afghanistan, she suffered severe injuries to her right leg which was amputated.
What about that hypothesis of peace and reconstruction for which many Italians gave their lives on the ground in Afghanistan? Monica is the face of this dramatic paradox. Will he run strong, what medal is at stake in his race? Perhaps the cry that cannot be silenced: no human being deserves to be amputated of his freedom and dignity.
3 Ambra Sabatini
Tuscany and world record holder in office, are premises that suggest a great desire to win. Ambra Sabatini too will compete in the 100 meters flat like Monica Counterfeit, in the T63 category. The unilateral transfemoral amputation was caused by an accident. Ambra is very young, she is 19, and she has remained crushed under a car who hit her and her father while he was accompanying her on a scooter to athletics training.
It was June 2019, therefore a still fresh wound. How do you deal with a big objection that, without any fault, shatters the hypotheses of an enthusiastic teenager? She talks about it with this image: redesigning goals. The design includes both an erasing eraser and an overall composition project. Even if we delete the hypothesis that our portrait does not disappear, it is enriched by changing.
4 Simone Barlaam
Being twenty years old and jumping into the water. Simone Barlaam’s element is not the earth, but the swimming pool since he was a child. He arrives in Tokyo, his first Olympics, with a remarkable curriculum: seven times world champion, three world records.
Perhaps his great tenacity and sympathy was born as a reaction to a fate that was sealed when he was still in his mother’s womb. A fracture of the femur while in the uterus and subsequent infection impaired the development of the right limb. He compares hers leg to Nemo’s trophic fin, but he has a shark’s heart … like the ones his mother drew for him as a child in the hospital.
Do you want to know what my coach says? It’s not that if you’re disabled, I’ll take you regardless. If you are scarce, you are scarce. The first is strong, the last is the last anyway. End.
5 Matteo Parenzan
We will also have our say in table tennis, leading to Tokyo the youngest athlete of the Italian team: Matteo Parenzan, 17 year old from Trieste. Suffering from birth nemaline myopathy involving immunosuppression, he could really be heavily penalized by the Covid situation.
He trained at his home, in the garage with a robot. And for him what characterizes so many Paralympic athletes is true: an enthusiastic family that trains him to trust and courage. We are waiting for him at the game table to do stunts with that ball that splashes everywhere.
