Championships of Despair

When Alex Schwazer decided to quit today's 50km Walk at the Berlin Leichtatletik Weltmeisterschaften midway through the race because of stomach problems, the (almost) last hope for Italy to finally get a medal in the competition faded away.

This lack of medals, which would be the first ever for Italy in an Athletics World Championships worsening their previous negative record of one single bronze in the 2005 event in Helsinki, shows that the Italian athletics movement is not what it used to be. Most of the medals that were won in the last few years by Italian athletes had been the results of either "imported" talents (like Fiona May or Magdelin Martinez) or of athletes who had then been involved in doping cases (Giuseppe Gibilisco) or of a long-standing tradition and school in a complex discipline such as the Walk - in those Helsinki Champs it was the very same Alex Schwazer who salvaged the Italian pride winning the bronze (with the NR) in the 50kms.

It would be unfair to put the blame all on the shoulders of the Italian Athletics Federation or on the single trainers, even though both these parties have their fair share of blame to carry; in fact Athletics, like almost every other sport (individual or team sport), suffers in Italy the looming and larger than life presence of football. Many people in Italy joke on the first article of the consitution saying that "Italy is a Republic founded on (other people's) work (and football is its religion)".

The popularity and all-around presence of football in the average Italian's mind mean that every other sport is considered to be second-tier and when some Italian says that he's interested in other sports or (horror and shock) that he doesn't care about football he's looked at by the majority as a weirdo or a goon. Moving to the economics, this means that football gets the lion, the leoness, the tiger and the panther's share of the TV money that the different channels are willing to spend on sports in the Italian market, while the other sports are left to fight between them the few tens of thousands Euros leftovers. Unluckily, without money a sport cannot thrive and expand its popularity and the number of its practitioners because of another Italian peculiarity: everywhere in the world winning a medal in an international competition, even a silver or a bronze, would be regarded as a wonderful achievement for an athlete or a team. Not so in Italy, in the Bel Paese everything below first place is regarded as not good enough and if an athlete or a team finishes as silver or bronze medal he/she is considered a loser by the majority of the Italian people and, even when he/she wins the reaction will be: "Yes yes he/she has won, but it's not like he/she won the Football World Cup". The consequence of this peculiarity is that an achievement in any other sport different than football is forgotten after a couple of weeks, while today, more than three years after the event, the commentator of our national football team is always stressing how many "world champions" are still playing in the First XI and that we're the world champions. I wish and hope that somebody will hit him in the head with a club in order for him to understand that he's redundant and that nobody cares anymore after Euro 2008 and this summer's Confederation Cup.

All this means that most italian athletes that are involved in "minnow" sports (minnow only for football fans) have to rely on the armed forces' teams in order to be able to train sufficiently and hard enough to be able to compete at the highest level and the kind of money that an average Serie A player earns in one year they will be lucky to be able to earn it in 25. This system implies that while the big talent is still going to emerge despite all the (financial, organizational, etc.) problems that his/her federation has, a broad movement and the nurturing of additional talent that will shine if developed correctly by top-tier trainers and staff will be very difficult to obtain because the Italian state can spend only a certain amount on money on these sports because, as we all know, the Italian finances are at best a mess.

So hopefully Ciotti will prove me wrong tonight by winning a medal in the high jump final in Berlin, but the roots of the problem will remain deeply buried in the Italian society and in the coming London Olympics the U-23 Football team will continue to fly in business class despite being kicked out early from the tournament while many olympic champions will fly in economy class because the Italian National Olympic Committee has only very limited funds.