Don’t trust that apparently staid blue gaze, don’t trust her childish stature, Arianna Fontana, when there is an air of medal in the air, can be implacable like no one and is an immeasurable giant.
She wasn’t alone this time, the short track mixed relay is a choral song at the speed of sound: it’s always done in one go, and Italy skated together. There were six of them on the podium, not four because the whole team skated at least one fraction: fundamental Elisa Confortola who made the decisive, spectacular overtaking Pietro Sighel who had planned to finish with his back to the finish line facing his teammates, but he needed the margin and he found it. Yet, in the chorality, Arianna Fontana can only be the star of this midday of ice and fire: the most medaled athlete in Italian Winter Olympic history, from today only one point away from the 13 summer medals of the fencer Edoardo Mangiarotti, the only woman in the world to medal in six Olympics and it’s just the beginning.
Elisa Confortola, Pietro Sighel and Arianna Fontana celebrate after winning the gold
(EPA)
The numbers say that Fontana is a tough woman, her mother, who she physically resembles very much, caught on the fly in the stands, remembers her as “a stubborn little girl”. As happens with all women of character, they say she has a bad temper, because she knows what she wants, and fights like a lioness to obtain it even at the cost of clashing, if this then serves to bring medals, which have always been, even with a Federation with which there have not always been honeymoons, a bargaining chip in gold, silver and bronze tokens. If you want medals, do it his way. This is how it went when she chose, somewhat against everyone else, to be coached by her husband Anthony Lobello, even threatening to sail to America on a one-way ticket and change citizenship.
Luckily for us, they listened to herbecause it is she here who knows how to win, how to drag a team in which, as Julio Velasco often reminds us, what matters is not being friends, but skating together towards the goal, and Arianna Fontana is a master at this: she knows how to do it and Italy did it with her in this golden relay in a crazy Forum.
At the end Arianna jokes, someone hands her a blow-up of herself with her tongue sticking out and she poses for the photographers sticking out her tongue, showing all of herself in joy.
Chiara Betti, the companion who arrived before everyone in the belly of the stadium observes: «Arianna was a great inspiration for me: she was already on the ice in Turin 2006. She started skating 25 years ago before I was born».
When Ariana arrives, foreign journalists seize her, with her perfect English, divided as she is between her beloved Valtellina and the States, she makes a great impression. Someone points out that the twelfth medal arrived on the twentieth anniversary of the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Turin Gamesand there she was, not yet fifteen. She won bronze in the women’s relay: «Evidently it was good, I never expected to be here twenty years later, this thought gave me a lot of energy this morning. I won everything I wanted to win, I achieved all my goals, I was calm, I said to myself: «Come here, you’re ready, play it. It’s a great boost to play at home: I still have the fire inside.”
She doesn’t know that Kim Boutin, the beaten Canadian opponent, just said about her that “He is a model of determination for the world.”
And it couldn’t be otherwise.
