She took to the stage with the eyes of the Mona Lisa drawn on her mask, for her fourth Paralympic final in the T12 shot put (gold in London 2012, gold in Rio 2016, silver in Tokyo 2020, gold in Paris 2024), she, Assunta Legnantewho has seen and walked on many platforms, first at the Olympics (she was there in Beijing 2008 and won gold at the 2007 European Indoor Championships in Birmingham, as an able-bodied athlete) and in the shot put, of which she still holds the title the absolute Italian indoor record with 19.20 (2002) then Paralympic, confessing that the emotion shortened her measures a bit, but not enough to prevent her from leading the entire race. A sign that you never get used to the test that asks you to put everything on the line on the occasion when it really counts, in front of millions of eyes that scrutinize you even if you can no longer see them.
An intelligent and self-deprecating woman, Assuntina (copyright Guido Alessandrini), aka “Cannoncino”, progressively lost her sight between 2009 and 2012, but not her verve and never her smile, much less the desire to measure herself against the distances of life. She will be 50 years old at Los Angeles 2028 and has already said that she will be there: “I have never seen it and I will not see it this time either”, she joked, “but I will do everything I can to go, in a wheelchair if necessary”, she promised, laughing, at the first microphone passed by, thinking of the physical wear and tear, of the Achilles tendon ruptured in 2020. And then she expressed a serious wish: “I would gladly carry the flag”. She who has waved it in the Olympic and Paralympic stadiums of the world and who, as a blind person, due to a congenital degenerative disease, in 2014 she threw more than the minimum required to be admitted to the European able-bodied competition.
And four years later she also returned to join Fidal (the Italian Athletics Federation), forcing her to review the barrier that prohibited athletes from being accompanied onto the platform: she, blind, needed it. But otherwise she threw like all the others. Now that ban has fallen thanks to her who in 2018 competed in Rieti among the able-bodied looking for stimuli and opponents, but proud to remain a Paralympian, a world in which she feels at home. Since September 6, 2024, Assunta Legnante has been the most medaled athlete in the history of Italian athletics. She deserves the Los Angeles flag. If not then, when? If not her, who? Since she is the flag? Heroine of two worlds, which she began to launch to react to an exclusion: her pathology at 18 years old made her in fact unfit to participate in the selection tests for Isef, the Institute that preceded Motor Sciences, her dream at the time. The rest is history, and not just from yesterday.
(Ansa photo)