The silver skates are theirs: Chiara Betti, Elisa Confortola, Arianna Fontana, Arianna Sighel, when you call it a team. Yes, a team, although they were good at not letting themselves be influenced by the tangle of their relationships: Arianna Fontana has been training for some time, especially in the United States, under the guidance of her husband Anthony Lobello, Arianna is the sister of Pietro Sighel, Elisa Confortola’s boyfriend, who in recent days, after the gold with the mixed relay, in an interview had let slip, perhaps betrayed by his emotional involvement, poorly measured words that could have caused the serenity of the women’s relay to explode, undermine its unity. Unless I try to clarify them better later. Difficult days for him, in Games affected by dubious disqualifications.
There was everything to create tension from the outside, and instead the girls were strong in their heads: good at staying focused on the race, good at managing communication, avoiding setting fire to the dust, even with Arianna Fontana solicited by many questions, good at not losing sight of the objective.
And when they arrived almost at night on Wednesday evening in the Ice Skating Arena of Assago, otherwise known as the Forum, they had the smiles of those who are satisfied with themselves and their performance. The serenity of those who had sown, reaped and reaped well. While Elisa Confortola, smiling, proud to be there, said: «When I gave the speech for the candidacy of Milano Cortina in Lausanne, I wasn’t even sure that I would be called up: I never expected to have two medals around my neck and it was nice to have them like this in the mixed and women’s relays». With a beautiful authentic smile he extinguished any attempt to rekindle tensions: «On the ice we are always all united, we work towards a single objective, in training we are all determined to achieve the same thing, let’s leave the controversies aside, outside let’s enjoy this medal, which belongs to all those who are here and also those who are at home and who have helped us get this far, we all train together with even some males who come to lend a hand».
Arianna Fontana will mention them one by one: «During the World Cup season we had some problems with the relays, which is why I chose to stay in Italy and in Bormio to train because the goal was to get here, both with the mixed (later gold) and with the women’s. I’m happy, we worked to create this team, also with Martina (Valcepina, injured just before the Games) and Gloria (Ioriatti).
While Martina and Arianna Sighel spoke with us, Arianna Fontana and Chiara Betti joked with each other in a corner, in a relaxed atmosphere.
And if with two laps to go we dreamed even bigger thanks to the overtaking by Elisa Cofortola, the master of overtaking, as in the mixed, the smiles definitely got the better of them in the end on every form of regret: «For a moment, yes, a thread of regret», said Fontana, for the Korean girl who slipped me in very quickly and who I didn’t hear coming, but then I turned around and saw my companions smiling and only the good things came out».
Of a medal which for her individually has the special value of a race won with history: her 14 Olympic medals have been the most successful in Italian Olympic history since 18 February 2026, the previous record having belonged to the fencer Edoardo Mangiarotti with 13 medals since 1960. In recent days, even on the evening in which she had equaled the record with silver in the 500m, she had claimed to avoid thinking about it to stay focused, but after the relay team admitted: «Yes, this medal has a particular meaning, it was a strong emotion, in the locker room I had to sit for five minutes, perhaps a drop in blood pressure, perhaps the intensity of the moment. I realized that my husband, Anthony Lobello, (her coach ed.), was talking to me and I didn’t understand anything, I asked to spend five minutes alone, but I think it will take me a moment to process everything».
Short track is essentially an individual sport, what applies to all sports in which teams compete in relays applies to it: everyone achieves their own individual performance in the team and individual performances add up. But it’s not like in fencing or cross-country skiing, where you inherit the advantage or disadvantage of your partner only, there is the gear component, the most difficult thing, when, as here, you have to push yourself, in a pre-established sector of the rink, among many people skating in a small space. The failures of many American relay teams in athletics, the sum of individually very fast individuals, failures in the changes demonstrate that this is the moment in which you become a real team: those changes, as Fontana explained regarding Bormio, must be tried and tested. Italy did it. And that mattered.
Julio Velasco, perhaps the most authoritative team coordinator that world sport knows, is right when he says two essential things: one that to be a team we must all work towards the common objective; two that it is not true that in teams they are all the same.
The corollary of the first axiom is not to work against each other with the risk of ruining the final result; which doesn’t mean being all friends, hanging out together, having no disagreements. Indeed, a long tradition with the world of sport has taught us to be wary of teams in which it is said that everything is always an idyll in which everyone is always friends, it is often the way to sweep under the carpet problems that sooner or later explode, sometimes in a very explosive way.
The corollary of the second is that the differences exist and must be recognized and addressed: it is clear that Arianna Fontana, due to longevity and results, has a visibility and a “contractual” power which must be managed within a delegation and, even more so within a team, because they can simultaneously represent a burden and an advantage. If you think about it, these dynamics are not so different from those of team work, which are called that by no coincidence. If there was a need to prove that the short track girls are a team of professional ladies, they did it on the ice with the Olympic silver. And this must be enough for us. The rest is rhetoric, controversy, gossip. It doesn’t concern us.
