Ah what good times those were when we looked mainly at the medal table and the main question, having come almost halfway through, was: are we strong, are we good, is the overall balance of medals worth more, or are only the gold ones worth in the end? In short, Italian sport, after the soccer disaster at the European Championships, how is it doing?
Instead, this theme, except for a bit of liturgy about biographies and loves and hometowns of our heroes of the day, is now secondary in the narrative-mainstream of these Olympics, which seem more and more like a poisonous supplement to the already red-hot French election campaign that just ended. The Italian center-right, primarily Salvini, misses no opportunity to berate Macron’s faux grandeur, from the polluted Seine to the Last Supper in drag.
And Giorgia Meloni, who has just arrived at Casa Italia directly from China, from a very politically and economically demanding visit, occupies the media for statements about Angela Carina, our boxer who leaves the set after 46 seconds and especially after a well delivered punch by Algerian rival Imane Khelif, a woman in her own right for the International Olympic Committee but with an over production of testosterone that make her “beat” like a man.
She did well, says the premier, she did not have to stand there and get slaughtered in a match without gender equality, simply because her rival is not in fact a woman. I went a bit by the wayside, but the issue has well crossed national borders and involved politicians, sportsmen, sociologists and sexologists from all over the world. In a state of confusion we no longer knew this morning what gender Olympia was, but her divine nature made us overcome our old human categories, via trans which is a hoax, but via even the more suggestive intersex, fluid state beyond male and female.
Speaking of Olympia, while diplomatic relations between Italy and Algeria, a country not among the first in the world for the recognition of sexual diversity, are at risk of breaking down, what has happened, beyond our provocation, to its inclusive spirit? Sport as a flywheel to overcome conflicts and differences has become an instrument of daily, local, global, symbolic controversies.
I don’t know how many medals we will bring home, but a little bit of all of us, not only we Italians, have lost on the streets of Paris the famous halo. Baudelaire lost that of the poet at the dawn of the modern metropolis; we have lost that of the dream of universal peace at the dawn of a century that is in danger of being above all that of divisions and wars.
The article Goodbye dear Olympia comes from TheNewyorker.
