ROME (ITALPRESS) – “With the Short Course World Championships, the new quadrennium opened and it was an opportunity to integrate emerging young athletes into the national team, who demonstrated the quality and depth of the movement. Although without our established champions such as Paltrinieri, Ceccon and Martinenghi, who were engaged in a more gradual recovery after the Paris Olympics, the team showed that it has the potential to continue to grow in results and performance.” The president of the Italian Swimming Federation, Paolo Barelli, takes more than one positive sign from the just-concluded Budapest World Championships, the last act of 2024 and the first of a 2025 that opens, in fact, the race toward Los Angeles 2028. “All of this comes about thanks to the synergies put in place by the Federation with the clubs that feed the number of registered members and train young athletes who then arrive at the national team after passing multiple objectives that increase their experience, such as regional and then national youth and absolute championships,” the Federnuoto’s number one stressed in an interview with Italpress. “Having arrived in the sphere of national interest, it is then our burden and honor to have to manage their further growth. The ongoing training of technicians, the investment in federal centers, which allow local authorities to guarantee access to pools otherwise destined for closure or partial activities, are further strengths of the federal planning that has been ensuring generational turnover and continuity of successes for 20 years now.” The Paris Olympics demonstrated the strength and depth of Italian swimming, which legitimately aspires to be a protagonist at the next American Games as well: “The Paris Olympics expressed our strength; six medals are a lot, no other federation has won them. Moreover, with seven fourth places and 12 more appearances in the finals. So it could have been even more, and who knows where our water polo boys could have gone without that gross technical error that as sportsmen we have to accept, but which we will never be able to justify. We have brought all our disciplines to the Games with a path full of successes; we are working to confirm ourselves, as the prestigious results of our national youth teams show, but the world is also growing. So it will be increasingly difficult to confirm after the eight medals of Rio de Janeiro 2016 and the seven of Tokyo 2021.” It would be wrong to single out symbols, male and female, of Italian swimming this season that has just ended: “I do not wish to talk about individuals, but about the collective. The champions are just the maximum expression of a movement supported by the clubs. They are symbols of everyday life, of the sacrifices of managers who have managed to overcome one of the most difficult socioeconomic periods in our country’s sports history due to Covid and the massive increase in energy costs. To excel in water sports is very difficult both because of global competition and because swimming facilities, which are predominantly single-discipline, require significant resources devoted to operation and maintenance. To be competitive, we need to ensure that young people have access to swimming pools. To facilitate this we need to bring down operating costs, developing greater sensitivity to environmental sustainability and promoting research into solutions aimed at energy efficiency. In addition, the Federation also feels that it is responsible for social welfare because it knows that motor practice means lower health care costs and above all it knows that teaching swimming, moreover in a peninsular country, saves lives, one’s own and those of others.” Barelli, in addition to being president of the Fin, is also group leader of Forza Italia in the House. Regarding the government’s contribution to sports, Barelli admits that “this government is doing a great deal, although I am of the opinion that more should and can always be done. It has worked hard to identify resources and instruments in favor of sports clubs, which deserve to be supported at all times, especially in this long emergency phase; to optimize the reform of sports and the management of the new VAT regulations; and it has ferried the word Sport into the Constitution, recognizing its educational, social and promotion value of psychophysical well-being in all its forms. He is working with the relevant institutions to bring schools closer to sports and reinforce the decisive role of sports clubs that ensure its development in the territory. I will continue to strive,” he concludes, “so that in the governing coalition due sensitivity continues to prevail to respond to the needs and demands of the clubs without which there would be no sport in Italy.”- Photo Ipa Agency -(ITALPRESS).
