Sisters of Italy, Italy was at your feet that day. In adoration, with the gaze ready to capture every moment and make a memory of it, with the heart pumping emotions because what had never happened – that August 2, 2012 at the London Olympics – had taken shape.
Women, fencers, blue. Italy first in team foil. Three is the perfect number. They didn’t love each other, not at all. Poison flowed through him, for convenience and for a quiet life poured into a rivalry that kept the three foil players lit, like matches ready for fire. They instantly became the Dream Team. Elisa Di Francisca, Arianna Errigo and Valentina Vezzali, further away than her colleagues – the reserve Ilaria Salvatori, who entered the competition in the last round of assaults of the final. All three on the podium, the champions, with the gold medal clutched between their teeth. Each one turning their gaze to an unshared elsewhere.
Errigo said that they were “three furies, ready to slaughter us if they pit us against each other”, then added “but when the objective is common we become three furies against each other”. That August 2nd they had swept away – one after the other – three great rivals. Great Britain in the quarter-finals, France in the semi-final and Russia in the final. The iconic image: Vezzali on her knees, the mask far away, her hair free, in the air conditioning of the arena, the scream to the sky. A year earlier – at the World Championships in Catania – the Russian foil players had triumphed, in the face of the Italian women. In the end, with the confetti still in the air and the photographers’ flashes consigning them to the legend, they decided to dance, at the time of Crazy team to tie. Observing them, drenched in joy, was the coach Stefano Cerioni, also from Jesi, like Di Francisca and Vezzali, teacher of the former and wedding witness of the latter.
Five days earlier – Saturday 28 July – the three Italians had contracted the foil podium individual. Gold for Di Francisca, silver for Errigo, bronze for Vezzali, the latter with her eyes filled with tears of regret. She had lost the semi-final with Errigo, there had been a battle. In the final she had prevailed over Di Francisca. She said the champion: «The last thrust was like the attack of a snake when you see its prey».
Different generations and paths, distant friendships and affections, incompatible lifestyles. Vezzali was thirty-eight years old, Di Francisca was twenty-nine, Errigo was the youngest, twenty-four. They wrote that the latter two had ganged up against the Cannibal, the Vezzali one who achieved six Olympic gold medals in London 2012. They didn’t deny it, they shrugged. A similar triumph – with the all-blue podium in the individual – had been seized only by men, the blue swordsmen at the 1936 and 1956 Games. Forgetting resentment, reconnecting the thread of a common history, trying to create teams, to reasoning with “we” instead of “I”: this was done by the three Italians who became legend on 2 August 2012 in London, discarding the news with a dance.
