19/02/2020   Ancona (ITA) - The absolute indoor championships with the "lump on the stomach"






 

 

 

 
We imagined it and the voices of the world of the Italian race walk confirmed it to us.
 
The 2020 edition of the Italian Indoor Absolute Championships will be lack of the stars of the Italian race walk, of those who represent us in the various editions of the International Championships, sometimes with success, sometimes less, but who are still our bearers and our business card around the planet.
 
We cannot hide our sadness and that kind of lump on the stomach that grips us.
 
It will end that sooner or later also in Italy, as in other countries, race walk will disappear from the Indoor and then maybe down to complain about a Federation ... that does not understand us and that does not help us.
 
Never again will we have thought that our beautiful men's Absolute championships (those of Damilano, Mattioli, Visini, De Benedictis, Brugnetti, Perricelli and Didoni and we stop here so as not to slip too much into rhetoric) they turned into a kind of photocopy of the U20 and U23 Indoor Championships with five of the ten athletes who have already competed two weeks ago for a title of a lower category.
On a female level, the situation is marginally better: only four out of ten have competed two weeks ago.
 
We do not want, and cannot believe, that this is our state of the art.
Those who love walking, at least as much as the writer, know that this is not the case.
We knows that at the right time we are capable of perhaps unthinkable things, but not of lettting go of perpetual frustration.
 
We know of the problems that grip us, the technical choices and everything else, but we remember what the late Elio Locatelli said at a press conference that "the Italian Championship is a value that must be respected".
 
In athletics and sport we must not find the most unthinkable excuses for our defeats: we know that normality is not always winning, but instead it is an alternation between victories and defeats.
The only defeat that cannot be justified, and that we could never accept, is that of not having participated if we had been able to do so.
 
Let's all think or ... the toy will break completely.