Telling this story is not easy, because although it is a story shared by many, we are convinced that for each of the citizens involved in this tragedy it has an intimate, painful and unique implication. A former gymnast from Renato Serra writes to us, one of the realities in Emilia-Romagna affected by the flood, who in Cesena, together with other registered members, is giving a hand to the forces of order and civil protection, with their feet in the mud and heart in throat.
“I don’t claim to provide a unique and universal vision of what has affected my city, but I would like to offer you my testimony. The two days of very intense rains that hit the region unleashed a strong sense of impotence and desperation in me: from the window of my room I could see the water rising in the streets closest to the river and the incessant downpour it kept going down. In the meantime, videos and photos of what was happening everywhere were posted on any social network in real time: flooded houses, people and animals to be saved, fields that turned into lakes, hilly roads broken by landslides. In a nutshell, in those stormy hours we saw our beloved Emilia-Romagna fall to its knees live. My family and I got lucky, and so did my gym, where I’ve been training for about twenty years. A fortune that many other people, practitioners and enthusiasts of our sport, have not had. I’m thinking of Riccione, Bologna, Forlì and the colleagues and friends who ended up with platforms underwater. Gymnastics, a teacher of life, has taught me to respect the work of others and has given me, day after day, during the long hours of training, a strong sense of belonging to my society, to my city, to my region , which has always given me the strength to cultivate dreams and passions”.
And it is this love that is driving athletes, technicians, managers, race officials to take to the streets, equipped with shovels and boots, to help as much as possible the people who have been affected by this flood. It is the sporting spirit, which feeds on fair play and the Olympic values, that makes a gymnast become a rescuer. “with me – continues our witness who wanted to remain anonymous to represent all FGI members – there was another former gymnast, Giada Maraldi, then Andrea Dotti, Samuel Pompinetti and Gabriele Tisselli, who instead compete in Serie A1 and we will see them at the Final Six in Naples. There are people here who for several days put aside their grips and switched from artistic tools to work tools to lend a hand to those who needed it most”. Thus concludes our angel of the post global flood, a young passionate of our disciplines who, like her peers, from Cesena and not, is demonstrating once again that gymnastics is solidarity, it is help, and that Romagna is love. “We have done nothing but follow our hearts”, and sometimes the heart, as we know, has to be thrown over the obstacle and who better than gymnasts, then, to jump beyond life’s adversities?