A PERFECT EXAMPLE FOR OUR YOUNG PEOPLE

Let’s not turn around so much: the marriage between school and sport in Italy compared to other world sports powers has never been celebrated. We are light years behind. Studying with profit and playing sports at a high level is still a thing for the select few, stubborn and admirable. For the rest they are obstacles to overcome in class or hours of training, and therefore dreams of glory, to be skipped. It is true that something has been moving for a while. “Sports high schools”, including snow schools like the Bachmann of Tarvisio, or even dedicated middle schools pop up here and there. Something is moving, but it is still too little. It is always a question of mentality.

So you went and asked until a few years ago if it was possible that a blue athlete of swimming, a sport par excellence in which if the meter of the hours in the pool runs fast, you get the results otherwise you forget them, he could graduate regularly in medicine after hours and hours spent studying or engaged in the long internship of the wards of a hospital, and they replied that it was impossible. Imagine if that athlete in the graduation season also fulfilled the dream of a lifetime, to participate in the Olympics.

Then, in fact, Matteo Restivo arrived. Talent in the tub and in the studio. With very clear ideas. Even four years ago when, accompanied by his proud father, he came to visit us in the editorial office and revealed his goals: to participate in the Tokyo Olympics, to graduate and become a cardiologist. Said. And, particularly not just, done in the middle of a pandemic. Yes, because in the meantime the 27-year-old carabiniere Restivo was one of the first Italian athletes to get vaccinated a year ago, he stubbornly chased the Olympic dream with intense training sessions crowning it in extremis, when everything seemed to have vanished. And after Tokyo and the flag of Friuli proudly waving in the Olympic pool, he immediately dived for the most beautiful pool: that of the degree in Medicine. Dear kids, Matthew’s story is an example for all of you. Sport helps to study, study helps to go fast in the pool or on the track, or on a bike or on a playing field. In America, for example, they have known this for a long time. In Italy now there is dr. I stayed from Udine to teach it. –

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