“It’s your birthday, really? Happy Birthday!” The almost unbelievable story of Francesca Lollobrigida, who won speed skating gold over 3,000 meters on Saturday, on her 35th birthday, had long been out in the world when Valerie Maltais, the bronze medalist from Canada, found out about the Olympic champion’s honorary day at the press conference an hour and a half after the competition.
Like silver medalist Ragne Wiklund, she sat in amazement on the podium and listened with interest as the first Italian Olympic champion at these games conveyed her message to the people, her story as a competitive athlete and mother.
She described in great detail the history of the touching images that showed her hugging her two-year-old son after her run of 3:54.28 minutes to set a new Olympic record. About how she didn’t want to choose between a career and a child and how difficult the path to gold was because of that.
The structures are simply not designed for mothers who have to train all day. “And I’m always the first one at practice and the last one to leave,” she said, recounting how she was yelled at when she took her child to the weight room. Once in Hamar, Norway, where she was training, she saw a gym that offered child care. She enthused: “Train for an hour and then pick up the child, it could be that easy.”
Her husband, who is one of the best inline skaters in Italy and like Francesca Lollobridgida, her sister, who was also very successful on rollers, is a trained sports coach himself, and her whole family did everything to always support her. With her association and her trainer, she developed a plan for what could happen after the birth of her son in May 2023.
The white sheet of paper
No one was prepared for a case like hers. “We started with a blank piece of paper,” she said. At the Beijing 2022 Games, Lollobrigida won silver in the 3,000 meters and bronze in the mass start. This was certainly helpful in the negotiations about the reintegration plan into competitive sports.
A good six months after Tommaso’s birth, she ran her first competitions again. It was a logistical challenge not only because she breastfed her little one until he was 18 months old.
Even before she became a mother, it was certainly not easy for her to structure her life. When she decided to pursue a career in winter sports as a young woman, she knew that she would be traveling a lot. After the 2006 Olympics Her father introduced her to ice skating from Turin.
That meant being on the road 250 days a year. As a student she was already there over the winter Baselga di Piné in the Dolomites, the Italian speed skating center. But like in all of Italy there is no covered ice skating ring. That’s why she often goes to the Netherlands or Inzell to train. After Tommaso’s birth, she had to qualify for the World Cup all over again, even though she had only missed one season. For mothers who want to get back into the World Cup, there are no special rules that would make reintegration easier.
She wanted another medal
But she did it. She wanted another medal at the Olympics, at the games in her home country. She wanted to fight for bronze in Milan. She didn’t even think about gold when she took on the drudgery again.
And when she caught a nasty virus in November that her son probably brought with him from kindergarten (“Every mother knows that”), she almost wanted to give up. “It was supposed to be the best season of my career, and it turned out to be the worst.” Only a week ago, when she entered the Olympic ice ring in the exhibition halls in the north of the city for the first time, she knew that she wasn’t in such bad shape. Now she is an Olympic champion.
She is now being celebrated in Italy, and everyone now knows that the film diva Gina Lollobrigida was her great aunt. In the hall after the race, the cheering wasn’t quite as big. The hall was well filled with fans from the Netherlands. It was obvious that Italy is not an ice sports country.
The story of Francesca Lollobrigida is all the more astonishing. The applause from the Dutch fans was therefore more than polite, even if they were certainly shocked that none of their compatriots had made it to the podium.