Nina Corradini, Anna Basta, and Giulia Galtarossa are three girls from the Italian national rhythmic gymnastics team who in recent days have denounced the enormous pressures, insults, and humiliation they suffered inside the academy to meet the weight parameters of the Italian national rhythmic team. Corradini said she wanted to tell her story to “give a voice to all the other victims of these pressures.”
Nina Corradini, according to what she told Repubblica: daily she was weighed with her other teammates, “in her underwear and in front of everyone, always by the same coach,” who would mark the data on a little notebook and make her own judgment: “I was trying to put myself last in line, I didn’t want to be made fun of in front of the team. The coach repeated to me every day, ‘Shame on you,’ ‘eat less,’ ‘how can you see yourself in the mirror? Can you really look at yourself?”
Anna Basta recalled the same: she entered the Desio Academy in 2016, when she was 15 years old. She explained that she had suicidal thoughts, suffered from panic attacks and eating problems that continued even after she left in 2020. Repubblica writes that Anna Basta, before leaving the Academy, “had reported everything ‘upstairs,’ but ‘no one ever did anything.’”
And again Giulia Galtarossa: “It had become a problem even to drink half a liter of water after hours of training. Once a staff assistant shouted at me in a restaurant, a place affiliated with the federation. I was peeling a pear. She walked in and looked at me with wide eyes and then said, “Giulia, are you eating a pear?” I couldn’t. One or two ounces would change the day at the gym. Once they gave me a diet, and at the end it had a message for me: ‘We have a piglet on the team.’”
These are experiences that should never be experienced and I fully agree with what the association Assist, which fights for women’s rights in sports, has spread, saying that the risk is that what is happening is being told “as a bad exception.” To avoid this, “beyond the dutiful investigations of the sports prosecutors’ offices and the Public Prosecutor’s Office,” the Ministry of Sports should set up “a permanent working table where third and independent realities” representing the rights of female athletes and with expertise and experience in the area of combating gender violence are involved.
This is not an exception because forms of abuse, world level, are not new to gymnastics. One need only recall the U.S. gymnastics scandal in which dozens of girls were abused by national team doctor Larry Nassar, as well as that of U.K. gymnastics exposed in a 2022 white paper by Anne Whyte. Stories not unlike the one allegedly experienced in Romania, nearly 50 years ago, by the greatest gymnast of all time, Nadia Comaneci and recounted in a 2021 book by historian Stejarel Olaru on desecreted Romanian police documents.
History is repeating itself and, unfortunately, this happened amid the disinterest of the Italian gymnastics federation.
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