2022 Beijing Olympics - Short Track Speed Skating - Women's 1500m - Final A - Capital Indoor Stadium, Beijing, China - February 16, 2022. Silver medallist Arianna Fontana of Italy reacts during the flower ceremony. REUTERS/Aleksandra Szmigiel/File Photo
BERBENNO DI VALTELLINA, Italy, Jan 29 (Reuters) - The evening after Arianna Fontana comes home from the European Championships, the kitchen at her parents’ house fills in waves.
Cousins, neighbours, children, friends spill in.
Plates move, chairs scrape, someone opens another bottle of wine, joyful at her latest short skating title at the championship in the Netherlands earlier this month.
Fontana moves constantly — hugging, laughing, scooping her baby niece onto her arm, helping her mother serve pizzocheri and taroz — in the same house where she grew up, in the valley that has never let her be anyone but Arianna.
“First thing is to go and see my parents. I need a hug from them,” she says. “And then obviously food in Italy, it’s a big thing.”
Twenty years after her debut in Turin, Italy's most decorated winter Olympian is preparing to skate another Games on home ice — no longer Italy’s teenage prodigy, but a 35-year-old nearing what may be her final act in the sport.
She was 15 when she won bronze in the 3,000-meter relay at the 2006 Turin Games, becoming the youngest Italian medallist at a Winter Olympics.
Now Fontana is heading to her sixth Games in Milano Cortina, where she will carry the Italian flag and arrive with 11 Olympic medals, the most in short track history.
“I’m really fortunate … I get to do it twice in my career,” she said of racing before a home crowd.
KEYS TO THE GYM
What’s changed since 2006?
Almost everything, starting with how she balances "the fire" that made her with the body that carries it.
Some of the adaptations are microscopic - shifts in diet, recovery, and timing. “If I take out all the dairy … obviously sugar - unfortunately for me, because I like sweets - that really works. My body is less inflamed … I can recover faster,” she said.
“I can’t train like a 20‑year‑old so my training needs to reflect that.” Her husband Anthony Lobello, now her coach, was key to refining her approach.
At the rink Lobello whispers tendencies of her rivals- “number one always passes at three laps to go” - until she can feel a race form before the gun. Her blade has a customized rocker - curvature - specific only to her.If she gets it right on the ice, she and Lobello fist-bump.
Lobello’s metaphor for their partnership is pure pit lane: “Arianna is a Formula 1 car — you need to put high octane fuel into her … If she’s the Formula 1 car, I’m the engineer.”
They’ve learned to separate their marriage from the job.
“At 6 p.m., we don’t talk about skating or training anymore,” she said. “Once a week we go out for dinner, or to the theatre, or for a walk or something - just try to really separate the two figures - coach and athlete, husband and wife.”
That discipline is why she can thread a last-lap pass with the same menace she had at 15. Her start is still its own species - feet set open to “project myself right away forward, keep my hip forward,” she said.
The 500 meters remains personal: “I always liked speed … I always liked to be the fastest.” And if she’s on the line, she wants her space: “I make myself a little bit bigger and people want to stay far away from me … I’m not there to play around.”
REFUELLING WITH SLICES OF BRESAOLA
In her northern Italian hometown of Berbenno, people don’t need her surname: the bars are papered with signed photos and at her parents’ house, medals line the walls and trinkets from her travels crowd the shelves.
Fontana has the keys to the local gym. Before the Beijing Olympics she was there from 5 a.m. to prepare for jet lag and the ladies who did a Pilates session with her brag about sweating next to a legend.
Her dad, Renato, keeps A2-size photo albums chronicling everything since she was six."I don’t even know where to put them anymore,” he said, grinning.
When she’s away, her mother, Maria Luisa, helps rally the fan club. For the last Olympics, they put up a screen in Berbenno so people could gather and watch her race.
Her talismans are local, too. On her right shoulder is a tattoo of the giuèt, a forest creature from Valtellina folklore that grandparents used to invoke to scare children away from danger.
“Maybe it will help keep my adversaries away as well,” she said, laughing.
And then there’s the meat slicer that Fontana has been putting into her suitcase for the last two Olympics, along with a hunk of bresaola:
“Every day I would just cut a few slices and have it… and that was a big fuel for me for sure.”
CHAOS OF SHORT TRACK
Short track remains unpredictable, but Fontana has turned chaos into an algorithm.
“We’re really good at analyzing other skaters… I always am prepared and I know what to expect,” she said.
The older she gets, the more the work is mental. She dismissed the idea that short track isa young person's sport.
“Your body can really adapt and do anything you put it through. As long as mentally you’re prepared to do it, your body will follow,” she said."A lot of athletes are taking breaks from competitions. And you see them then coming back, and they're the same or stronger."
Last autumn, a torn quad derailed a bid to double up in long track, which she said was a chance "to put myself out there and see what else I could do".She would not say whether she sees long track in her future.
Looking at Italy, she still sees a country where soccer dominates the front pages and other sports squeeze into the back.
“Culturally in Italy … some things need to change in order to also then look at women’s sports, women's rights in sports.”
Her wish list is practical: more rinks, and a way to combine school and sport “because … a lot of kids or even families will find it really tough to combine the two things.” She recalls her parents driving her to the town of Bormio, an hour away, four to five times a week to train.
FINAL CHAPTER STILL TO BE WRITTEN
The cost of 20 years at the top shows up in small rituals. After races she retreats to “a long shower… or take a bath,” or a couch with a movie or a book.
“I like to spend time in the sun, by the water … Anthony and I like fishing,” she said, telling the story of an amberjack “as big as me” that nearly pulled her overboard off Venice, Louisiana.
“I like to win,” she added, laughing — on the boat, at cards, on the line. “The competitiveness … is always there.”
What comes next remains deliberately open. Fontana said she wants to share what she has learned — not only with elite athletes, but with people who want to better understand their bodies and how to stay healthy as they grow and age.
Asked if Milano Cortina will be the end of her skating career, she refused to be drawn.
“It could be the perfect ending … I’m not really thinking about quitting or stopping my career after the Games. I never really had yet that feeling that I'm like, OK, you can be done. Maybe I will feel it after these Games," she said.
"I will let you know after the 22nd of February."
(Reporting by Agnieszka Flak; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
