The power to change the rules of the game

The revolution, gentle and firm, is made with strokes of nail polish and lipstick. Women also want their space in sport because, since the Holy Scriptures, he is ’ish«man», and she is ’isshah, «woman»: same word, marked only by the final ending of gender. Women have chosen athletics, football or a mountain to tame to cling to a full life and climb prejudices and gender cages. They put themselves on the line, light on the scene, and today the perspective has already changed because Anna Maria Ortese, the first woman to approach sports journalism, followed the 1955 Giro d’Italia almost hiding the fact that she was a woman. But the run-up is still long: «For the authors of Fundamentals there is no other way of reading women’s sport other than keeping it on a level of equality compared to men’s, maintaining and enhancing the peculiarities that characterize the former”, writes Giorgia Bernardini in the introduction to Fundamentals. Stories of athletes who changed the game, a multi-voiced collection of events that free women’s sport from stereotypes and open up a new narrative: «precisely because everything is still in progress, writing about women’s sport is a place of great freedom. There is room to experiment because most of the time it involves venturing into paths that no one has taken so far.”

What the body says

Alessia Tuselli talks about Caster Semenya, South African middle distance runner and sprinter, two-time Olympic 800 meters champion (2012 and 2016) and three-time world champion (2009, 2011 and 2017). Her body is the object of contention because it produces an “excess” (by medical standards) of male hormones. And she is accused of not being a “real” woman and of having a competitive advantage over her competitors, violating fair play. Caster Semenya has gone through an ordeal of biology, prejudices, norms, medicalization, racism, lesbophobia, sexism and her story is a warning: «The sporting space is today at a crossroads, remaining tied to its binary organization, with male and female categories as we know them, or rethink those same categories, question them.”

Blood and lipstick

Just as the Wimbledon tradition of requiring tennis players to wear white suits needs to be reviewed. Only from 2023 can dark shorts be worn, to meet needs related to the menstrual cycle. For centuries it was hidden as an inconvenience but, writes Tiziana Scalabrin «to optimize the health of young athletes we must teach them how to train by thinking about their bodies; that is, train like people who bleed, and not like men.”

Icons are made of body and blood, who conquer spaces with the sound of goals, on the pitch and in life, like Marta, the Brazilian striker always with lipstick on her lips: «objects and spaces support or hinder bodies – writes Elena Marinelli –; they mark a personal perimeter to broaden the reasoning, to problematize; they punctuate the speech, to throw a marble far away so that it becomes an entire planet.”

Scaling rights

The story of the swordsman Alexandra Ndolo, remembered by Olga Campofreda, is also an achievement. She, German but with origins in Kenya, put together the Kenya Fencing Federation from scratch because we come before I. And, when everything works against you, from the harsh impositions ofapartheid of gender to the laws of religion, the self is the voice that screams in the desert and shows the way to other women. So did Nasim Eshqi, the only one climber Iranian woman practicing outdoor climbing. She has opened a hundred new routes on mountains in the Middle East and Europe and talks about her journey towards freedom in I was rock. Now I’m mountain. Childhood in Iran, the hijab as obligation and torment, sport as salvation for herself and the other women, for whom she coached. The first trips abroad for work, then, invited by mountaineers from all over the world, always with bright nail polish, it won’t be a problem to ruin it with rocks: «while climbing it doesn’t matter if you are male or female, rich or poor , Iranians or Americans, because the force of gravity pulls everyone down in the same way. The only thing that matters is using your brain, your muscles, your instinct to find a way.” On the rock walls and among the absurd prohibitions of the regime: “Like reading or riding a bicycle, freedom is also something that, once learned, can no longer be unlearned.”