A tale of tales. Body and power: when sport becomes a struggle against fate

“To explain in everyday terms that a ship set sail from me, taking me away” – Alejandra Pizarnik wrote a perfect epigraph for reading two novels side by side that deal with sport and how the body reacts under pressure: Giulia Della Cioppa, La mancina (Bompiani, 2026) and Luigi Guelpa, La lunga marcia della tartaruga. A Match Against Destiny (DeriveApprodi, 2026). These works deal with ships and departures, with the distance that arises between the body and itself, between the athlete and the possibility of controlling one’s own destiny. Guelpa and Della Cioppa explore two different sports – football and tennis – but also the same sense of escape that accompanies the body as it distances itself from the person inhabiting it.

In "The Long March of the Tortoise", Luigi Guelpa describes football as a geopolitical stage where resistance is condemned to a conscious and necessary redefinition of the meaning of victory: two friends set off together on an extraordinary adventure when one of them is offered the chance to coach the national team of Kinjanga, a tiny African state that has only just emerged from a dictatorship. It is a novel that blends sport and anthropology, depicting an Africa that says ‘no’ to colonialism yet continues to pay a heavy and bitter price for its freedom. Football becomes the arena where colonial power continues to exert its influence even within the resistance, and the players’ bodies do not belong to themselves but to history, to politics, and to the seemingly never-ending struggle for self-determination.

A novel that engages well with Giulia Della Cioppa’s “La mancina”, where tennis conveys the exact opposite: not the boisterous collective spirit of the football pitch, but the silence of the enclosed court, the rigorous solitude of the left hand as it learns to control the technical movement. Here, the body does not attempt to emancipate itself (or escape) from politics in Guelpa’s sense, but moves towards a form of obsessive, meticulous, almost maniacal control: the serve, the ball, the geometry of the stance, the infinite number of repetitions that should ensure the body finally obeys the subject who commands it.

If "The Long March of the Tortoise" is collective action, "The Left-Hander" is the symbol of an intimate, individual, microscopic resistance, where every centimetre of the ball’s trajectory is a personal battle against chaos, where every aspect of the technical movement is challenged by a centrifugal force pulling towards elsewhere. And whilst Luigi Guelpa describes the collective failure of political resistance, Giulia Della Cioppa recounts the individual failure of the obsession with technical control. One argues that power cannot be conquered; the other, that the body cannot be fully mastered, that every attempt at control is always fragile, threatened by error. Neither believes in the rhetoric of miracles, nor in the fairy tale of resilience triumphing. Yet, when read together, the two books converge on a thesis concerning sport, but perhaps also this troubled world: the body is the place where the self refuses to be annihilated; the athlete resists not because they will win, but because they recognise and defend their identity. The ship sails away, but the hand holding the racket, the body running across the pitch, remain. Fragile, perhaps defeated, but tremendously human.