The ‘too many’ gold medals in athletics and swimming have caused problems for the Italians

It is an alienating experience to look in the mirror and struggle to recognise oneself. Not that it happens often – hardly ever in recent years, with social media, cameras and mirrors everywhere. Once upon a time, though, it used to happen more frequently. It happened to H.P. Lovecraft, who found it ‘heart-rending, demoralising, distressing’ (in ‘In Defence of Dagon’). Something similar is happening to the Italian armchair sports fan. Nothing, however, is demeaning or distressing. On the contrary, everything is quite satisfying. A little sense of alienation remains, though. The Italy of lazy people, who didn’t get moving, ate and drank too much, with too many vices and few virtues, seems to have vanished. It has been replaced by an Italy that wins everything: first, for the second time in a row, in the medal table at the European Athletics Championships, and second only to the United Kingdom in that of the European Swimming Championships.

If anyone had dared to predict this six years ago, they would have been taken for a madman. Revolutions do not happen in six years; at most, one begins to reap the benefits of a change that was already underway. Or rather, of changes already underway – those that tie together shifts in society, people’s habits, aesthetic tastes and entertainment activities.

Even after six years, however, it is still difficult to fully grasp the changes, especially the most radical ones. And finding ourselves ahead of Great Britain, France and Germany in the continental athletics medal table, and ahead of Germany and Hungary in the swimming table – with almost twice as many medals as the United Kingdom (which tops the table for gold medals) – still makes quite an impression.

We should congratulate the coaches, athletes and those who organised all of this.

This needs to be done. With one caveat: but that’s enough now.

Because looking in the mirror and struggling to recognise yourself can be an alienating experience, but never as much as having an overwhelming abundance of events to celebrate and remember.

Italy was a country that knew how to celebrate, a country that Antoine Blondin – a magnificent writer who had turned his hand to cycling – admired for its ability to transform every victory into ecstasy by adding “the wonder of longevity: a success continued to live a life of its own for far longer than in any other country”. The Olympic victories of Pietro Mennea, Sara Simeoni and Gelindo Bordin in athletics lasted well beyond the natural four-year Olympic cycle.

Last week’s news was drowned out by a background clamour that overwhelmed and muddled it. On websites, on the radio, on TV and in the newspapers, we were presented with a list. So-and-so won this, such-and-such that, and so-and-so something else. Meanwhile, Sara Curtis was breaking world records and there were even more than one Italian flag to be seen on the podiums. And it wasn’t the European Fencing Championships.

A spectacle that has managed to rob Italians of their ability to begrudge others’ success, to find excuses for their own failures and to see conspiracies in others’ victories. And now, who can claim that winning athletes are all on performance-enhancing drugs, or that there is a sports ‘super-system’ whose (almost) sole purpose is to penalise Italy? It’s hard to keep peddling these theories now that we’re the ones on the winning side.

And so the counter-narrative has vanished, disappeared completely: the moon has swallowed the sun, and that’s that. It will resurface, you can be sure of that, but it will be more bitter than imaginative. When victories fade away, all that remains is the bitterness of resentment.

Victories are stifling the Italians’ imagination.

Is he even letting them mature? It’s hard to say. But are we sure that a handful of extra gold medals will make us happier than the oddities written or spoken during lean years of sporting success?