Tennis, baseball, Formula One: Italy’s sporting triumphs (while football is in freefall)

We had left off just a week ago celebrating the achievements of Italian sport, highlighting the extraordinary results obtained even in disciplines that are not widely practiced in our country. And although only a short time has passed, these winning statistics can now be revised upward with even greater pride.

Jannik Sinner triumphed in the final of the Indian Wells Masters 1000, defeating Russia’s Medvedev in straight sets and thus securing the twenty-fifth title of his career, as well as his hundredth victory in a Masters 1000 match. The top spot in the ATP rankings, currently held by Spain’s Alcaraz, still remains out of reach for now, but it is impossible not to notice the rapid rise of Flavio Cobolli and Matteo Arnaldi, both getting closer and closer to the top 10.

After decades of very lean years — when the best we could boast was perhaps an ATP No. 18, held for a week or two by players like Camporese or Gaudenzi — tennis has finally started speaking Italian again in recent seasons. So much so that the increasingly frequent successes of our athletes are now almost taken for granted.

_{Jannik Sinner, The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}

What does not seem “normal,” however, is how Italy has begun to assert itself strongly in other sports as well — disciplines in which, until recently, the presence of Italian teams or athletes at the top level was considered marginal at best.

A clear example is baseball, where our team has managed to reach the semifinals of the World Classic, an invitational tournament that has effectively taken on the status of a true world championship since 2011, when the IBAF stopped organizing official competitions of that kind.

Our players will try to defeat Venezuela in the semifinal taking place in a few hours in Miami, aiming to reach the United States, already qualified for the final after defeating the Dominican Republic.

The odds favor the team coached by Francisco Cervelli, former Yankees star, but it is worth noting that Italy was also considered the underdog against Puerto Rico — beaten in the quarterfinals — and even against the United States itself (a team composed entirely of Major League players), defeated 8–6 in the Pool B match.

_{Francisco Cervelli (right), Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

And we close with motorsport and the success of the not-yet-twenty-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli, driving a Mercedes at the Chinese Grand Prix, held last night as the second round of the Formula One World Championship. The young driver from Bologna finished ahead of his teammate George Russell and Ferrari’s British driver Lewis Hamilton, and now sits in second place in the overall standings, just behind the other Mercedes driver.

Antonelli’s triumph comes exactly twenty years after the last victory of an Italian driver in Formula One, achieved by Giancarlo Fisichella with Renault at the 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix — at a time when the new star of Italian motorsport had not even been born.

I’ll leave you with a tweet written a few days ago by Riccardo Cucchi, one of Italy’s most well-known sports journalists. It makes me proud that he essentially echoed the reflections I had already expressed in the previously mentioned post, of which this is the natural continuation.

We are among the protagonists in swimming, skiing, athletics, volleyball... We collapse in football. But is there any executive in the FIGC asking why? — Riccardo Cucchi LINK

He raises a question that millions of Italian football fans have now begun to ask themselves: “How is it possible that all our sports federations — even the less prominent ones like cricket or baseball — have managed to grow and achieve results, while the only one overflowing with resources and public attention is instead sinking?”

I am sure he already knows the answer, even if he cannot openly state it. For those who still have doubts, it will be enough to wait a few weeks, until the Rosa Camuna award is presented on May 29. Just know that one of the candidates is the worst diver in the history of Serie A, Inter defender Alessandro Bastoni.

Now everything is clearer, isn’t it?

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