The charge of the Italian girls makes Italia fly at the Olympics

And we want to talk about the 13 Olympic medals of Arianna Fontana, the queen of short track, this time silver in the 500 behind the Dutch Valzeboer. An ever-bright star out of an endless big bang. An inimitable career, hers, which allowed her to equal Edoardo Mangiarotti, another sports legend, in the medals table. Now they are even, but Arianna will have three more competitions to surpass the legendary Milanese fencer. There is no time to recount all the exploits of the Valtellina athlete here, but one note is enough: she made her debut at the age of 15 at the 2006 Turin Games, where she won bronze in the relay, becoming the youngest medallist in history. Twenty years have passed and Arianna is still on the short blades, stronger and more determined than ever,

And Francesca Lollobrigida, also 35, gold medallist again in the 5000 metre skating after the one in the 3000? Francesca, Italy's sixth gold medallist, overcame a viral infection that had stopped her in the months leading up to the Olympics and also motherhood - that of little Tommaso - which will naturally have brought her much joy but also many sacrifices and complications. How often have great champions found themselves at the crossroads of the biological clock: career or motherhood? Sport or family? A problem that once, before athletes like Valentina Vezzali, Josefa Idem, Tania Cagnotto crossed the no-man's-land of career motherhood, seemed almost insoluble.

So many stories, also beautiful ones from the girls in the double luge, where both women and men won gold. A double gold that confirms one beautiful thing: that men and women can coexist, work well together without false compliments and unsolicited courtesies. Because in sport you cannot cheat: either you are up to it or you are not. A healthy meritocracy to be exported, one hopes, to other activities as well.

This explosion of women's sport does not come out of the blue. It is a long wave, as we were saying, which had already started at the Paris 2024 Olympics, the summer Olympics where the last wall had collapsed. And not only because for the first time, the Italian girls had collected (7-3) more golds than the boys, but because never before these Games, in the entire Olympiad, women's participation had been equal, fifty-fifty: a resounding fact if you think that Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Games, had always been firmly opposed to the participation of women, who were considered 'unfit to undergo these efforts'. Other times, of course, with ideas hopefully largely outdated since for the first time in the history of the IOC a woman, Kirsty Coventry, was elected president. And the wave that started in Paris has turned into a blue-pink avalanche at our Winter Olympics.

Of the Paris Games one cannot fail to remember the gold in women's volleyball (repeated a few months ago at the World Cup) won by Julio Velasco's national team against the United States. An irresistible charge from volleyball that joined the triumphs of epee, gymnastics, tennis, athletics, surfing and many other specialities. Since then, this charge has never stopped, ever more powerful, ever more festive and convincing.

What is most striking is their tenacity and serene determination. These girls struggle, make many sacrifices, study and have children, but always with a grit and cheerful pugnacity that we do not always see in their blue brothers.

It is as if someone, with the Olympic Games, had officially certified that times have changed, that even in sport that famous 'silent revolution' Velasco spoke of in Paris has taken place. It remains to be seen whether sport or society is more advanced. The impression is that sport, for the time being, leading the way, has gone much faster.