The champion also retraced the moments following the 2014 accident, those races at the Nanjing Youth Olympic Games in which he dived at the finish line and…
Self-assured and ready to look back not only at his great successes, but also at the moments he is least proud of, Philip Tortu he was the protagonist of the thirteenth episode of Supernovathe new podcast by Alessandro Cattelan which can be seen on YouTube and listened to on the main streaming platforms and which in the past has already hosted great champions of Italian sport, from Thomas Ceccon to Alessia Orro and Myriam Sylla.
Filippo Tortu at Supernova by Cattelan
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The sprinter, Olympic relay champion 4×100 meters at the Tokyo 2020 Gamesstarted from the recent past, the silver medal in the 200 meters at the European Athletics Championships held in Rome last June: “I came home pissed off from the European Championships, where I could have won the 200 meters and came second” , admitted the 26-year-old ready to admit what his mistake was on that occasion: “I sinned a bit, I won’t say arrogance, but I knew I was the favourite, because in the qualifications I had done better than the others, running easily. I wanted to push, and at all costs reach a time objective that I had set for myself.”
“I didn’t run freely”, continued the champion: “I was thinking about my time, which obviously I knew was a time that would have made me win. Then I did two things wrong on the curve, the 200 meters are long, and at 150 meters when you don’t have any more, you don’t have any more… the day before I had run very well, best race of my life, the next day I did the worst”.
The accident in 2014 and the comical side of the rescue
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Tortu did then a leap back ten yearstelling Cattelan about the accident during a semi-final race of the Nanjing 2014 Youth Olympic Games: “What I identify with in athletics is the final dive, when you throw yourself at the finish line. And I’ve always done it. Then in the In 2014 I did it a bit too much, I overbalanced myself, I put my hands down and broke both the radius and ulna, four dislocated fractures.”
Despite the dramatic moment, and the subsequent period of two operations, Filippo tried to laugh it offrecounting the moments immediately following the accident: “From there comical. I was in Nanjing in China, and the nurses arrive and put me on the stretcher, holding me by the arms! Then they take me to the medical room and there must have been 15 of them, no one who spoke English, and 15 of them were looking at my legs, because obviously you run and you will have hurt your legs! And I couldn’t even point with one arm to the other because I was like a lying mummy!”.
Filippo Tortu is a big Juventus fan and during the interview, recalling the times of Ronaldo’s transfer to Juve, he wanted to answer a question that has been asked to him several times over the years: who would win a 60 meter challenge between him and Ronaldo? Diplomatic response: “Okay… but there is no footballer who can compete against a top-level sprinter. The strongest ones set times like 10.70 10.60 and there isn’t a footballer who can do that time there but because it’s not their sport, because the ‘Training is different, everything is different.”
The format
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Tonight there is Cattelan – Supernova is a podcast and vodcast released every Monday and Thursday, in which Alessandro Cattelan returns to do interviews like in his television programs. Among his first guests were Alessia Orro, Miriam Sylla, Pierpaolo Spollon, Brunori Sas, Thomas Ceccon And Luca Argentero And Giuseppe Cruciani. To enrich the format there is also the interaction between the host and three authors of the program (Carlo Crocchiolo, Walter Proserpio and Silvia Righini) who act as voice-overs commenting on the most interesting passages of the interviews.
Gazzetta dello Sport
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