Unless very rare exceptions, defeat is the most common figure of a champion’s life. And when it arrives, there is a real mourning to elaborate. But it is from there that the ascent begins. Ask Jannik, Nadia Battocletti and a certain Michale Jordan …
The defeat and the victory, that is, the triumph and ruin of the famous poem “If” by Kipling, who called them in the same way, impostors: the athletic World Cup bring us many Italian examples, from Larissa Iapichino to Mattia Furlani.