I have a dream

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Dreams have always been a constant in my life. We should all have dreams that we aspire to: they are the engine that drives everything.

I began dreaming when I was a young girl and I’ve never stopped!

I was five years old when I started to fence, I was quite good and almost immediately I began thinking about taking part in the Olympic Games. Then, along the way, I had to revise my plans a bit. At the end of 2008, when I was 11, I contracted fulminant meningitis. It was a dreadful situation and to save my life my legs had to be amputated from the knee down and my arms below the elbow. I was in hospital for 104 days and when I came out I couldn’t wait to get started again. I was different, however, and the doctors said that I wouldn’t be able to do the things I had done before. Right away I tried to work out how I could go back to my previous life and I based my plans on my main passions, the three S’s: scouts, school and scherma (fencing).

2008: scouts, school and fencing

With the scouts it was easy because they are excellent at this sort of thing, and the day after I rejoined the group I was already running around the fields on my scout leader's back. In practice, I had never really left school since I didn’t want to have to repeat the year – so the teachers came to give me my lessons in hospital. They were all fantastic and thanks to them I was able to continue my lessons at the same pace as my classmates. Then there was fencing. I could no longer fence standing up, so I turned to wheelchair fencing and I immediately fell in love with it too because it is even more beautiful.

Gradually my dream took shape again but instead of the Olympics I began dreaming about the Paralympics! I started making plans and contacted anyone who could help me achieve my dream. Because all by yourself you’re nobody and you’ll go nowhere. You can be as talented and strong as you wish but you always need people in your life. I needed technicians to make a prosthetic aid to support the foil (I was and still am the only female competitor in the world who fences without arms), physiotherapists to help me physically prepare my “new” body for this new adventure, fencing experts to teach me how to fence in a wheelchair, and many other people who supported me.

I relied on the CIP, the Italian Paralympic Committee, which some dub the CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee) for disabled athletes. Until a few years ago the CIP lacked autonomy and came under the umbrella of CONI; however, in 2017 its Chairman Luca Pancalli managed to get it recognised as an independent body by the Italian Government. This was an important achievement, which will help the Paralympic world to flourish.

2010: wheelchair fencing

In 2010 I started participating in wheelchair fencing and a couple of years later I was honoured and fortunate enough to attend the 2012 Paralympic Games in London and serve as a torch bearer at the inauguration ceremony. During the two weeks of the Games I also worked as a journalist for Sky Sport.

2016: first Paralympic Games

That was when I began winning. Starting in 2014, I managed to win the gold medal in every major competition that I entered: the Europeans in Strasbourg in 2014, the World Championships in Eger in 2015 and again the Europeans in Turin in 2016. Later in 2016 in Rio I experienced my first Paralympic Games.

While qualifying for the Games was fairly straightforward, combining school with my physical and fitness training was really tough: that same year I was also preparing for my final school exams and the months leading up to these two events, one at the end of July and the other at the beginning of September, were gruelling. My teachers wanted me to dedicate most of my time to my studies whereas, more than anything, my trainers and sports coaches wanted me to train for the Paralympics! At a certain point, my teachers realised the difficulties that I was facing and suggested that I drop out of school for that year in order to devote myself entirely to the sport. But I didn’t agree – I wanted to do both and do them well. I wanted to get good results on my exams since the university course for which I had applied in Milan required a minimum grade of 75/100, but I also wished to finish on the podium at the Games because I had been winning everything for two years and certainly didn’t want to miss out at the biggest competition of all!

2020: Tokyo Paralympic Games

Somebody said to me recently that all my dreams had been fulfilled and that there was nothing left for me to “achieve”. It's true that in the last two years I’ve ticked off a number of objectives on my “wish list” – apart from my high school exams and taking part in the Paralympics I have travelled the world and met many famous and important personalities, I’ve written two books and “dabbled” in the world of TV where in 2017 I even presented my own show “La vita è una figata” (“Life is cool”). I have also worked on the film “Incredibles 2”, dubbing the voice of a new superhero into Italian, I’ve got my driver's licence, and this year I started attending the American University of Rome, where I’m studying communication, international relations and marketing. However, I'm not content with that so now I’d like to raise the bar of Olympic dreams with my team – I would dearly love to win gold with my team-mates at the next Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. It won’t be easy but it will certainly be beautiful and exhilarating.

There's one thing though that I always try to keep in mind:

In fact, when I was preparing for Rio 2016 I put a countdown on my mobile phone 500 days before the Games and each morning I would wake up and say to myself “come on Bebe, get to work – soon you’ll be off to Rio…”. For Tokyo 2020, however, I’ve begun my countdown 1 000 days before the Games because it will be even harder this time and nobody wins anything by chance or luck.

Now that I’m living in Rome I’m very lucky to be able to prepare and train in facilities that are extremely well-equipped and organised, with many of my friends and team-mates from both the Olympic and Paralympic national teams. My days in 2018 are divided between studies and work, and the intensity of the programme will be stepped up by several notches as we get closer to 2020. In the morning I do an hour of fitness training starting at 7:30, then I attend my classes at university until lunchtime, in the afternoon I study, and at around 5pm I go training at CONI's Olympic Centre for the evening. It’s a bit tiring but I really love it and I couldn’t ask for more. In Rome I live on campus at the university, right in the city centre in Trastevere. It’s a beautiful area and has a great nightlife, which I enjoy to the full with my room-mates and fellow students, who are all foreigners. Sometimes, we stay out late and the next morning it’s a struggle to get up for training but that’s okay – after all, I’m 21 and I also want to have some fun!

One of the great things about my university is that most of the students are foreigners and many of them don’t know me. This enables me to lead a very relaxed life, along with many others of my own age who treat me simply as Beatrice, their fellow student.

When we are out in Rome and people stop me to ask for a selfie, sometimes I explain to the others that it was a friend or someone who had just mistaken me for somebody else and any time people talk about Rio or books or TV I have to think up all kinds of excuses, playing on the fact that they don’t speak much Italian. Many of them don’t even know that I am a fencer.  One evening I arrived back late for a dinner party thrown by my room-mates, and when the guests saw me arriving with my fencing bag, which is huge and very long so it can hold the foils, one American girl asked me if I played golf!

Dreams that emerge along the way

Another of my dreams emerged suddenly, after I discovered at close quarters the world of disability and the world of Paralympic sport. This is a very difficult environment that is not well known but is powerful, full of humanity and involves truly wonderful people. My first heroes were Alex Zanardi and Oscar Pistorius. They’re the ones who inspired me to get going again after my illness. I then met so many other great champions such as Francesca Porcellato, Italy’s most successful Paralympian, and the youngest, Martina Caironi, who had her leg amputated and won the gold medal in the 100 metres in Rio. When she mounted the podium for the medal ceremony she asked me to look after her running blade, and it was fantastic to sing the Italian national anthem at the top of my voice holding tight the blade with which she had just won!

Seeing the beauty, value and importance of practising sport, especially for people with disabilities, my parents and I decided to found an association to help child amputees enjoy the beauty of life through sport. Called art4sport ONLUS, it helps child amputees who start practising a sport for fun but then really get into it, and as they get older start to get more serious – often with incredible results.

The findings, interpretations and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Investment Bank.

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© European Investment Bank 2018
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