Domenico Acerenza is an exception | The paper

Swimming is a precocious sport: Benedetta Pilato won her first world medal at the age of 14, Federica Pellegrini was sixteen when she took the Olympic silver medal in Athens, Gregorio Paltrinieri won his first European title at 17. Domenico Acerenza is an exception. In the past twenty years he was not even part of a military sports group and swam very high times to aspire to a future as an international-level athlete. Absolute Italian Championships, April 2016: Paltrinieri dominates the 1,500m freestyle in 14’42”91, Gabriele Detti second in 14’46”48, Acerenza third in 15’08”55. Nearly 26 seconds slower than Greg, basically a tank of delay. “In those years everyone called me crazy”. Why go ahead? Who made him do it? Was passion enough to explain all that effort? He went ahead. At the World Championships in Fukuoka he won another medal in the 5 km open water race.

Because Acerenza knew in his heart that he had a future, just a little behind the average. “I’ve always seen it as a challenge, an enormous challenge, because they were very strong, they finished first and third at the Olympics, they won everything, they were unreachable. But I never gave up. I was aware that I could do something, that I could go faster, simply for the fact that, apart from putting in 200 percent of the effort, I had nothing. I didn’t have a physiotherapist, I didn’t have an athletic trainer, I didn’t have a nutritionist. I knew I had room for improvement, I just had to figure out how to improve.” At 23, Acerenza joined the Fiamme Oro and made his debut at the European Championships. At 24 he won his first medal at a World Cup. At 26 he went to the Olympics. His is a story of tenacity and stubbornness that started from a small village almost a thousand meters above sea level in the only Italian region where there is not even a 50-metre Olympic swimming pool: Basilicata.

“Actually, a few years ago they discovered one outdoors in a tourist village in Scanzano Jonico,” he explains. “It was a 50-metre tank thrown there, without even the starting blocks and the stripes on the bottom, nothing at all. The regional Fin has taken it and arranged it to use it a little in the summer months, to play some regional championships… But here summer doesn’t last long. You can’t think of doing a structured preparation in an open tank after a month of use. It’s useless”. Acerenza is from Sasso di Castalda (Potenza) but started swimming in Atena Lucana, province of Salerno, in another region. Then at the age of six he moved to the Satriano swimming pool, a few minutes from his home, where he met his first coach, Vito Santarsiero. “I was lucky, otherwise I couldn’t have done anything else. In this area we are very lacking in sporting alternatives to football.”

In 2016, after failing to qualify for the European Championships in London, he went to Naples to train with Lello Avagnano. However, the real turning point came in 2018, when Acerenza had the opportunity to study at the University of Mezzofondo: the group from Ostia, with Paltrinieri and Detti, led by Stefano Morini. “Those were professional training years. I could see how champions trained and lived, because they were champions. I stood there and looked at everything, trying to figure out what they were doing that was right for me. There we can say that my professional career began. Every time he got in the water it was a race, and he really pushed himself every time without complaining. Then we lived just for swimming, which I didn’t do before. There was space for physiotherapy, the mental coachwe slept there, we didn’t have to worry about having to go shopping or cook, there was a canteen, everything was prepared, so our only thought was to go fast and that’s it”.

Today Acerenza is still based in Ostia, but since 2020 he has joined Fabrizio Antonelli’s group and alongside lane swimming he joins open water swimming. “The sea gives you other sensations. I often compare it to the feeling of flying, because you feel much freer at sea. It’s a bit like imagining the world upside down: you feel like a bird flying, only on the other side of the sky”. Right at sea, at the age of 27, last summer he won gold in the 10 km of the European Championships in Rome and silver in the World Championships in Budapest.

At 28, tonight, he confirmed his bronze medal in the 5 km at the Fukuoka World Championships behind the German Florian Wellbrock and Gregorio Paltrinieri. One question remains in the history of Domenico Acerenza. Have you ever thought: “Ah, if I had done this sooner…”? “I once asked to go to Ostia, but I was not allowed. But maybe going to Ostia at 17/18 I would have burned out, I wouldn’t have held up the comparison with Paltrinieri and Detti and I wouldn’t have done anything anymore. For me it had to be like this. My growth path had to be this and I could not have done otherwise, simple. Yes, maybe I arrived at the results a little later, but the important thing is that I got there”.