Federica Pellegrini in “Oro”: “I gorge myself and then vomit everything. My mother discovered it”

At the World Championships in Montréal in July 2005 I showed up with the best time of the season. In April I had done 1’57″92 in the 200m, so I was the favourite. It’s the World Cup in which Philip Magnini wins gold in the 100m freestyle and becomes a star, those in which Laura Manaudou wins the 400. The phenomenon was though Michael Phelps: five golds, including the 200m freestyle and 200m medley, and silver in the 100m butterfly.

I had invested everything in those World Cups after a lousy year. I wanted gold. Only gold would have repaid me for the effort, pain, anguish and loneliness. That would have been my compensation. Unfortunately, however, I have a delay in menstruation despite taking the pill, I was a mess at that time, and my body doesn’t respond, it’s sluggish, it doesn’t explode. I do 1’58″73: silver. The Frenchwoman wins Solemn Figuès with 1’58″60.

Tackled for a television interview, I burst into tears. I was so happy about the Olympic silver medal in Athens, how much this world silver burns me. I said to the journalist: “This medal should be thrown away. I still haven’t understood why the final turned out so badly for me. I can’t find any answers to such a disappointing time trial”. My mom, who watches me on television, gets scared. She knows me, she guesses how I’m feeling from the way I answer her on the phone, even if I call her mom and not mom, she worries. She told me I was unrecognizable, she swollen like she’d never seen me.

Everyone attacks me because I cried for a world silver instead of being happy. Nobody understands. But how could they if I didn’t understand either? I struggled like a fish caught on a hook, I just wanted to disappear. Instead I was there, in front of everyone’s eyes, unable to handle the stress. I was seventeen, which is bad enough even if you don’t have to swim in a world race. I didn’t feel any indulgence towards myself. I was stiff, I saw no way out. In the photos my eyes are completely dull. And I’m swollen, pimply, long hair that I no longer had and didn’t even like.

A few months ago, shortly after I moved to Milan, I had begun to gorge myself on food. I was able to churn out pounds of ice cream followed by several bowls of cereal back to back. Once my mom came to see me and she noticed it. I told her I’m hungry, shall we have a snack? And I had eaten two bags of raw ham and three packets of crackers. She had looked at me puzzled.

In the evening, after eating all I could during the day, I vomited. I did it systematically, every night before going to sleep, when the memory of all the food eaten increased the sense of guilt. Throwing up was a bit like clearing my conscience and also my way of metabolizing the pain. It’s called bulimia but I didn’t know it. For me, bulimia wasn’t the problem, it was the solution. My way to lose weight without sacrifice by eating everything I wanted. Of course, part of me sensed that it was a signal, that I was trying to hit rock bottom so that it would be clear to me that I had gone in the wrong direction. But the fatter I looked, the more I ate. By now I was very far from what I wanted to be. The only thing I could do was carry on like this. Eventually someone would notice and stop me, part of me thought. And in the meantime I continued to eat.

One day I am summoned by Gérard Rancinan to SportWeek. You allegedly photographed some athletes out of their natural environment. He would have transformed them into animals, masks, models. For me he had imagined a Venetian mask. They make me up, with white lead on my face and my mouth in the shape of a heart. They put on me a blonde wig, jewels, heels. It takes us two days to do these stage tricks that were complicated and time consuming to make. I always wear my racing suit or bikini. The photo session is exhausting and I find myself in constant embarrassment. The only thought I have in those two very long days is that I want to escape. Now, right now, with this goddamn little lady make-up on my face. Run away fast without looking back and never let me be seen again. Instead I stay and have my picture taken, I do whatever they ask of me. Because I’m serious, I’m a soldier.

On the day of the presentation I panicked. I already know I won’t like it. To go unnoticed I don’t wear makeup, I put on a shirt and a pair of baggy jeans, I tie my hair up with an elastic to mortify myself. I walk into the hall and it’s worse than I imagined. There are photos on the walls. Huge. blowups. A nightmare. I remain petrified, I would like to cover them in some way, especially those with a bikini in which I see nothing but the rolls of fat on my belly. The languid poses, the seduction, I just want to sink, disappear, die. And yet everyone looks at me, it’s full of people who see what to me looks like a poor fat, pimply little girl, made up like a whore, half naked. I’m an athlete, why did they turn me into a femme fatale? I’m only seventeen, I’m a minor: regardless of my physical condition, that sexualization of my body is a violence, it humiliates me and is absolutely out of place.

Fiona May she is portrayed as a panther, beautiful. About to snap, bent over her legs. It’s a famous photo, she’s practically naked but you don’t even notice her nakedness, you only notice her power. Immediately trace her photo back to her athletic gesture, to the fact that she is an athlete who runs, jumps. Her body, however naked, is the body of a person ready to hunt, to compete. Was I perhaps a Venetian lady naked and in heels? Looking at my photos, no one would think I was a swimmer.

What was wrong with me? Why did I give others such a different image than who I was? Maybe I was too curvy, didn’t have an athlete’s body? Translated into my language of despair, was I a lump of meat? In that case I was therefore right: I had to vomit everything. My medicine to stop being the woman that others saw and that was not me.

Yet I had always had a healthy relationship with food. I’ve never been followed by a nutritionist, one of those who gives you the diet to the milligram. I eat everything except the béchamel and tripe which I don’t like. Over the years I’ve realized that I didn’t need to make big sacrifices, even when I was training. Without overeating, but if I felt like a tiramisu I ate it. Or a glass of wine. I grew up in Veneto in a family of bartenders. I grew up thinking that drinking in moderation was a natural thing. Since I was a child I knew what a spritz was, because my parents had made me taste it. So when sunset comes I feel the need to stop and have a drink, to unwind. It’s almost a genetic issue. Obviously when I swam I didn’t do it every night, but I did on weekends.

In the last years of my racing career, when I didn’t eat enough, a glass of wine even helped to unclog my stomach. In the heavy training load phases I was so tired that I wasn’t hungry, but I had to eat to recover. Not that I imposed anything on myself or had any form of food refusal. It was just my body that completely closed the hatches, went into standby and the only thing it wanted was to rest, to sleep. It happened that at lunch before the final I couldn’t even finish a plate of spaghetti. Usually before the races you eat white pasta, sugars that can be assimilated quickly. You avoid things like lasagna or parmigiana, which take a long time to digest. Plain pasta, a little ham and parmesan, bresaola, tuna. But that didn’t suit me either. When I was tense, not even a pin would go through. Over the years I have learned to integrate solubleally. On days of excessive fatigue, I gorged myself on protein and carbohydrate sodas.

But this is normal for an athlete. Instead, what happened to me at seventeen in Milan was something else. Everything had blown. Plus my body had gone public. Athletes have non-standard bodies, because their goal is not beauty but power. And every sport demands a different arrangement of muscles, levers, empty and full spaces. In swimming, the shoulders especially come out. And since I was a child I had these broad, robust shoulders, which embarrassed me when exposed in elegant clothes. I tried to avoid tank tops, tops and anything that highlighted them. Growing up I made peace with it. I learned to dress in such a way that my shoulders become an asset and not a defect. But it wasn’t the shoulders: in those years I saw myself as a monster.

Dysmorphia. It’s the disease where you can’t see yourself as you really are. The mirror reflects the image produced by your unconscious, by your obsessions. What you see is not you, but the projection of your fear, your insecurity.

(© 2023 The Ship of Theseus publisher, Milan)