“I won the gold, then they cornered me. Female athletes were seen as a waste of time»- Corriere.it

dAs a child she liked to draw, did they bet on her as a future artist?

«Certainly no one imagined that one day I would become an athlete. Sport, for a woman born in 1953, could at most be a pastime. And to be cultivated in moderation».

And yet, little Sara, born in Rivoli Veronese, on the banks of the Adige, enjoyed running on the lawn of the family farm-house.

«It all started by chance, with a physical education teacher who convinced my parents to enroll me in an athletics school. First competition: I jumped one meter and 25, frontal style, country gym. First real competition at the school camp in 1966. There was no string but an auction. I got scared and said “How to do it?”. I don’t know how, but I jumped. And since then for the whole group I became the high jumper. Hoplà».

“Captain” without meaning to.
«The point is that at the time there wasn’t all this scientific research around sport. Often you just jumped, you just ran. Today my perennial back pain is also due to the fact that some movements maybe were wrong but you didn’t know it. Everything was rudimentary, think that when menstruation came it was even difficult to talk about it, they called it “the character of women”, it was a kind of unfortunate monthly incident».

In your autobiography (Rai Libri) «A life up high», you say that the ventral style, with the belly down, was the dominant one. Was she comfortable there?
«No, it scared me, I preferred the scissor style. The coaches then saw the female athletes as a waste of time and so they loaded us with absurd physical effort, convinced that we would give up after a while to start embroidering and cooking».

However, she didn’t give up.
«No and, indeed, I dared to jump Fosbury style, on the backbone. The problem is that we weren’t equipped: we took terrible blows with every fall».

The real competitions began: the juniors in Paris, then Helsinki, right?
«I met Mennea, we were a fierce Italy even if my shoes were a disaster, the equipment was not suitable. I don’t know how, the 1972 Munich Olympics arrived. I improved the Italian record, finished sixth in the final classification and while I was preparing to celebrate, death descended on the Olympic village. A terrorist commando kidnapped Israeli athletes and coaches, we received the news of the dead. And to think that in that year Erminio and I fell in love».

Erminio Azzaro, who became his coach.
«We have been together for half a century, we have a son, we have never stopped trusting each other. Erminio took me seriously, which few did with female athletes. Today is different, they train like machines programmed to win. At the time everything was more improvised and trust made the difference. My parents were against him training me: they trusted Bragagnolo, like the whole team. I put my foot down: either he or I leave athletics. No one replied.”

Here she is, the captain.
«Javier Sotomayor, world record holder with 2 meters and 45 centimeters, who publicly declared that he had “studied Simeoni’s jumps”».

First real medal?
«Bronze in Rome in 1974. Then came the 1976 Montreal Olympics: silver, the only Italian medal in athletics in that competition. But I’ll tell you a detail: although my career was on the rise and successes, albeit slowly, accumulated, I didn’t feel safe. I enrolled at Isef: you never know, I thought. Today female athletes are much more encouraged, they see competition as a real professional career. For us, there was always an uncertain horizon. Yes, today I win, but then, what will happen?».

If I tell you Brescia, August 4, 1978?

«I’ll answer you with a magic word: two-zero-one, the new world record in the women’s high jump, those two meters that changed my life. Media pressure also began: think that they asked me to invent some love story like this, to get me publicity. I rolled my eyes: what if I get the wrong name in interviews because I get confused?, I said. Folly. I couldn’t jump without the solid certainty of my family, my husband beside me. I don’t know how certain athletes of today, full of sentimental torments, manage. When I jumped, not only my legs and back jumped, but Sara jumped, with her life, her affections, her anxieties. In that year I broke the world record twice. The footage of the match in Brescia came to me, just think, thirty years later, filmed by a Trentino man in the stands».

And the best was yet to come:
Moscow, 1980.
“That Olympics meant only one thing to me: gold. I was determined but scared. A wink that I don’t tell her, perhaps because for the first time I was asking so much of myself. When the gold arrived I thought that I had arrived somewhere and I finally convinced myself that all those sacrifices were worth it. But then, in Athens, I got hurt and I learned, with bitterness, that when you win, you receive big telegrams and the time you don’t wear the gold medal, they don’t even say hello to you».

Does it heal quickly today?
«We used to waste months before fully recovering from traumas from which today we would recover in a few weeks. But in Los Angeles, in 1984 I brought home a nice silver. But then I said goodbye to the competitions, I did it in Sardinia, almost in a whisper, instinctively. And it was then that I learned that sport is not a beautiful fairy tale where everyone loves each other. The Federation called me to collaborate, I became responsible for the “Club Italia”, a laboratory where we helped the most promising boys and girls. Then, however, one day they put me aside ».

And that’s how she went back to teaching?
«For fifteen years I taught in the Faculty of Motor Sciences of Chieti. Then in 2017, at the age of sixty-four, I returned to my school in Garda. Having held the physical education chair in 1984, between one secondment and another, I had never managed to complete the one hundred and eighty continuous days of probation required by the school bureaucracy to be a full-fledged teacher and access the career reconstruction purposes of my future retirement.’

And started another “race”?
«Quibbles, codes, questions, inscriptions. Result: I was finally hired, but what should have been my chair was occupied, so, thirty-seven years after winning the gold medal at the Moscow Olympics, I assumed the role of “enhancement professor”. That is, I became a substitute teacher».

But why didn’t the Federation or Coni assign you more prestigious assignments, in your opinion?
«Dunno, maybe because I’ve never cultivated the right friendships. But that’s okay, my third life began a while ago».

On TV. The World Cup commented by her was a blast.
«I don’t understand anything about football, but I know how to recognize sport done well. The Circle of the Rings before and the World Cup afterwards gave me a great opportunity, to show myself in a new guise, a more witty captain, let’s say. I had fun and learned a lot. So I thank Rai. I have no regrets. I have a wonderful son and a husband who I love like the first day. When they ask me how you can spend half a century together, I answer that you always have to think of yourself as a close-knit team».