Paolo Conte Bonin, a successful amateur

It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful. On the day of his debut with the senior swimming team, yesterday Paolo Conte Bonin won the gold medal at the World Championships in short course and set the new world record with Italy’s men’s 4x100m freestyle relay (3’02”75). Until a few weeks ago, only the most voracious enthusiasts knew this curly-haired boy with a cheerful smile, two medals in the relay (as a reserve) at the 2019 World Youth Championships and many placings in national competitions, but none of the stigmata of the predestined. He qualified for Melbourne last November 10th, finishing second in the 100m freestyle at the Italian Winter Championships in Riccione.

Paolo Conte Bonin, who would probably win the World Championship of Marco D’Ottavi’s names on l’Ultimo Uomo, was born in 2002 and is from Vicenza like Thomas Ceccon, from Stroppari, a fraction of Tezze sul Brenta. He started swimming at the age of five as “my father had asked me to choose between football, swimming and tennis, I chose swimming without knowing too much why”. In September 2021, after a difficult season due to health problems, he decided to move to Ostia, to the speed pole led by federal coach Claudio Rossetto. The turning point of his career. He was an adult world, he was wrong as a professional, and to think that Paolo Conte Bonin is not a professional either: he is not part of any military sports group. He doesn’t have a biographical card on the federation’s website, and to be honest until yesterday evening his Wikipedia page didn’t even exist.

Give me a dream that doesn’t give sleep. We don’t know if Paolo Conte Bonin managed to sleep or not on Monday night, before the World debut, but we do know that the Italian 4x100m freestyle had a dream, a goal, or rather two: and he achieved them. “We got what we had in mind,” he said after his gold and world record. In the heat Paolo Conte Bonin swam his fraction in 45”68, winning the internal challenge for the place in the final against Manuel Frigo (46”51), then in the evening he worsened slightly (45”93), braked partly by emotion, but driven by Alessandro Miressi and Thomas Ceccon, with the precious collaboration of Leonardo Deplano, Italy touched solo ahead of Australia (3’04”63) and the United States (3’05 ”09). In Melbourne, the home of freestyle. And the Australians who get pissed off.

Now the blue 4x100m freestyle relay is the current Olympic silver medalist, the current World Long Course bronze medalist, the current World Short Course gold medalist and the current European Long Course gold medalist. Paolo Conte Bonin’s story confirms that we are becoming, in our small way, like the United States: it is almost more difficult to qualify for the national team than to win a medal at the World Cup or the European Championships. If you succeed in the first venture, the second almost comes by itself. There’s no one here to tell that he can’t swim and never will.