The Butterfly Academy told by the former blue Nina Corradini: “Trained to smile to hide our hell”

The crazy calculations on how to lose three ounces, perhaps sweating inside a sweatshirt in the sun, skipping dinner or using laxatives. So many humiliations and insults that I can’t even line them up and the diagnosis of PTSD. Always wonderful, both in public and on the platform, trained to hide reality behind a smile. Here is the Italian rhythmic gymnastics team told in the book “Always smiling, I was a butterfly and they ripped my wings off” Of Nina Corradiniwhere the spiral of cruelty and humiliation suffered by the Butterflies is told and the story of a winning and successful image overwhelmed in recent months by reports of abuse and mistreatment.

Nina Corradini’s voice is first that of an enthusiastic child in love with sport, then became a teenager trying to escape from her own dream. In the book written with Valeria Abate and published by Rizzoli two worlds are told, two “styles” of work but also of life.

First there is the gym in Fabriano, with the multi-medal trainer Julietta Cantaluppi, fondly called Julie. Then comes the call-up to the Farfalle, to the international academy of Desio with the coaches Emanuela Maccarani And Olga Tishina. Their names and surnames are not there, because there is still a legal proceeding, so the two are always called by a nickname: Lunatic Lady and Perennial Shadow. They are two small worlds, both exclusive and successful: on the one hand the Olympic medals of the technical director of the Maccarani national team and on the other the unprecedented international victories obtained with Sofia Raffaeli and Milena Baldassari, the athletes trained in the Marche by Cantaluppi, in turn a successful ex-blue and daughter of a legend of world rhythmic like Christina Gyurov.

Between these two worlds, which have the same goals and ply the same international platforms, there is only one thing in common: the hours of hard work, the endless repetitions, the long journeys, the lack of family and the sacrifices. For everything else in Corradini’s book there is a contrast between a platform that becomes a home, a family, where the coach Julie decorates the training shirts with her own hands and writes the names of “her” girls with glitter , and another where, on the contrary, one lives in terror of weight and of making a mistake, of reproach and screaming.

«We were all interchangeable», writes Corradini. «One clue among many, perhaps the least significant, but under everyone’s eyes: when a gymnast left, the one who took over came into possession of everything that she had belonged to her. I’m talking about the supply supplied, and not just the bag with the tricolor coat of arms. The T-shirts, the tops, the tank tops, the tracksuits: everything. Garments previously worn by another, which made no sense to take off except to communicate one thing: when you leave this structure, I strip you of everything I gave you, and you go away naked just as you entered. And on another one».

It almost seems like an instruction manual for young gymnasts and parents, a series of useful indications for recognizing what is sacrifice and what is not, it is just prevarication. In Corradini’s memories, even before Desio, there are also training sessions in a smaller, less prestigious gym. «I am still amazed today at how normal the various “stupid”, “idiot”, the “you can’t do anything” yelled every day in the faces of eight, ten year olds, as well as sixteen adolescents seemed to me normal. What I can now finally recognize as offenses constituted the baptism of my life as a gymnast. Again, «Those cursed thumbs stuck in the shoulder blades and the boot stuck in the coccyx».

The final word has not yet been written in the affair of the abuses and mistreatments of which the national technical director Maccarani and her assistant Tishina have been accused, who will be next week in Milan for the last stage of the World Cup, just like Cantaluppi’s individualists. For gymnasts and coaches on the platform next week the Olympics are the goal, for Corradini the story has become another. «I think rhythmic gymnastics is the most beautiful sport in the world and I hope that what I said and can change the way it is taught even just a little – comments the former Farfalla who left the national team in 2021 -. Finding yourself in situations like the ones I found myself in, I hope it won’t happen to anyone again”.