the butterfly coach rejects the allegations of ill-treatment – Corriere.it

What I ask the Court to be able to hear as many witnesses as possible in the courtroom to understand whether my client, the coach Emanuela Maccarani
, has lost lucidity and changed his personality in this last period or in a longer period of time becoming another person. Because if it were true we should find some episodic symptoms in her past. It is possible that they have all remained silent, all conspiratorial. Is it possible that no one, that no butterfly, has noticed anything before?. These are the words of Avilio Presutti, lawyer of Emanuela Maccarani, deus ex machina of blue rhythmic gymnastics.

The trial against the coach, which opened today Friday 24 March in Rome, will take an unusually long time for a sporting proceeding. But right from the start of a hearing that was opened to the press in an extraordinary way, a clear result that the butterfly coach of the blue gymnastics completely rejects the serious allegations of ill-treatment made by four former blue athletes. Maccarani has no intention of becoming a scapegoat for the system, nor of adopting strategies to keep their job or keep a contract that protects them until the end of a season in which most athletes seek Olympic qualification for Paris 2024, with World Cup in August which will be a decisive step. Who on the other hand imagined a soft position of justice (or rather of the federation) towards the technical commissioner (and her assistant Olga Tishina, also on trial) who transformed the blue rhythmic into a medal factory and the butterflies into world leader must change his mind:
the Federation has no intention of covering up or softening the case or of influencing its judgments.

Exceptions rejected

The Federal Court rejected the defense’s procedural exceptions after an hour and a half in closed session. Not trueas argued by the defense of Maccarani, that the alleged mistreatment inflicted by the coach on the students of the Desio Academy had already been disclosed to the federal president Tecchi in 2020thus expiring the terms for the judicial action. Extricating itself from the dense calendar of national and international competitions, the Court (next hearing scheduled for May 12 in Milan) will hear in the presence of a first group of active athletes (Agnese Duranti), former athletes and members of the blue staff with inevitable dialectical clashes to judge from what we saw today in the classroom. Testimonies in person rather than on documents already frozen by the prosecutor are very rare even in the most important sporting trials.