Izabella Chiappini withdraws from the Pan after reliving traumas – 10/19/2023 – Sport

The body expression of Izabella Chiappini, 28, suddenly changes when she remembers her time in Italy. The athlete gestures more with her arms, the heat makes her take off her coat, and the story alternates between slightly accelerated sentences and moments in which she lacks words.

They are reflections of the most difficult phase experienced by the water polo player, during the period in which she played for the Italian national team. She says she was the victim of attacks by her own companions in the pools.

The situation led her to have anxiety attacks and develop a process of depression, in addition to keeping her from dreams such as winning an Olympic medal. She will not be at the next edition of the Pan American Games, whose opening ceremony is scheduled for this Friday (20), in Santiago, Chile.

“I got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the Olympics anymore, because I thought: ‘God, I don’t want to have to spend another four months with these girls, with this whole situation'”, says the player to Sheet.

Winning Olympic gold was the athlete’s biggest dream, forged in a family of polo players. Her mother, Raquel Maizza, played for the Brazilian national team. Her father, Roberto Chiappini, after his retirement, became one of the main coaches of the sport in the country.

It was Roberto who presented Izabella with the opportunity to play for Italy. In 2016, before the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, he was approached by Fábio Conti, then coach of the Italian national team and interested in the future of the athlete — elected in 2015, at the age of 20, the second best in the world by the American magazine Water Polo World , the most important publication on the sport.

“He [Conti] I already knew about my dual citizenship”, says the player, who did not hesitate in accepting the invitation. “I played in the Olympics [pelo Brasil] Knowing that I would change nationality, I think the whole team already knew.”

Her excitement became even greater when Italy won the silver medal in Rio. “It was the chance to be part of a team that is one of the powerhouses of polo and compete again in the Olympics with a chance of winning a medal”, she recalls.

“The first year in Italy [jogando pelo Messina] It was wonderful”, she recalls. “I was chosen as the best player in the Italian Championship and I was already training with the Italian team as a guest.”

At the time, she needed to go through a kind of one-year quarantine before playing for Italy, as she had already played for a national team. It was after this period that her problems began.

“Officially, I was stealing the place of an Italian woman”, she describes how she was seen by some of her teammates. “The older girls even nicknamed me Brasil, apart from the things I knew they said about me.”

The situation wasn’t worse because she was very loved by the coach. However, when he left the team, there was no one left to protect it, nor to keep the team in line. “The team wasn’t doing well in or out of the water.”

After finishing runner-up in Rio, the Italian team accumulated a series of failures in the cycle to the Tokyo Olympic Games, with early eliminations in the 2018 European Championship and the 2019 World Cup and falling in the quarter-finals of the pre-Olympic tournament.

On the eve of the Games in Japan, the world was shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic. Izabella returned to Brazil, still not knowing exactly the extent of what the suffering in Italy had caused her.

“Every time I thought I would have to go back, I had a crisis, I felt anguish, which only went away when I saw that the borders were still closed”, he says.

When she finally returned to Italy, the crises worsened, especially during the period in which she spent 15 days in quarantine, alone, in seclusion that stimulated a depressive process.

“I cried every day because I had to wake up at 4:30 am to go train alone, swim alone, and then I would come back and stay locked in all day. Alone and locked in,” she recalls.

Izabella thought about giving up everything. But she found a new purpose when she returned to Brazil earlier this year, to play for Pinheiros, where she was trained. She had also decided to return to play for the Brazilian team and had her biggest goal in competing in the Pan de Santiago.

The new dream, however, also fell by the wayside when the athlete found herself in a situation that reopened the wounds from her time in Italy.

The brands were exposed last August, when the then Pinheiros athlete was involved in a fight with Luana Bonetti, an ABDA player, from Bauru, in the final of the Liga Rendimento, a competition that brings together the main water polo teams in São Paulo. .

The disagreement occurred in the final minutes of the match, when Iza’s team was winning 9-6. “The game was already won when the other team started to become more aggressive”, he states.

Izabella, however, cannot explain the exact reason why the fight with Luana started. “I would also like to understand,” says she, who at the time was captain of the Brazilian team. “As captain, I always treated everyone with the utmost respect. There was no personal friction between us.”

The biggest frustration came after the episode. “I didn’t like how they managed the situation, especially on the part of the coach [da seleção brasileira, Paulo Rogério]who did not contact me.”

Worse than that, for her, was seeing Luana Bonetti being called up to defend the team on the first list after the fight, while she and other Pinheiros athletes were left out. “There was no explanation or criteria”, said the player, who decided to withdraw her name from consideration for the Pan de Santiago call-up.

When contacted by the report, the CBDA (Brazilian Water Sports Confederation) said it regretted Iza’s decision “because it would make a difference for the team”.

She also reported that both she and Luana were not punished because the tournament in which the fight between them occurred was not organized by the CBDA. Thus, there was an understanding that possible punishments would be up to the clubs — at the time, the Bauru club said that Luana would be punished internally.

CBDA also informed that it offered Izabella the possibility of performing only for the Pan, without having to train with the team in Spain, where the delegation began its preparation. Still, she refused.

The athlete recognizes that the doors to the national team are open, but she does not intend to change her decision. “Of course I would like to be there. I see the Pan as if it were an Olympics. But I chose to ask for exemption.”

Disillusioned with Brazilian water polo, Izabella returned to Europe and recently signed a contract with Mulhouse, in France, where she rediscovered the joy of playing after the frustrations in Italy and Brazil.

“As difficult as it was, these situations made me grow,” he says. “I don’t regret anything, any choice I made in my life.”