NEWS

Review of the 2022-23 competitive season

The 2022-23 competition season is finally behind me: yesterday (Saturday), I returned from Japan, after a few days' holiday spent between Kyoto and Tokyo. As I do every year, here I am drawing up a brief summary of this transitional season, towards the Paris 2024 Olympics. At the end of October 2022, I took part in a leg of the FINA World Cup in Berlin (which has since changed its name to World Aquatics), where I won two silver medals in the 100 and 200 butterfly. The first part of the season culminated in the World Championships (Short course) in Melbourne (in mid-December), where I made the podium on two occasions: silver in the 50 and bronze in the 200 butterfly. After returning from Australia, I started a new cycle of preparation at the beginning of January, which led me to the recently completed World Championships in Fukuoka. During this long preparation period, I went through the Swiss championships and some important international meetings, in particular the two Mare Nostrum events in Barcelona and Monte Carlo (end of May) and the Sette Colli International Trophy in Rome (end of June). In all these events, I confirmed my position at the top in the butterfly races, reaching the podium several times (from first to third place) and, above all, setting very good times, without ever decreasing the training load for the races. So, I arrived in Japan in confidence and in good form, to at least compete for access to the finals. As we all know, the results were not up to our expectations, also considering the chronometric evidence we had received from the training sessions as soon as we arrived in Japan. It was therefore normal that, at first, I was not particularly happy with the times I set in Fukuoka (in all the butterfly races), where I nevertheless ranked seventh in the world in the 100 metres, in a very fast race. During this month of August, after a bit of a holiday, we will have a chance to analyse in detail the whole season and the possible reasons that led me to the Fukuoka results, in the knowledge that this is a situation that, sooner or later, occurs in the career of all athletes: the most correct reaction is to simply try to learn from any mistakes, in order to improve further. The balance of the entire season can only be positive, although I cannot be completely satisfied with the conclusion. This certainly does not undermine my optimism and my belief in the potential that I can still show, in a competitive career that, at 22 years of age, can only be considered to be in its early stages. From the beginning of September, I will be back in the water with my usual maximum commitment.