The visually impaired Italian sprinter Valentina Petrillo has a special relationship with Paris. She appreciates the French capital for having won, in July 2023, the bronze medals in the 200 m and 400 m in the T12 category (blind) at the world para-athletics championships, earning her first qualification for the Paralympic Games in both distances. She also likes it because “In this town nobody [la] look insistently ».
However, the 50-year-old will be under scrutiny when she steps onto the starting blocks of the purple track at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis (Seine) for the first round of the 400 metres on 2 September, becoming the first openly transgender athlete to take part in the Paralympic Games since their creation in 1960. A few days later, on 6 September, she will take the start of the 200 metres.
Coming from a difficult neighborhood and of modest origin in Naples, Valentina Petrillo lived until the age of 45 under the name of Fabrizio, prisoner of a male body that she “hated”. “I have felt like a woman since I was 5 years old, but as a teenager I resigned myself because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I thought I was alone in the world in this case.”, She confided to him Worldone week before the start of the event.
In 1980, she was captivated by the victory of her compatriot Pietro Mennea in the 200 metres at the Moscow Olympics. She vowed to one day wear the azzurro jersey to run at the Games, as a woman. Suffering from genetic macular degeneration at the age of 14, which caused her to progressively lose her vision (Stargardt disease), she put her dream on hold.
She did not really get into athletics until she was 20, in Bologna, where she studied computer science at a high school for the visually impaired, and where she now lives and works as a remote computer programmer. She plays blind football (the Paralympic version of futsal) for the men’s national team. She then took up track from 2015 to 2018, winning eleven national titles in the men’s T12 category.
“A long process”
At the end of 2018, he confessed to his wife, with whom he has a son who is now 9 years old, that he dresses as a woman whenever he can. Once he got over the shock, she encouraged him in his transition, which began in 2019. The couple ended up divorcing, although their relationship remained. ” Good “. “Hormonal treatment is a difficult choicewhispers. We know what we leave behind but we don’t know what we will find. »
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