FLORENCE – A journey to Salviatino, a residential neighborhood in Florence, to try to decipher a riddle of Italian sport. The answer lies inside an elegant building that served as the set for the Sassaroli clinic in Amici Miei. On the first floor, Larissa Iapichino opens the door, accompanied by her father and coach Gianni. The windows overlook the Fiesole hills, electric guitars on the walls, and a golf bag on the floor tell stories of the life of the former Italian pole vault record holder and ex-husband of Fiona May. It is within these walls that one can understand whether one of the jewels of Italian athletics has been tarnished. She was famous since she was a child, acclaimed before entering this strange phase in which some fear a decline. This coincided with the change of coach (from Cecconi to her father), perhaps revealed by the failure to qualify for the world final in Eugene.
“I’m very calm,” says Larissa. “I envy those who have a clear path in sports, without going through difficult periods. Since I got injured before the Olympics, I’ve experienced tremendous growth. I’m much less naive. I’ve realized that my passion is now a job, whereas before it was a game, even when I set the world junior and Italian indoor record with 6.91, tied with my mom.” Her afro, which she sometimes pulls up because of the heat, her jeans, a white T-shirt, and her dazzling smile as she speaks, is a power forward for the Under-20 basketball team, fresh from the European Championships in Montenegro. Petite, Larissa, close to her 6-foot-2 boyfriend and her imposing father. Petite, but magnetic and determined. “It’s tough to put so many things together at twenty, even though I’m finding the right balance. The impact was shocking; I knew there was a step ahead of me, but I didn’t know how high it was. But there are champions like Ivana Spanovic-Vuleta, my mentor, who encourage me and find what’s happening completely normal.”
Yeah, what’s happening? Gianni Iapichino isn’t willing to be seen as the one holding back his daughter’s growth. “Larissa has improved a lot, the numbers say it—not the competition numbers, but her speed, explosive strength, dynamic strength, reactivity, everything you see in training. I’m very happy with her entry speed, which is what matters most to me, given that our primary goal is Paris 2024. Stefano Tilli wrote to tell me he saw a lot of speed on the platform. She improved without excessively increasing the workload, because I was afraid of overloading it. They say I took Larissa as a 6.91m jumper, but that’s not true. She was jumping 6.42m before Tokyo, but she wasn’t jumping like she used to; something hadn’t worked. She was in terrible shape, and in fact she immediately got injured and missed the Olympics.” Larissa confirms: “I had sore knees, pain, I felt like an old woman. Now I’m fine.” Her father isn’t even willing to dismiss her failure to qualify for the world final by 4 centimeters as a failure: “In her second jump, a millimeter miss, she had a beautiful run-up and landed around 6.85m. On her last attempt, at twenty years old, in her first world championship, she found herself with two misses and a headwind that created eddies. Despite this, she made 6.60m, the only one with the wind against her when others had had as much as 4.7m in their favor. Her character was evident there. Now she knows she can face the next competitions without fear, starting with the next European Championships.”
Her mother’s record helps heal the wounds: she too was eliminated as a young girl in qualifying for two world championships and one Olympics between 1991 and 1993. Fiona May received Eugene’s videos from her ex-husband, but hasn’t responded. “She prefers being a mother to a coach,” says Larissa. “For me, she’s a role model, one of the greatest jumpers of all time. She’s a reminder that when you’re young, not everything can go smoothly right away.” The Iapichino-May family is immense and demanding, and the athletics world is questioning yet another parent-child relationship that has created both wonder and disaster in the past. “I would never give him up as a coach,” Larissa says sweetly and definitively. We’re two people who are very good at separating the two spheres. At home, we’re father and daughter; on the field, we’re coach and athlete. There are more of us than you might imagine in athletics. We seem like rare birds, but there are so many of us. The Duplantis, the Pichardos, the Sagnias, not just the Tamberis and the Tortus. Paternal and filial affection, compared to a simple sporting relationship, is an added value. Let me give you an example: a boy doesn’t have his period week, while in that week I’m very nervous and could attack anyone. It’s difficult for my dad to manage me in training; he sees this girl who suddenly wakes up feeling bad and won’t accept anything. The positive side is that I have someone by my side who keeps me in line. As a growing athlete, I need someone who sets limits for me, not a wingman who gives me free rein.