When you see Valentina Petrillo on the track, you notice a powerful and tall sprinter. You also notice a furious joy in running fast and competing well.
“Sprinting is life for me! I live to compete and I love to race,” Petrillo said through an interpreter. “I love being in the blocks and being ready to show the emotions when I explode out of those blocks. That’s what gives me energy. I couldn’t give it up. “
Giving up doesn’t seem to be in the mental makeup of this sprint specialist from Bologna, Italy. Even competing at 46 and despite having a visual field of less than 10% due to an eye disease contracted as a teenager, she is pushing hard for next year’s Paralympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. If she makes her mark next summer, she could be the first transgender Paralympic Games qualifier yet.
She is even advancing the COVID crisis with her whole country. That hasn’t slowed his resolve, but the mandatory lockdown has affected his training schedule.
“I still tried to go out during lockdown to run,” she noted. “Three times I tried to get out and run and three times the police told me to go home.”
Sprinting has been Petrillo’s lifelong dream and she has overcome a number of hurdles to achieve it. As a child in Naples, his first piece of that dream came in 1980. His eyes were on the Summer Olympics in Moscow. His inspiration, 200-meter world record holder Pietro Mennea, won gold in the event in a thrilling victory that made Mennea a national hero.
“I replay this race over and over again,” she smiled. “It gives me that same sense of motivation and excitement.”
Since then, running fast has become his passion. At 14, she tried out at the local sports club, but was turned down. “I didn’t have the right shoes and they told me I wasn’t fit for athletics,” Petrillo moaned.
Another disappointment soon followed. She was diagnosed with Stargardt disease. An eye disorder that causes retinal degeneration. It usually begins in childhood and stabilizes in adulthood, but often returns vision to 20/200 or worse. For Petrillo, that meant having to adapt and relearn. The next step led to a move north to Bologna, and to a school specializing in the visually impaired.
Running helped her cope with her progress by studying computer science at a local university. In 1994, she joined a sports club and showed great potential with a Paralympic in Atlanta in two years.
“My coaches told me I could do it, but I didn’t feel in shape,” she recalls. “I wasn’t in my head. I felt my discomfort because I felt like I was a different person, but I wasn’t expressing that.”
No one knew how much gender identity struggled for her. She remembered going to her first communion wishing she was in a white dress like the other girls instead of the same clothes the boys wore.
The 1996 Paralympic Games come and go. His struggle continued. Neither a career as a computer programmer nor marriage and the arrival of a son in 2016 could forge a truce.
The trail had been a refuge through so much, but that couldn’t protect her here. Petrillo won three consecutive National Paralympic Championships in the T12 (visually impaired) rankings in the 200 meters and 400 meters from 2016 to 2018 while showing up and competing like the man she always knew she was not.
“Before, I would dress up and hide in the bathroom so I wouldn’t be discovered,” she explained. “I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know who I could tell. I decided to keep this secret to myself.”
Her run on her secret ended in 2017. She went to her spouse, Elena. “She said she always knew,” Petrillo commented.
In early 2018, she started participating in a local support group. Her first open steps forward found a person who could explode out of the starting blocks as she stumbled into herself. “I was worried about how I looked,” she said of her debut. “I didn’t feel confident enough to go out.”
“At first she was very insecure, because she didn’t know the band,” said Gruppo Trans Bologna co-founder Milena Bargiacchi. “Then she became more and more involved in our activities. She felt welcomed into the association. »
Bargiacchi knows the embarrassment that comes with breaking barriers. She led the campaign to change Italian laws to allow transgender people to change birth certificates and legal IDs without undergoing surgery. In 2015, the Italian Supreme Court recognized this right. Bargiacchi became the first in her nation to enforce these amended laws.
The activist and the athlete became sisters, and the group became a necessary support when Petrillo made his transition plan known to his sports club. “I told them I wanted to compete as a woman,” she said. “I lost all my friends. I had to find a new coach and a new team. »
She threw herself into a transition with the same intensity as she throws herself into a race. She continued to train with an assertive new coach, suitable for hormone replacement therapy and faced a frustrating struggle with governing bodies unaware of the rules that had been in place for years.
“It was a very bad deal with the Italian Paralympic Committee,” Petrillo said. “When I said I wanted to compete as a woman, they said I was crazy,” she also noted that governing bodies were expressing different interpretations of the rules she was trying to navigate.
“Ignorance on trans issues is so prevalent in sports federations and governing bodies,” Bargiacchi added. “No one seemed to believe in Valentina’s good faith. More than once she was accused of wanting to run with women in order to gain time easily. »
Petrillo said she adheres to the guidelines of her sport’s global governing body, World Athletics, which states that testosterone should be limited to 5 nanomoles per liter or less. The National Paralympic Committee still maintained, at the time, that Petrillo should compete in the men’s category in their events.
But away from their events, she found acceptance. Last summer, in two more track competitions, she was allowed to compete authentically. His times and positions were secondary to validation. “It was beautiful,” she beamed. “It was a good feeling and I felt at home.”
Looking ahead, she is moving forward to step up her training with an eye towards restarting competitions if the threat of COVID recedes, and with the knowledge that the Paralympic Committee will allow her to compete as a woman. His journey is also the subject of a documentary currently in production. “It’s a very important subject because it’s about a person claiming their rights to be accepted and recognized in the world they want to belong to”, filmmaker Luisa Moreghetti said.
For Valentina Petrillo, the effort ahead binds her family to growing acceptance, new friends forged in support, and the goal that is a year away. Her hope is that she can inspire others, especially transgender Italians, as she was inspired 40 years ago.
“I dream about it,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “The determination that Mennea showed is something he taught us all. That’s how I feel when I run. The same determination and the same motivation. »
This week, Valentina Petrillo joined the Trans Sporter Room podcast team to talk about her journey to the 2021 Paralympic Games in Tokyo. Click here for the full interview in this week’s episode. You can also download, listen and subscribe at Apple’s Podcast Page as well as on top Google Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find Outsports podcasts.
And this week, you can watch and listen to the podcast, by clicking here. The password is: 6d @ yC52%
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