Paralympics: Bortuzzo and that bullet that changed his life, a matter of millimetres

Paris, August 30, 2024 – That of Manuel Bortuzzo It's a name that has been under the radar for years now spotlight. It was already for sports insiders when, at fifteen, he was a great hope of the middle distance swimming pool blue. Trevigiano born in Trieste but stationed at the Federal Center of Ostia, class of 1999, to those who called him a promise he replied that he was "a little promise”, but he made the news headlines for a crime that occurred in 2019, near a pub in southern Rome, when he was involved in a Shooting in Eschilo Square: he was with his girlfriend and was the victim of mistaken identity.

A bullet hit him from behind even though he was totally unknown to the shooter, causing him to die.spinal cord injury. Weeks and weeks on the news and in the newspapers, sometimes with the classic spectacularization typical of this era, then from victim Bortuzzo returned protagonist, or rather he has become one, making the most of his role as a public figure. Documentary film, fiction, then the television experience and recently a book ('Alone in the storm') in which he deliberately neglected his participation in a well-known reality TV show, which actually made him known even to the few who knew very little about his story.

The one in Paris 2024 is his first Paralympics, obviously in swimming which was and remains his sport. At the centre of media interest, in life and in the pool, where his numerous tattoos on his torso and arms – quite unusual for a swimmer – will make him easily recognisable. Among these, there is also a drawing that symbolises the number 12, that is, the millimeters of distance between life and death if the bullet, that day in 2019, had ended up just a little further and had reached the abdominal aorta. Her Paralympics will also tell this story, but above all they will allow the "promising girl" of that time to go in search of a medal to finally realize those expectations, different but always the same, when it comes to competing on the edge of tenths and hundredths.