Vanessa Ferrari’s impact on Italian gymnastics — mental health awareness

Vanessa Ferrari, the 2006 World all-around champion and four-time Olympian from Italy, announced her retirement from the sport on Wednesday.

Ferrari became the first Italian gymnast to win an individual Olympic medal when she took silver on floor in Tokyo. She said, in an interview to her hometown newspaper Bresciaoggi, that she had hoped Paris would be the final competition of her career, but a calf injury kept her from making the Italian team. 

She is the most decorated Italian gymnast of all time, with five World medals and eight European Championships medals in addition to her Olympic silver. She is one of only four women in the world to make it to four Olympics. 

When Ferrari won her World all-around title, she was the first to do so under the open-ended Code of Points. Her win was considered controversial at the time, because she fell on beam during the competition but was able to make up the loss of points there with her floor routine. She showed that a fall was no longer the end of all hope in a gymnastics competition, but an obstacle that could be navigated with shrewd code hacking. 

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Fifteen years stretched between Ferrari’s first international medal (that World title was her senior competition debut!) and her most recent, the Tokyo floor medal. She helped set the bar for modern career longevity in the sport, alongside Oksana Chusovitina and Brazilians Daniele Hypolito and Jade Barbosa. 

Ferrari also paved the way for the success of the Italian gymnastics program. Italy won the silver team medal in Paris, the first Olympic team medal since 1926, a hotly-anticipated result after a fourth place in Tokyo. Without Ferrari, the team had also won a bronze medal at the 2019 World Championships, their first team medal there since 1950. 

Ferrari’s teammate from Tokyo, Alice D’Amato, became the first Italian woman to win an individual gold Olympic medal in Paris when she triumphed in the beam final. 

In short, Ferrari walked so Italian gymnastics could run. She will be missed. 

Other gym news

College Gym News heralded Mental Heatlh Awareness Day with a day-in-the-life piece about gymnasts and mental health and one about the various mental-health challenges that affect college gymnasts, specifically. They also have a story on eight veteran gymnasts taking leadership roles on their teams for the 2025 season. 

CGN also gives us the weekly recruiting roundup, which features some big names this week. 

The Gymternet has the results of the Szombathely World Challenge Cup from last weekend. 

The NCAA has eliminated the national letter of intent, or NLI, effective immediately. I want to write more about this in the coming weeks, but it’s a big deal – especially for transfer athletes, and for the future of name-image-likeness (NIL) agreements.

In another big retirement this week, Dipa Karmakar of India announced that she will move on from gymnastics. 

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Social media post of the week

GOAT tour gymnasts tried standing 1.5s. To no one’s surprise, Simone Biles killed it.