For almost twenty years, Italy has been in love with a little girl who has a very famous last name: Ferrari. Like the “red fireball,” the world's most beloved racing car, the less than five-foot-tall athlete has enchanted fans around the world with her feats.

We are talking about Vanessa Ferrari, the greatest Italian gymnast of all time who last October announced her retirement from competition. The gymnast from Orzinuovi, a small town in the province of Brescia, Lombardy, left competitive activity at the record age of 33, after competing in major international competitions for 18 consecutive years. And Vanessa, in her long career, set many records.

She was the first Italian able to win a world title and an Olympic medal, the first and only one to perform a double backflip collected with double twisting, the first gymnast in the world to perform an “enjambé” ring change with 360 degrees of rotation on the free body, and the only Italian able to participate in four editions of the Olympic Games, from Beijing 2008 to Tokyo 2020. Unfortunately, her career was also marked by a series of serious injuries that forced her to undergo as many as nine surgeries, stopping her from competitions for long periods and affecting her performance even in training.

But Vanessa has also become a symbol of Italian sports because of her many injuries, because each time she got up and returned to competitions, winning important victories even 15 years after her first successes. In 2006, when she was only 16 years old, she won gold at the World Championships in Aarhus in the individual competition, and in the same competition she also won bronze in the floor exercise and uneven bars.

In 2021, at the age of 31, at the Tokyo Olympic Games, she won the silver medal in the floor exercise. When we consider that many gymnasts retire at age 20 or so, we can well understand what Vanessa Ferrari has represented for the sport. An endless career, certainly not at the level of the legendary Simone Biles, but in Italy such a strong and winning gymnast had never been there. Because of this, and also because of her extraordinary likability, Vanessa for almost twenty years has been one of the most famous and loved athletes by Italians.

When it was announced that she would be competing in an Italian competition, the sports halls would register sold out, because everyone wanted to witness her feats. And when she competed abroad, millions of Italians would stay glued in front of the television to see her. After each of her victories, gyms would fill with young girls who wanted to be like her.

Vanessa Ferrari has been a gymnastics icon, and now that she has retired she will be greatly missed by the Italians who supported and followed her throughout her long and successful career.