There are 10,000 kilometers between Addis Ababa and Milan, 5,000 there and 5,000 back. Yemaneberhan Krippa, with his gold and bronze medals around his neck at the last European Championships, he must have thought that these distances might really be his, the ones that gave him life.

When I arrived at the Madonna della Vita Village Orphanage in Addis Ababa to adopt my children, Yeman (“God’s Right Hand” in Aramaic) had already begun his journey with a new family a few years earlier. There he immediately struck me, all the children ran, always ran – walking is not a step of life. As my son Ephraim tried to explain to me some time later, in order to offer some mitigation to the constant notes of teachers for “motor rampage”: “Mom, you know, in Ethiopia, as soon as you are born, you start running. “Yes, just like the story of the gazelle and the lion, only you’re not doing it to run away from something you’re afraid of, but to race towards something beautiful that’s waiting for you.

Never, as after this summer of sports, which sadly began with disappointments in M.athletics waves and then perked up, and even more so after reading the stories in this issue of Elle – dunks Paola Egonou (on page 52), jumping Sara Simeoni (on page 56) and net descents Serena Williams (on page 60) – sport seemed to me the most powerful metaphor in my life. Life is your gym, your playground.

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One of the best memories of the period that I lived in Australia is when I attended school – by chance, for volunteer work, for Italian mammism – for physical education classes, which are held, for one or two hours, every day and – apart from swimming, a must – in turn: every month different sports, from the most common athletics, football and basketball to minor handball, lacrosse, field hockey.

Because life is like this: it does not spare discipline – you need to be able to run, jump over obstacles, dribble. But I will say more – now that schools are starting again: there are not enough gyms, pool activities; in school you should study the history of sports, great champions and broken promises, eternal seconds and last nobles. How much better one can understand not only Hitler’s madness but American racism by reading about Jesse Owens; about how relentless terrorism was in the 1970s when they talked about the Munich Olympics. If books and chronicles are not enough, let’s show in the lessons those wonderful writings about cinema, from moments of glory to Invictusto Race.

Learning to sport means learning to live: dive into the unknown, pass the baton, launch – ideas, challenges, obligations. Yeman Krippa ran his 10,000 meters across the field, kilometers in a lifetime – and won. But it’s important to always remember, as the Australian wheelchair teacher used to say (because the famous monthly rotation also includes wheelchair instructors), that you never train to win. You are training for defeat. Because it’s when you lose that you need all your strength.