To Italy we go! Much like the Japanese, the Italians are a perennial team-final qualifier that we can always count on to finish 5th-7th, but they’ll have to withstand increased opposition this year to keep that run going.
The scores from this month’s national championship (for which Lauren has helpfully noted the domestic bonus to be removed) forced us all to develop a nervous tic about Italy’s chances for another 5-7 finish. Even giving Meneghini a hit beam, and accounting for Fasana not being at full strength, Italy comes out of that somewhere in the lowish 173s, around a couple points behind what the Germany, Canada, Japan, and Netherlands teams were getting domestically this summer in their own trials.
Now, I think that dramatically overstates the difference between these countries (some nations will be brought seriously back to earth at the Olympics when we definitely won’t see a parade of 174s and 175s), but those scores do provoke questions about Italy’s competitiveness on certain events. Certain events named bars.
Italy’s eternal F Core of Fasana, Ferlito, and Ferrari remains the heart, brain, skeletal system, viscera, and really entire body of the Italian team, but is that consistency an asset or does that indicate that Italy has leveled off this quad while other nations are progressing upward? We’ll find out in…oh…a week. (A WEEK.)
Team
Erika Fasana – Never not the Italian floor champion, double double, DLO, deceptively good spins, only somewhat made of bandages
Carlotta Ferlito – 2016 Italian silver, 12th AA in 2015, the team’s beam star, desperately trying to come up with memorable qualities that aren’t the Simone incident, 2013 Worlds 5th place on beam, oh crap
Vanessa Ferrari – 2006 World champion, and a lot since then, casually her country’s best gymnast for an entire decade
Elisa Meneghini – 2016 Italian bronze, 2016 Italian floor champion, preposterously gigantic layout full on beam that’s almost actually a layout, the team’s secret weapon
Martina Rizzelli – 2016 Italian bars champion, on the team to make the bars not depressing, also has a DTY
Projected Olympics Lineups
Vault – (Ferlito) Fasana, Ferrari, Rizzelli
Bars – (Meneghini) Ferlito, Ferrari, Rizzelli
Beam – (Fasana) Ferrari, Meneghini, Ferlito
Floor – (Meneghini) Ferlito, Ferrari, Fasana