From the podium of Paris 2024 Paralympic Games to a school classroom, that of the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Comprehensive Institute of Castel Porziano, Rome.
That’s where Rigivan Ganeshamoorthy he was invited by the principal and the teaching staff to dialogue with the middle school students, eager to see up close and learn more about this extraordinary ‘champion’.
After the conquest of Paralympic gold and of world recordwith a measurement of 27.06 meters, in the discus throw category F52in which wheelchair athletes compete, Rigi has achieved resounding success on social channels where his hilarious interviews have become cult.
Bearer of an important message of strength, resilience and passion for sport, with his genuineness, his humility and his friendliness he reached without filters especially to the younger ones.
For this reason, the head teacher of the Mozart Institute, Giovanni Cogliandro, who has always been attentive to educating not only through books, but with extracurricular activities and meetings that bring a value meaning, jumped at the opportunity to host Rigivan, proposed by the teacher Monica Casella.
Welcomed in the school theater from thunderous applause and with an irrepressible enthusiasm, this 25-year-old born in Rome to Sri Lankan parents, answered the kids’ questions by exposing himself, telling with the irony that we have come to know, his human and sporting story of determination and rebirth.
Rigi spoke candidly and honestly about how sport saved him after the onset of the disease, ferrying him towards what he calls the new life.
Rigivan, in fact, is affected by Guillan-Barré syndrome, That it causes weakness and breathing difficultiesand is in a wheelchair due to a fall in 2019 which caused a cervical injury.
Today athe faces disability without dramatization, even in the passages where he recognizes that there are hard days in which he has to deal with the physical pain that gives him no respite.
What does sport mean to you? How did you feel when you realized you had won gold? How many hours do you train? Who do you have to thank for your victory?
Rigi answers all the boys’ questions alternating serious and joking tones, continually involving his irreplaceable coach Enrico Ruffini and his girlfriend Alice; a very trusted team that accompanies him in all his daily activities and without which – he admits – he would not have achieved the goals he has achieved.
Between one question and another posed by the students, important themes are touched upon: anxiety, fears, pain, rebirth, self-confidence. Rigi’s words are full of meaning, especially because they are aimed at an audience of teenagers, a category that today struggles to find motivation and easily breaks down at the first obstacles because they don’t feel up to it.
Rigivan firmly underlines: “It’s the people who put you in a position to be up to par or not. You have to keep your point and move forward, leaving what others think remains theirs.”
