Catching up with the 2016 Olympic Champion, Fabio BASILE of Italy, is always a special occasion, and this time it is in Rome during the 2024 European Open. It has been some time since we saw Basile on the competition tatami, but all for good reason. Many may have seen on his social media accounts, but let’s hear it first hand…
I had an operation some months ago, so now I am cleared to be training, I don’t know if I will say I’m coming back for Los Angeles 2028, but I am going to Thailand for a month for training then we will see what happens.
In 2022, I broke two vertebrae, I risked a lot, I could have become paralysed, but you know, I am ambitious and I wanted to try to compete in my third Olympic Games in Paris but this injury really killed me. I remember in my last fight with Maruyama in Paris, my arm stopped working, and I thought it really is time to recover.
For someone with such a strong fighting mentality, being sidelined by any injury can be difficult, let alone one that could destroy any hope of coming back to the sport he loves.
It was so hard, such a hard decision for me to make, but in myself I know that if I fought, it would be to become Olympic Champion, not for participation, or to get a 5th or 7th place. I knew at that time I wasn’t one of the best in the -66kg category. I had no choice, I had to have the operation, my girlfriend helped me a lot through it and my life continued on.
Nevertheless Basile has been kept busy around the world with seminars, in the summer he joined another Olympic Champion, Lasha SHAVDATUASHVILI (GEO) in Serbia for World and European Champion, Nemanja MAJDOV’s Academy, and most recently in the USA.
What I like to do is teach, I like to share my techniques and when the judoka do it in the randori, I get this adrenaline rush. Maybe one day I’ll be a coach, but this trip to Thailand is for me to figure out what I want to do next. My recovery has been so good, my surgeon said he would write a book about me! [he laughs] They assumed it would take me two months to be able to move, but I was in the gym well before then.
So what message would an Olympic Champion who still burns with the dream of winning another Olympic gold medal, pass on to the next generation?
I always say to my kids, fight for something, live for a dream, and do everything to make that a reality. To become Olympic Champion, your training takes over and you sacrifice everything for this. This is not a movie, it’s a reality.
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