Sporting advances
Still operating over 50 years after its foundation, the School of Sport continues to deliver training and education with the ultimate goal of helping Italy’s high-performance athletes achieve success.
Drawing direct inspiration from Rome 1960, the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) founded the school six years after the Olympic Games. It did so with the idea of training athletes, managers and technical personnel in the latest technical, scientific and methodological advances in the sporting world, and ensuring they stay abreast of them.
In recent years, the School of Sport has increased the number of courses it offers by 65 per cent. Its 2020 programme covered a wide range of topics, from the Mediterranean diet, athlete nutrition and the management of futsal and women’s football teams to Paralympic culture in schools and sports justice. The school delivers its courses to around 5,000 students a year. It also works closely with 17 of Italy’s national sports federations (including the badminton, rowing, handball and triathlon federations), helping them to roll out teaching and training courses to around 30,000 people studying at its regional centres.
High-performance Italian sport is also well served by the Institute of Sports Medicine and Science (IMSS), which opened in 1963 and has since delivered its services to more than 30,000 of the country’s top athletes.
The IMSS helps the country’s athletes prepare for the Olympic Winter and Summer Games, advises them on injury prevention and assists them with injury rehabilitation. Open to the public, it also shares detailed scientific insight with Italy’s national sports federations to improve the performance of the country’s high-performance athletes. The institute’s experts have been at the forefront of some significant developments in sports medicine and science over the years. These include the development of aerodynamic bicycle frames and disc wheels ahead of the Olympic Games Los Angeles 1984, where Italy won gold in the men’s team time trial on bikes that changed the sport forever.
The Olympic Games Rome 1960 also brought about a significant development on the field of play, with the creation of the Albano lane marking system for the rowing and canoeing events, held on Lake Albano. Situated in the crater of an ancient volcano, the lake was up to 170 metres deep in places, even close to the shore. This meant that the lane and distance markings commonly used at the time, which were supported by floating platforms held in place by anchors, were impractical. In response, some 1,500 buoys and 26.5 kilometres of supporting cables were used to mark out lanes for the events.
The rigid geometric pattern they created ensured a level playing field for all competitors. Promptly certified and adopted by the International Canoe Federation (ICF) and World Rowing – the respective world governing bodies of canoeing and rowing – for their high-performance competitions, the Albano lane marking system remains in use today.