Chiara Pellacani Rewrites Italian History: Fourth Gold in Four Events
Chiara Pellacani rewrites Italian history at the European Swimming Championships. The 23-year-old also dominated the women’s 3-meter springboard final, finishing with 358.05 points—a result that even Tania Cagnotto had failed to achieve. For the young Roman, this marks her fourth gold medal in a single edition of the European Championships. Her run in Paris has been flawless so far: four events—individual, synchronized, and team—and four gold medals. No one in Italian swimming history has ever achieved this.
A flawless run built race by race. The first gold came on Friday, July 31, in the team event, with the Italian quartet of Pellacani, Matteo Santoro, Sarah Jodoin Di Maria, and Raffaele Pelligra, who scored 410.60 points, finishing ahead of Russia and Ukraine. Then came the second gold in the mixed synchronized event with Santoro, with whom the Roman diver forms a well-established and dominant pair: the two finished with 305.85 points, the only pair to break the 300-point mark, outscoring the silver-medal-winning Russian pair by more than 19 points. “Together we give our best; we dominated the competition. It’s as if I were her older sister,” Pellacani commented after that final.
This is no makeshift pair: Pellacani and Santoro are the reigning world champions in mixed synchronized 3-meter springboard, a title they won last year at the World Championships in Singapore. At that world championship, Chiara won a total of three medals, adding two individual bronze medals—from the 1-meter and 3-meter springboards—to the gold she won in the pairs event. “I’m very excited about this medal because it meant so much to me,” she said after winning bronze in the 3-meter event in Singapore. “I’d been chasing it ever since my fourth-place finish in Paris. Seeing the Italian flag among the Chinese flags is an indescribable feeling.”
Pellacani’s progress had already become clear at the European Diving Championships in Antalya in May 2025, where, within a 24-hour span, she won a team bronze, a silver in mixed synchronized diving, and an individual gold in the 1-meter springboard. That victory made her the third Italian athlete ever to win European gold in that event, after Tania Cagnotto and Elena Bertocchi. Now, with her four-gold haul in Paris, Pellacani has definitively left the past behind and carved out a unique place for herself in the history of Italian swimming.
The European Championships in Paris—which are taking place at the same venues that hosted the 2024 Olympic competitions and will continue through August 16—are already bringing Italy great success in this first week dedicated to diving and artistic swimming. This is an encouraging sign ahead of the second half of the event, when swimming stars such as Thomas Ceccon, Nicolò Martinenghi, and Simona Quadarella will also take the stage.
