Paris 2024 Olympics, Mattia Furlani jumps into history: it’s bronze
An historic medal, won by a splendid and very young athlete.
Mattia Furlani gives himself a splendid bronze medal in the men’s long jump final at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and to Italy its first medal in athletics at this kermis. The very young athlete from Lazio (è born in 2005) jumped 8.34 meters: better than him only the Greek Miltiadis Tentoglou (gold thanks to a jump of 8.48) and Jamaican Wayne Pinnock (8.36, silver).
Furlani's bronze medal è historic, because it comes exactly 40 years after Evangelisti won the same metal medal in Los Angeles 1984. The Italian, moreover, reached the distance that would have guaranteed him the medal already on the first jump.
The medal count in Paris 2024, after Furlani's exploit, rises to a total of 26 for the Italian expedition. Italy had won a total of 40 medals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, setting a new record for spoils in a single edition of the Games. On that occasion there had been 10 gold medals, as many silver medals and 20 bronze medals.
Mattia Furlani won silver at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow 2024 in the long jump, thus earning his first major medal at only nineteen years old. È the third child of a family that è moved to Rieti in 2010, after living in Grottaferrata, in the Castelli Romani. His family è is known for the successes of his sister Erika (world runner-up junior champion in 2013 and European under-23 bronze medalist in 2017), but also for the sporting achievements of his father Marcello, a high jumper with a record of 2.27 meters in 1985, and his mother Khaty Seck, a sprinter of Senegalese origin, who also supported him technically.
