Valentina Petrillo will get to show her speed at the Paralympic Games in Paris, after more than four years of uncertainty and setbacks.
The Italian Paralympic Committee confirmed her selection to their Paralympic team over the weekend. The selection makes Petrillo the first publicly out transgender athlete in Paralympic history.
Canadian discus thrower Ness Murby came out publicly as trans after the last time he competed at the Paralympics. He did not compete at the Tokyo Paralympics after coming out and is not currently listed to compete in Paris.
“I have been waiting for this day for three years and in these past three years I have done everything possible to earn it,” she told BBC Sport. “The historic value of being the first transgender woman to compete at the Paralympics is an important symbol of inclusion.”
Petrillo, visually impaired since contracting Stargardt disease at age 14, will compete at 200-meter and 400-meter races in the T12 classification, which adjusts for visual impairment.
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Petrillo may lack sight, but she’s had a sharp focus on a vision of being on this grand stage for most of her life. She’s stayed the course and kept running fast even when the way to the Paralympics looked to be a dead end.
How Valentina Petrillo got to the Paris Paralympics
Prior to transition, Petrillo was an 11-time national champion in the men’s competition. She sought to compete in women’s para athletic events since deciding to come out as trans in 2018 and starting hormone replacement therapy in 2019.
She met International Paralympic Committee and World Para Athletics standards to compete in the female category. But she ran up against friction from FISPES (Italian Federation for Paralympic and Experimental Sport), the national governing body for adaptive sport.
Officials initially refused to allow her to compete in female events. They finally relented prior to their national para athletics championships at the end of the 2020 season.
Petrillo made the most of the chance with championships at 200 and 400 meters. Her success began the push toward the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021.
The next barrier her way came in 2021 when she was reclassified from T12 to T13 at mid-year, which meant having to meet a faster qualifying standard. Despite setting a 400-meter national record and promising international debut with a 5th-place effort at the 2021 European Para Athletic Championships, Petrillo was left off Italy’s roster for Tokyo.
“The day that I learned I was not going to Tokyo, I happened to find myself on an athletics track,” she stated in an interview with BiDiMedia in 2023. “From that day I immediately started to think about Paris and building what was possible.”
She met the next obstacle in her path in March 2023. Petrillo withdrew from the World Masters Indoor Athletic Championships in Poland due to anti-trans threats and concerns for her safety. A few days later, the ban on transgender women by World Athletics went into effect and worries grew that World Para Athletics would follow suit.
World Para Athletics chooses to stay with current IOC standards and guidelines instead, and Petrillo earned a place at that year’s World Para Athletics Championships. She ended up with a pair of bronze medals in Paris, including a personal best at 400 meters and a huge boost toward making a return trip for the big show in 2024.
The scrutiny, hopes and a dream from the past
Petrillo is scheduled to make her first appearance on the Paralympic stage on September 2. She will step in the starter blocks for the opening round of the women’s T12 400 meters, where she has the 6th fastest time in the world this year.
The discussion and speculation around a transgender woman with speed and accomplishment is brewing with competition more than two weeks away, as expected. Some say the scrutiny around Petrillo may be worse than the recent Olympic boxing controversy.
The IPC’s public stance on Petrillo’s eligibility seems to hold even after a year. “It was only a question of when and not if,” IPC President Andrew Parsons said to Gazzetta dello Sport after Petrillo’s efforts in 2023. “It is up to the federation to establish the rules. At IPC we do not establish another rule, we want the issue to be guided by science.”
For Petrillo, 50 years young as she prepares for Paris, this chance is also a dream decades in the making. As a young child growing up in Naples, she was in front of a television in 1980 watching Italian sprinting icon Pietro Mennea pull off an upset to win Olympic gold at 200 meters in Moscow.
The 200 meters is Petrillo’s favorite event because of Mennea. The memory of his win 44 years ago has been her inspiration since. “I play that race over and over again,” she remembered in an interview with Outsports in 2020. “It gives me that same feeling of motivation and excitement.”
The memory spurs her to bring her best races to the Paralympics, but she also seeks to set an example through her story which writes a new chapter in front of the world.
“I want to become the symbol of a world that is rebelling. I believe that in the future we need examples like mine,” Petrillo noted in an interview with Fanpage.it in July. “I am convinced that it will lead to something. Just see me in Paris at the Paralympics.”
“I’m going to do the most beautiful thing, the one I’ve always dreamed of in life,” she continued. “I’m running with women.”
