Paris 2024 Olympics: Gianmarco Tamberi turns losing wedding ring in Seine into a positive
A newlywed in the tricky spot of having lost their wedding ring might quietly – quietly, but frantically – look for said missing item.
When you're in a barge on the Seine river in an epic Opening Ceremony for the Olympic Games Paris 2024 watched by millions worldwide plus 300,000 spectators on the riverbanks, and you're the defending champion in high jump, in one of the most emotive moments of Tokyo 2020, oh and chosen as the flagbearer for your nation... not so much.
This is the predicament high jumper Gianmarco Tamberi found himself in after losing his wedding ring while on the Italian barge at the river-based Opening Ceremony on Friday 26 July, which broke with tradition by taking place outside a stadium for the first time in Olympic history.
Tamberi, who competes for the first time in Paris in the qualification event on 7 August, might have preferred the original way; finding a lost wedding ring on an athletics track on which athletes usually walk for the Parade of Nations, is much easier than in the depths of the river artery running through France's capital.
Heartbroken, Tamberi took to Instagram to apologise to his wife of 22 months Chiara Bontempi Tamberi to explain what happened, doing so in the most poetic of ways and with a textbook version of looking at the positives taken from any good athlete playbook.
Gianmarco Tamberi looks at the positives
"If it had to happen, if I had to lose this ring, I couldn't imagine a better place. It will remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love, flown away as I tried to carry the Italian flag as high as possible during the opening ceremony of the most important sporting event in the world. If I had to invent an excuse, I could never have been so imaginative."
I mean, goodness. But there's more.
"I think there may be a huge poetic side behind yesterday's misdeed and if you want we will throw yours into that river too so that they will be together forever and we will have one more excuse to, as you always asked me, renew our vows and marry again."
Tamberi, who famously opted to share gold with his friend and competitor, Qatar's Mutaz Barshim at Tokyo 2020, instead of continuing with a jump-off, suggested some reasons why the ring might have flown off his finger at all.
Perhaps it was the weight loss from the past few months as he headed toward Olympic competition season, competing at his optimum weight to defend his title, he opined. Or maybe it was waving the flag so enthusiastically? Whatever the cause, his wife also saw the best in the situation, and her husband.
"Only you can turn something similar into something romantic 😭😭♥️," posted Bontempi Tamberi under the lengthy caption, posted alongside a series of photos, starting with loved-up photos of the pair at their wedding. Their hands together showing said rings came next, followed by Tamberi waving the Italian flag high on the athlete barge, and then, comically, a doctored image from Lord of the Rings in which the hero, Frodo Baggins, destroys a gold ring in the fires of the Mountain of Doom. Tamberi's face replaces Frodo's visage.
As poetic as Tamberi sounds in his post, there's perhaps a little more revealed by Italian journalist, Giulia Cicchinè, who commented:
"Come on Gianmarco, tell us the exact words you said when you saw her fly..."