Two decades on, Arianna Fontana comes home for one more Olympic run

BERBENNO DI VALTELLINA, Italy, Jan 29 : The evening after Arianna Fontana comes home from the European Championships, the kitchen at her parents’ house fills in waves.

Cousins, neighbours, children, friends spill in. 

Plates move, chairs scrape, someone opens another bottle of wine, joyful at her latest short skating title at the championship in the Netherlands earlier this month.

Fontana moves constantly — hugging, laughing, scooping her baby niece onto her arm, helping her mother serve pizzocheri and taroz — in the same house where she grew up, in the valley that has never let her be anyone but Arianna.

“First thing is to go and see my parents. I need a hug from them,” she says. “And then obviously food in Italy, it’s a big thing.”

Twenty years after her debut in Turin, Italy's most decorated winter Olympian is preparing to skate another Games on home ice — no longer Italy’s teenage prodigy, but a 35-year-old nearing what may be her final act in the sport. 

She was 15 when she won bronze in the 3,000-meter relay at the 2006 Turin Games, becoming the youngest Italian medallist at a Winter Olympics. 

Now Fontana is heading to her sixth Games in Milano Cortina, where she will carry the Italian flag and arrive with 11 Olympic medals, the most in short track history.

“I’m really fortunate … I get to do it twice in my career,” she said of racing before a home crowd. 

KEYS TO THE GYM

What’s changed since 2006? 

Almost everything, starting with how she balances "the fire" that made her with the body that carries it.

Some of the adaptations are microscopic - shifts in diet, recovery, and timing. “If I take out all the dairy … obviously sugar - unfortunately for me, because I like sweets - that really works. My body is less inflamed … I