What Angela Carini felt after Imane Khelif’s punch says nothing.
About 11 years ago, I broke my legs. I won’t bore you with the medical details, but I wanted to mention this detail of my biography to tell how I realized something had gone wrong with my knees. without even looking at them. Immediately after falling, I distinctly remember not having heard anything. Even more alarmed than a more intense pain – or maybe less, maybe the pain was so intense that my body tried not to let me notice – could have done.
I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. If I tried to straighten them I could no longer feel the mechanism or the weight that had to be put back into the usual position. The legs were actually still there, but to me It seemed of having lost them.
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Is called phantom limb syndrome: is a disorder that can affect patients who have had a limb amputated and who perceive, often through painful impulses, the piece of the body that has been cut off. An extremely common disorder, which can affect up to 7 out of 10 people have had a limb amputated. A disorder that causes sensations that are also extremely vivid, so obvious and clear that one can forget that one does not have a limb and, for example, start walking as if there were two legs to lean on.
You can still have your legs attached to your body and feel like you no longer have them, but you can also have had an amputation and believe you still have the leg. Situations opposites cause reactions opposite: there are people for whom the pain is so intolerable that they go to the doctor at every good opportunity, others who keep quiet, developing a personal relationship – almost never mediated by professionals – with the pain.
Even if you don’t represent one of these two categories, have you ever felt sick in a specific place, or experienced symptoms of a specific disease? And then heard, by a doctor or a parent with a thermometer, that you had nothing?
In the field ofmedical anthropology There are three English terms, almost never translated, that outline these divergences: disease he means disease in a biomedical sense, that thing that medicine detects by analyzing organic parameters; illness refers to the subjective aspect of the disease – how it is experienced by the patient, the level and location of the pain; sicknessinstead, is the social and cultural aspect of the disease, all those beliefs and reactions that can influence the way in which the patient reacts, or even just the definition of which disease deserves clinical treatment.
Pain is a personal experience, and it is solo a our personal experience. There is no scale, because there is no common language that allows us to quantify a pain of the same intensity in the same way and because it is not possible to use the same parameters that biomedicine uses to define our disease to understand our illness.
How can we explain this difference, then? What consumes our sensation of pain and the intensity with which we experience it? This is a complicated answer: there is no single explanation. Quantitative data is not acceptable, it is rather a qualitative operation.
The anthropologist Byron J. Good Talks about worlds of experiencedrawing on a long philosophical history to project the idea of different spheres of analysis and conception of the surrounding, of which the world objective of scientific reality represents only one of the many possible spheres. Edmund Husserl he was talking about Living environmentil world of lifeof our lived experiences, and theorized that this was the world on which the world of science was built, and not vice versa.
Arthur Kleinman has demonstrated how “meaning is created in illness”, or, to put it in the words of Good, who quotes the Harvard psychiatrist in his ““Narrating the disease”, “how cultural values and social relationships shape the experience of the body and illness, and situate suffering in local moral worlds”In his book, the American lists a series of narratives of illnesses made by patients themselves: Often the stories do not include organic factors, but rather key events in their lives are considered to be fundamental.
Good gives the example of some Iranian women who assign the responsibility of their heartache to arguments with mothers-in-law or disagreements with husbands. Whatever their diseaseeven if it is traceable by a doctor, the perception of theillness it’s basically information from what is happening environment to these people, and not what is there inside.
In the last few hours there has been a lot of talk, in Italy but also in the world, about the ache. Not just any one, but that of Angela CariniItalian boxer defeated in the first round of Paris 2024 by the Algerian Imane Khelif – the latter was the victim of a coordinated attack by political forces, media bodies and X accounts with the blue tick “anti-woke” who accused her, in an unfounded and ignorant manner, of being a transgender.
By definition, a transgender person does not identify with the gender assigned at birth: Khelif was registered as a woman and identifies herself as suchmoreover in a country where any sex reassignment surgery is prohibited and with very repressive legislation for the LGBTQ+ community.
The clash between Carini and Khelif
The video of the match shows Carini who, 36″ from the start of Round 1approaches her coach, Emanuele Renzini, twice. The master spoke to Fanpage about a pain in her nose resulting from a couple of shots from Khelif. Initially encouraged by the coach to at least get to the end of the round, Carini would have resisted for a few seconds before turning back to his corner saying “No, master, enough, I don’t want to fight”. READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>
Initially, Renzini had thought that the pain could be linked to a health problem that Carini had recently had: a tooth abscesswhich forced her to remain under antibiotics in the days preceding the competition. The Neapolitan boxer herself, however, confirmed to Renzini that she had withdrawn because he didn’t see a way to win the match.
Following the defeat at Carini, his decision to don’t greet the opponent – perhaps partially influenced by the pain experienced – has been analyzed. Even exploited, by a significant part of the critics, who wanted to glimpse a political gesture. The reality is this: non we know how Angela Carini is, non we live his experience of pain, non We know what motivated her, and that is true whatever our opinion on her retirement and failure to say goodbye.
If in the next few months Angela Carini were to exploit the defeat to make hate campaign against Khelif o cagainst the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports – which we recall are two different issues, and in the second case not justified by any concrete evidence – on a par with the American swimmer Riley Gaines, who finished 5th in a tie with the transgender athlete Lia Thomas at the NCAA swimming championships in the 200 freestyle and became the face of thealt-right USA, then we would have clearer means to interpret its actions.
Ditto if he did the exact opposite gesture: What if she loudly defended Khelif from the attacks that continue to rain down on her? Until then we can only speculate.
What we know is that Angela Carini, before the meeting, said she was absolutely available to compete against Khelif. What if at CIO the participation of the Algerian athlete was fine, it was fine for her too. We know that the two know each other, they have probably already done training sessions together – Renzini spoke of an Algerian national team hosted at the federal center in Assisi – and they have at least cordial relations.
We know that in 47 fights, Imane Khelif has never forced an opponent to retire, and that she has collected 38 wins, with only 5 KOs, and 9 lossesone of which in the 2022 world final against Britain’s Amy Broadhurst. We know that Khelif has undergone numerous tests to determine her ability to compete against women, and that she has always passed, including those for Tokyo 2020. In one case she failed them, after a test carried out by the IBA, a federation that, for other reasons, has been excluded by the IOC.
The 2022 World Cup Final
None of this can give us a complete explanation of what happened: it can only come from Angela Carini, if she wants it. We can try to identify a alternative reading – knowing what we know about what moves pain, about how its perception is totally subjective and influenced by the world around us, as well as by the physical causes of our bodily accidents – but which will not be necessarily true, which does not want and cannot be used to make decisions about Imane Khelif’s body.
We know that for a couple of days Angela Carini was exposed to enormous pressure. She has heard almost all the most important officials of the Italian State express their opinion on her fight. She has read rumors that asked her to withdraw to protect her safety. She has read lies and unproven insinuations about her rival. She has had to answer to journalists who asked her if it was a fight right, balanced, link.
His head was filled with the idea that he couldn’t do it, that it was dangerous even to to try. To demonstrate that there was no conspiracy behind these rumours never a charitable intent but only the desire to attack a communityall this talk sounds awfully like when future athletes are told that they won’t be able to reach the topThat the numbers are against them.
And while stories like this often lie behind successful athletes, like Jaylen Brown in the NBA, It is neither normal nor reasonable to expect that the reaction to these doubts will result in a motivational push. Can haveand in most cases they havean opposite effect.
The whole story of the Carini-Khelif match has been monopolised by the idea that there is something malignantthat some body has taken or must take decisions not on the basis of the individual case but on principles cut with an axe, some fundamentally unscientific, some certainly wrong the moment they identify Imane Khelif as a transgender woman.
It’s a story that has been repeated in sports for a long time, well before Caster Semenya in athletics, and that Zambian footballers Rachael Kundananji and Barbra Banda were also involved in these games. This is further evidence of a strongly Western and racist stereotype of what should be the womanand a not-so-hidden desire to eliminate all non-compliant bodies from the arena.
Whether you work on individual situations or on large schemes, however, you cannot ignore the idea that it is not possible to use pain as an analysis tool and it is useful to make a decision of this kind: not only is the pain threshold different and subjective for each person, but also the means of communicating pain are unbalanced and individual.
Focusing on the aspect of pain, of suffering, of Angela Carini’s decision to withdraw because she could not continue, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanisms at work. It does not represent a good faith attempt to open a discussion table, but an attempt to mutiny the discussion, to to confuse people for propaganda purposes.
2024-08-02 06:00:00
#CariniKhelif #Pain #Personal
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