Hours before Team Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi was set to compete in the high jump final at the Paris Olympics, he was taken to a local hospital.
“10 hours have passed and the renal colic still hasn’t gone away,” Tamberi, 32, wrote in Italian via Instagram on Saturday, August 10. “The pain I have felt since this morning, however strong, is nothing compared to what I am feeling inside.”
He added, “Even what was my last certainty is about to vanish, I just was taken to the ER by ambulance after vomiting blood twice. Now they will do more tests on me to understand what is happening … I dreamed of everything for this day except living a nightmare like this.”
Tamberi, who is the defending Olympic gold medalist in the men’s high jump, has recently been dealing with kidney pain.
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“Yesterday, I felt a shooting pain in my side,” he wrote via Instagram on August 4. “First aid, CT scan, ultrasound, blood tests … Probable kidney stone. And now I find myself, 3 days after the race for which I sacrificed everything, lying in bed, helpless, with a fever of 38.8.”
The injuries meant Tamberi needed to delay his return to the Olympic Village.
“All I have to do is wait and pray… I don’t deserve all this, I did everything for this Olympics, everything. I really don’t deserve it.” he wrote at the time. “Only one thing is certain, I don’t know how I’ll get there, but I’ll be there on that platform and I’ll give my all until the last jump, whatever my condition. I swear it to you but even before that I swear it to myself!”
Tamberi was the Italian flag bearer in the Paris opening ceremonies. During the boat procession, his wedding band flew off his hand and into the Seine River below.
“I’m sorry my love, I’m terribly sorry. Too much water, too many kilos lost in the last few months or perhaps the uncontainable enthusiasm of what we were doing,” he penned via Instagram late last month, apologizing to wife Chiara Bontempi Tamberi. “Probably all three things, the fact remains that I heard it slip away, I saw it fly. I followed it with my eyes until I saw it bounce inside the boat.”
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Gianmarco added, “But if it really had to happen, if I really had to lose this faith, I couldn’t imagine a better place. It will remain forever in the riverbed of the city of love, flown away while I was trying to carry the Italian tricolor as high as possible during the opening ceremony of the most important sporting event in the world. If I had to make up an excuse I would never have been able to be so imaginative.”
It is not known whether Gianmarco will be able to compete in the Olympic final on Saturday.
