Elisa Naldi

Happy birthday to Italy’s long jumper Elisa Naldi, the Italian champion, who placed at the national championships in one of her own two home cities three weeks ago.

On 26 July at the Italian Absolute Championships in Florence, Elisa jumped 6.12m for fourth place. Her Instagram bio has read “Tra Lucca e Firenze” — between Lucca and Florence — for years, and there she was contesting a national final in one of them. A month earlier she had reappeared at the Memorial Bellocchi in Piacenza and jumped 6.16m to win her section and qualify straight through to those championships. Her club’s caption was one word long: bentornata. Welcome back.

She has been at the top of Italian long jumping for a while. Elisa won the Italian Absolute title in La Spezia in 2024 with the national championship in her hands, took the Italian U23 title in Grosseto in 2020, and has three more senior Italian medals: indoor silver at Ancona in 2022, outdoor bronze at Rovereto in 2021, and indoor bronze at Ancona in 2025 with 6.29m. Her personal best of 6.48m came at Palermo.

Since November 2021 she has worn the uniform of the Centro Sportivo Carabinieri, which in Italian athletics means the corps employs her to be an athlete. She was the second Lucca athlete to earn a place there, after Idea Pieroni, and the local paper covered it as what it is: one in a thousand makes it. She still signs her scores over to Atletica Virtus Lucca for the club championships, on a list that also carries Marcell Jacobs and Pieroni.

And she does it while reading foreign languages and literature at the University of Pisa. A national champion in state service who spends her other hours on literature in languages that are not her own.

Buon compleanno, Elisa! Cento di questi giorni, tra Lucca e Firenze. Auguri! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇮🇹