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Italian high jumper Gianmarco Tamberi, who won the gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, took to Instagram to publicly apologize to his wife after losing his wedding ring during the Paris Olympics 2024 opening ceremony on the River Seine.
In June 2024, Tamberi received the tricolor flag from the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. As he was waving the Italian flag during the opening ceremony on a boat, his ring slipped off his finger, bounced inside the boat, and fell into the river.
He wrote he couldn’t imagine losing the ring at a better place than the city of love.
“I'm sorry, my love, I'm so sorry. Too much water, too many kilos lost in the past few months, or maybe the uncontrollable enthusiasm of what we were doing. Probably all three things, the fact remains that I felt (the ring) slip away, I saw it fly … I followed (it) with a glance until I saw (it) bouncing inside the boat,” he continued. “It will stay forever in the riverbed of the city of love, flown away while I tried to carry the Italian tricolor as high as possible during the opening ceremony of the most important sport evening in the world,” Gianmarco Tamberi wrote on Instagram.
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"If I had to invent an apology, I would never have been this imaginative. I think there might be a huge poetic side to yesterday’s misdeed, and if you want, we’ll throw yours into that river, too, so they’ll be together forever, and we’ll have one more excuse to, like you’ve always asked, renew our vows and get married anew," he added.
Gianmarco Tamberi bagged a gold medal at 2020 Tokyo Olympics
During the Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021), Gianmarco Tamberi and Mutaz Essa Barshim from Qatar were tied at the top in the men’s high jump final as they cleared 2.37m. In a rare Olympic instance, both Tamberi and Barshim decided to share the gold medal.
At the World Championships in 2023 in Budapest, the Italian secured the gold medal, besting JuVaughn Harrison of America on a countback, as both of them cleared the 2.36m mark.
