Sofia Raffaeli

Sofia Raffaeli was born January 19, 2004 in Chiaravalle, in the province of Ancona, Italy. She started artistic gymnastics at age four and switched to rhythmic gymnastics at seven, drawn by the apparatus work — the precision of the ribbon and the geometry of the ball. She trained from that point at Società Ginnastica Fabriano under Julieta Cantaluppi, Cristina Ghiurova, and choreographer Bilyana Dyakova, who would become the architects of her senior career.

Her international breakthrough came at the 2019 Junior World Championships in Moscow, where she won three silver medals. By 2021 she was a senior and on the podium at the World Championships in Kitakyushu — bronze in hoop, silver with the team. The 2022 season was the one that changed her career. She swept gold across the FIG World Cup circuit (Athens, Baku, Pesaro), became the first Italian individual to win the all-around at a World Cup stage, took the European Championship titles in Tel Aviv, and arrived at the World Championships in Sofia, Bulgaria as the favorite. She left Sofia with four gold medals — all-around, hoop, ball, ribbon — plus team gold and a bronze in clubs. She was the first Italian individual rhythmic gymnast in history to win a World all-around title, and she had done it at eighteen.

In 2023 she defended at the Worlds in Valencia with three individual silvers and a team bronze, performing routines that had become as much theatre as gymnastics — a hoop set to the Psycho theme, a ribbon to Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” choreography about cancer battles and heartbreaks where her sport’s tradition was wall-to-wall classical music. Olympics.com called her a master storyteller on the floor.

At Paris 2024 she won bronze in the individual all-around — the first Italian rhythmic gymnastics medal at an Olympic Games of any color. The medal ceremony was emotional: she was 20 years old, she had been on the international circuit for half her life, and the Italian sporting public had been waiting decades for that moment.

Outside the medal record, Raffaeli holds the highest individual score ever recorded in international rhythmic gymnastics competition — 36.200 at the World Challenge Cup in Cluj-Napoca. She is a Police Athlete (GS Fiamme Oro) and continues to compete at the highest level under the weight of being the country’s named successor to a long lineage of rhythmic gymnastics tradition. Her teammates and coaches still call her the Atomic Ant, the nickname earned not from elegance — the standard rhythmic gymnastics framing — but from the explosive strength in her jumps and the speed of her apparatus work, which is closer to artillery than ballet.