Sport is not black or white. It’s so much more.

Hi, I’m sport, and I’m a simple kind of guy: on one side, Olympic disciplines, on the other, Paralympic ones. Easy, right? If you have a disability, you do the latter; if you don’t, you choose from the former. The catalog is split in two, and don’t even think about dipping into the “wrong” one.

Black or white. “It’s always been done this way, and I don’t see why we should change.”

Then the game-changers show up, and everything gets complicated, damn it. Take basketball: people practicing a “common” sport even if they have a prosthetic leg or an intellectual disability. And no, they’re not doing “para-basket” or “handy-basket”: they lace up their shoes, sling the ball into their backpack, and head to the playground down the street, dreaming of shooting like Steph, dribbling like Luka, and flying like LeBron.

Or there are those who buy a wheelchair just to play wheelchair basketball even if they don’t have a disability. Why do they do it? Crazy. They want to play two sports in one: be unstoppable on the court and lightning-fast in a chair with ringing wheels and a carbon frame.

When the game-changers arrive, the game really changes. Forever. Every time someone breaks the wall of everyday life, of written or unwritten rules, something rare happens: something new is born. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it emerges again. Because often that “new” has always been there; we just thought it was impossible to live, share, or appreciate.

My name is Andrea De Beni, and I believe the world deserves more when it comes to sport. It deserves cross-pollination, opportunities, people willing to risk failing, doing something seemingly useless, not going far while trying to go further than ever.

Once, they told a boy with Down syndrome that, because of his condition, he wouldn’t be able to play sports. The very next day, he started training. Not “a little exercise,” not something vague: he began preparing for an Ironman. Swimming, biking, running. Eight hours of racing, stuff that shakes even the best athletes in the world. I still wonder today: didn’t he understand, or was the doctor just not clear enough?

That boy’s name is Chris Nikic, and five years after that prescription, given more to preserve the status quo than to see beyond, he became the first person with Down syndrome to finish an Ironman.

A hero? No. Just someone who read the word “impossible” and found it suspicious. He questioned it. And in trying, he heard the thunderous sound of a wall falling.
Who built that wall? Me. You. Us. Them. Everyone.
Because sometimes the world needs a Chris Nikic to remind us there are more possibilities than tradition, more colors than black or white, more paths than “it’s allowed or it’s not.”

The world will be a better place when a doctor writes on a prescription “one year of training” instead of a long, indecipherable list of pills and syrups.

In my work as a trainer, the concept of Diversity has changed. Once it was just inspiration and motivation. Today it’s personal and collective growth. Because no one truly gets motivated just by watching others: you can light a fuse, but the fire is inside.

Training, on the other hand, works on systems. And so diversity becomes a real engine: for hiring, corporate wellbeing, marketing, innovation. It creates new services, new products, new markets.

In simple words? With diversity, life is better. And you earn more. For longer.

To do this, you have to start far back: with prejudice. Who doesn’t have it? No one. It’s a mental shortcut meant to speed up decisions, shaped by personal experience and context. The point isn’t to destroy it, but to recognize it. Welcome it. Breathe. And try, at least once, to rewrite the same story starting from a blank page.

This is how you really train for change: one choice at a time, one risk at a time, one right word at a time.

Being an Industry Expert for RiminiWellness means taking on a responsibility: helping people and organizations see beyond “it’s always been done this way.” Crossing prejudice and crossing the body are two sides of the same transformation: changing the way we read limits to discover new possibilities.

In my work with companies, teams, and leadership, I bring these themes out of rhetoric and into real processes: organizational culture, wellbeing, hiring, innovation, sustainable performance. Because diversity isn’t an abstract value, and imperfection isn’t an obstacle to hide; they are concrete levers for growth, competitiveness, and the future.

RiminiWellness is the place where movement becomes a universal language. My role is to help translate it into vision, method, and action for those building products, services, and organizations capable of evolving every day.

If there’s one thing sport, body, and business share, it’s this: victory doesn’t go to the perfect, but to those who can adapt, learn, and keep moving.