Federica Pellegrini, the first Italian woman to win an Olympic swim crown, has been given the all-clear by doctors after suffering a breathing scare at the Italian championships in Genoa. Pellegrini, who won the 200m freestyle in Beijing, stopped racing in the 800m free in Genoa when she started to hyperventilate.
After three hours of tests at the Italian Olympic Committee's Sports Medicine unit in Rome today, she said: ''It went well, we did all the tests and they were all negative. It was only an attack of hyperventilation, it could have happened to anyone. I just got scared because it hadn't happened to me before."
As a precautionary measure, Pellegrini will wear a heart-beat monitor for the next 24 hours, whose results will then be studied. She resumes training Tuesday morning in readiness for the European s/c championships in Croatia next week.
