Born on 23 September 1964 in Goch, a German city in North Rhine-Westphalia, the canoeist Josefa Ditto he had a two-sided sports career, similar but different, a youth under the Teutonic flag, a more mature one defending the Italian flag.
He participated in 8 consecutive editions of the Olympic Games, from the 1984 Los Angeles edition to the 2012 London edition; present at the Olympics from the age of twenty to the threshold of fifty: a record sporting longevity.
In the first two Olympics he represented West Germany by winning a bronze at the first participation: it is the Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles and Josefa Idem gets the bronze in the K2 500 m specialty, paired with Barbara Schuttpelz. In 1990 he married his coach Guglielmo Guerrini. With the marriage, from which two children Janek and Jonas will also be born, Idem acquires Italian citizenship starting to compete for the blue team. The satisfactions were not long in coming: at the World Championships that year in Poznan (Poland) he won his first world title in the K1 500 m and the silver medal in the 5000 m. Another gold at the 1991 world championships in Paris, where the blue canoeist improves the placement of the previous edition in K1 5000 meters.
The successes will also come in the following years: from 1997 to 2002 he will ring three world titles, five European titles and the gold medal in the K1 500 meters at the 2000 Sydney Games. Other joys at the Olympics with silver in Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 always in K1 500 m.
A 48 years, in the summer of 2012, participates in the Games of the XXX Olympics in London, finishing fifth in the K1 500 meters race and becoming the female athlete with the most participations in the Olympic review.
In total, in his palmares in the canoe / kayak there are one gold, two silvers and two bronzes at the Olympics, five golds, nine silvers and eight bronzes at the World Championships and eight golds, four silvers and three bronzes at the Europeans.
After retiring from competitive activity Josefa Idem, since 2008 Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic on the initiative of the then President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, she devoted herself fully to politics (from 2001 to 2007 she was councilor for sport for Municipality of Ravenna) presenting himself in the primary of the Democratic Party in view of the political elections of 2013 and holding the position of Minister for equal opportunities, sport and youth policies during the Letta government, from 28 April 2013 to 24 June 2013.
