This summer, Sophia Campana is taking her Fire Within Experience Tour across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It is the most ambitious thing she has ever built, and it is only the latest chapter in one of the most remarkable stories in gymnastics. When she sat down with us on the GymnasticsVille Podcast, we got to hear all of it, and it is a conversation worth your time.
Sophia is an elite gymnast with dual American and Italian citizenship who competed in Italy’s top professional league, Serie A, across three separate stints. She was the 2021 Italian National Bars Champion. She starred in MTV Italy’s reality series about the lives of elite gymnasts. She is an ambassador of abuse prevention for the Italian Gymnastics Federation. She is the author of multiple books, including her memoir “Flipped: Keeping My Balance Beyond Borders.” And she has built one of the most engaged gymnastics communities in the world, with nearly one million followers on both Instagram and YouTube.
She also just launched her signature Fire Within leotard collection. The tour, the leo, the mentorship program, the YouTube channel with videos that have racked up tens of millions of views. In other words, she has been busy. And all of it connects back to one thing.
The Fire Within Experience Tour
The tour is the most immediate thing happening in Sophia’s world right now, and it is genuinely unlike anything else in gymnastics. This is not a standard clinic or a skills camp. Sophia has been running a version of this format in Italy since 2017 and is now bringing it to North America for the first time.
“I’ve decided to do something different than a typical gymnastics camp. I wanted to bring more of what I bring to my YouTube channel, which is kind of crazy, kind of wacky, kind of wild, the joy, the fun, the spirit of gymnastics.”
Sophia Campana
The tour is built around empowerment, mindset, and play. Sophia wants gymnasts of all ages to reconnect with why they started the sport in the first place. And she is quick to point out that this is not just for competitive gymnasts. Adult gymnasts are already reaching out wanting to attend.
What separates this from a standard clinic is the philosophy behind it. Sophia frames everything around the idea of autonomous empowerment: teaching gymnasts to lift themselves up on a hard day rather than waiting for external validation from a coach or a score.
The tour also features the Pink Party, a post-event celebration complete with a pink carpet, professional photos, and time for Sophia to actually sit down and get to know the gymnasts who come out. When asked to describe the tour in just a few words, Sophia landed on: “Gymnastics. Wild. Iconic. Celebration. Fire within.”
Gym owners and coaches who want to bring the tour to their facility can reach Sophia’s team at sophiacampana.com.
The Mindset Behind Everything
If the tour is the what, the mindset work is the why. Sophia has spent years developing what she calls the Powerful Mind program, a group mentorship experience where gymnasts meet regularly to work through mental exercises designed to build autonomous empowerment.
The core idea is simple but powerful: instead of focusing only on what you have not achieved yet, gymnasts actively track their 1% improvements each day. Small wins create a backlog of evidence for why they should believe in themselves.
“They start to get excited because they’re realizing, hey, I am getting better. I am good at this. When you start to see your small improvements, you start having this backlog of reasons why you should believe in yourself.”
Sophia Campana
Sophia also broke down her event-by-event mental approach in competition. On bars, she tells herself to play. On beam, she repeats an inside joke with her sister to break her own seriousness. On floor, she focuses on expression over perfection. Each event gets its own mental key, personalized to what actually works for her.
She was equally quick to say that what works for her may not work for everyone. Her philosophy as a mentor is not to prescribe a single approach but to help each gymnast discover what ignites their own fire.
From Colorado to Italy
At 10 years old, Sophia was training in Colorado when her choreographer, the legendary Geza Pozsar, who worked with Nadia Comaneci and the 1996 US Olympic team, told her something that would change her life. Through her Italian grandparents, she could obtain dual citizenship and compete for Italy.
Five years later, with an italiangymnast@hotmail.com email address, Sophia wrote to the Italian Olympic director asking if she could come try out for the national team. He said yes. She flew to Italy, did not make the team, came home, and immediately knew she was going back.
What followed was years of persistence. She graduated high school a year early to devote herself fully to elite training. She sent update emails repeatedly. She told herself her final email would be just that: if this one did not work, she would move on. Ten days before she was set to leave, a coach from one of Italy’s top Serie A teams pulled her aside and offered her a spot on the 2015 roster.
“It was one of those surreal moments. All of that daydreaming and visualizing and sweat and literal blood and tears. This is my moment.”
Sophia Campana
MTV, Elite Life, and the Harder Parts
Making the Serie A team was not the end of Sophia’s challenges. MTV Italy had already filmed her during her first tryout trip. When she made the team, they came back. The show followed the gymnasts from the moment they woke up to the moment they went to bed. Overnight, Sophia became a recognizable face across Italy.
But the training environment carried a weight that the cameras did not fully capture. For Sophia, who had always thrived in positive environments, the culture of the gym she was in shut her down rather than building her up. By the end of that year, she said, she hated gymnastics. These words carry real weight coming from someone who had sacrificed everything to get there.
She is careful not to generalize her experience as representative of all Italian gymnastics. But she is clear about the impact it had on her, and about the fact that she has since dedicated part of her work to making sure others are protected.
Sophia now serves as an ambassador of abuse prevention for the Italian Gymnastics Federation. The Italian system is actively working to shift culture and educate coaches, with Sophia as one of the key voices driving that change.
Her recovery came through somatic emotional processing work and eventually opening up to her mother about what she had been going through. The path back to loving gymnastics took time, but she found it. And the experience gave her the framework for everything she now teaches gymnasts about healthy environments, positive coaching, and the kind of sport experience every young gymnast deserves.
YouTube, Viral Moments, and the Fire Within Leo
After MTV ended, Sophia’s little sister told her she should start a YouTube channel. Sophia resisted at first. Then she tried it, fell in love with it, and built the biggest gymnastics channel in all of Italy.
When she finally expanded into English content, she doubted herself for nearly a year. Then one day the belief clicked. A week later, her first English video went viral in the United States. One video hit 54 million views. Another hit 61 million. Within two years she had tripled her following and moved to California.
“I believed in it, and then all of a sudden, viral.”
Sophia Campana
The content that drives her channel is rooted in something genuinely rare: a love of old gymnastics. Sophia binge-watches archival footage looking for skills nobody does anymore and attempts them herself, publicly, including the failures. Her goal is to try them and pay homage to the gymnasts who invented them.
On the leotard front, Sophia just launched the Fire Within Leo collection, a hot pink signature design sourced and made in Italy. The leo is available for pre-order at sophiacampana.com.
“When you put it on, it’s your reminder: your fire is always stronger than your fears.”
Sophia Campana
Listen to the Full Episode
The Fire Within Experience Tour kicks off this summer across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. If you are a gymnast, a coach, a parent, or a gym owner, this is a conversation you need to hear before the tour comes to your city.
The Sophia Campana episode of the GymnasticsVille Podcast is available now on YouTube, with audio following on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Visit sophiacampana.com to learn more about the Fire Within Experience Tour and to pre-order the Fire Within Leo collection.
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