High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Raffaele Avagnano (born August 21, 1963) is a retired breaststroke swimmer from Italy, who represented his native country at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California. He claimed the gold medal a year earlier at the 1983 Mediterranean Games in the Men's 100m Breaststroke event. The aquatic sport of swimming is based on the human act of swimming, that is, locomotion in water by self propulsion, usually with the goal to complete a given distance in the smallest amount of time.