In Clusone everything is ready for the Italian sprint: from Pellegrino to Scardoni, here are the big blues present

Saturday and Sunday the Italian specialty championships organized by the 13 Clusone Ski Club in collaboration with Cancro Primo Help Onlus.

Wednesday 20 January 2021 9 minutes reading time

Cross-country skiing in the province of Bergamo is immediately associated with Giuseppe Barzasi, and even more with Clusone. Thus the appointment with the Italian Sprint Championship and Team Sprint, which on Saturday and Sunday will host the La Spessa di Clusone cross-country ski center, will be dedicated to the great manager who left us last spring. The 13 Clusone Ski Club, which organizes the event in collaboration with the SC Oltre CPA, thus intends to remember a sportsman who is particularly close to cross-country skiing and to the locality that will gather all the strongest Italian athletes, up to the under 18s, over the weekend. Everything is ready, they say, but in Clusone it is not a slogan, it is a fact. Freshly covered track with natural snow and with a good thickness of artificial snow so as to guarantee competitions at the highest level. Team A athletes will also be there, with Federico Pellegrino and Lucia Scardoni determined to hold on to the Italian title won last year in Bergamo. The predictions are easy and difficult at the same time; with Pellegrino the focus is on the winning horse, but the Aosta Valley ace, who boasts 7 gold medals in the sprint and 6 in the sprint team and is training in Oberstdorf on the tracks of the next world championships, explains. "The goal was to recover after the Tour de Ski, I tried to rest and do some mild training, listening to my body as best I could - the words of the Nus policeman - There are some small ailments, but you can't think to do eight races in ten days, including two sprints to the final, and not be affected. This week I started to load up hours, in view of the second part of the season, certainly at the Italian Championships I will not be the best Pellegrino, but I will try to sell my skin dearly. The opponents are there, they have a lot to play for, I think it's a good satisfaction for everyone to be able to take away the title won in recent years. I think that above all Rastelli is the opponent with whom, as happened last year in Gromo, I will have to fight until the last. These days we are in Oberstdorf, me, De Fabiani and Greta Laurent, but we will arrive in time ... ”. In Clusone, Pellegrino should compete with Dietmar Noeckler in the sprint team. The Veronese financier Lucia Scardoni will not have an easy life: “Let's say I really needed a little rest and to switch off for a few days. The Tour was quite demanding not only physically, but also mentally between travels, buffers and so on. However, now I think I have recovered and I am ready to defend the title of last year, even if my goal is always the World Cup sprint. A sprint is a fairly unpredictable race, anything can happen like crashes, slips, contacts, but surely Greta will be the rival to beat. She is the strongest in this racing format. Then I think they will all be aggressive ”. And Greta Laurent, also a financier, replies: “I'm trying to better prepare the next appointments. It's been two months since the last sprint in classic for me, I know I have done less in classic so far, but I'm preparing well and I'll try to confirm myself ”. Marco Selle, director of the national fund, is certainly the most quoted voice on the Clusone races: "It is two days to which the federation wanted to give great importance, assigning absolute and youth Italian titles of any race, both to honor Barzasi , which for years has been very active in the world of cross-country skiing, both because they are two formats that we will then find again at the World Championships, and for this reason they will also be selection competitions in which Italy plays the best cards, both in the sprint, especially with Federico Pellegrino, both in Team Sprint, two formats that saw us go to the medal in Seefeld. The favorites in Clusone? I'm a bit biased in this case: with Pellegrino on the track, the Fiamme Oro will try to return to victory in Team Sprint too after the many obtained in the Primiero sprint, even if the race there was a city one, with different characteristics. In the female the Fiamme Gialle start clearly favored, in the male the antagonists are certainly the athletes of the Army, a team equally equipped with De Fabiani and Rastelli. After the Tour de Ski some went to look for qualifications in the Alfedena races, our two strongest athletes, De Fabiani and Pellegrino, went to test the slopes of Oberstdorf, they are doing a one week training camp and from there they will directly to Clusone for the race. They found a lot of snow, they are doing race tests with the German team, their sprint and team sprint. We will see how they will stay in the two days of Clusone, then we will return to the World Cup ”. In the organization of the Clusone event, apart from the technical aspect managed by the Sci Club 13 Clusone under the direction of Renato Pasini and Michel Rainer, there is also the SC Oltre CPA. Omar Galli, event manager with a considerable amount of knowledge gained in alpine skiing especially with the fast races of Bormio and Santa Caterina, wants to bring a little liveliness even to the bottom, but above all he intends to give visibility to Cancro Primo Help Onlus and its partners . The association, based in Monza, has as its mission to carry out projects in the field of social and health assistance in favor of cancer patients and their families. The motto is significant: “We are only men helping other men”.

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