At the Teatro Sociale the evening that begins the Festival. The message from the president of the IOC Coventry: “With so many champions, the Festival is a way to celebrate sport, its ability to unite”. Malagò: “Milan-Cortina, we will be ready”
Pure adrenaline. The theme song is enough to understand what the tone of the eighth edition of the Sports Festival in Trento will be. Federica Masolin and Pierluigi Pardo, hosts of the Grand Inauguration at the Teatro Sociale, break the ice with a jolt of real adrenaline, the challenge between two Italian sabers, the world champion Luca Curatoli and Luigi Samele, four-time Olympic medallist. They compete on stage, as if it were an Olympic platform, complete with a referee. They compete to see who gets to five hits first. Curatoli wins 5-3.
Real sport on stage to launch four days of sport told in talks, seen and experienced in the squares, encountered in all corners of Trento. Three hundred guests and 150 events until Sunday evening. Great champions, some of whom are in the audience, from Fabian Cancellara to basketball legend Michael Cooper, from Alessandro Michieletto to Massimiliano Rosolino. And then the football legends, Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidane, David Trezeguet, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Lothar Matthaeus and many others.
AT HOME
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Urbano Cairo, president and CEO of RCS MediaGroup, launches an ever bigger event. “We have been here for eight years – he says -, there will be another two and then we will continue”. “I’m at home in Trento, in fact I want honorary citizenship – he jokes, alongside the president of the Autonomous Province Maurizio Fugatti -. Trento makes itself available to the Festival and becomes an Olympic Village, you can see the champions of the present and the past, it’s all beautiful. And on the web we have reached 100 million stream views”. Maurizio Fugatti, president of the Autonomous Province of Trento: “It is a time of great sporting events for us, and linking it to the Sports Festival has an important value. The Milan Cortina Winter Games competitions will arrive, then the Youth Olympics, and recently we have also been chosen as the venue for the 2031 Cycling World Championships”.
On stage, the director of La Gazzetta dello Sport Stefano Barigelli links the history of the newspaper to the value of sport. “We are first on social media, on the web and on paper, we win the Triplete every year – he jokes as he goes on stage -. We have these numbers because we have great quality. I worked for many years in general newspapers and I always found someone who perhaps had something to say about the political line. Now the interlocutor always smiles at me. And this is important, because we make people smile by talking about one of the most beautiful things, the passion for a sport or a team”. Here comes the message from the president of the IOC, Kirsty Coventry: “It is a great honor to join you, even if only virtually. With so many champions, the Festival is a way to celebrate sport, its ability to unite. Sport can make the world better. Milan-Cortina will carry forward this vision. Happy Festival and we can’t wait for Italy to write the new chapter in Olympic history”.
GREETINGS
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Elisabetta Bozzarelli, deputy mayor of Trento, takes the stage and brings the greetings of Mayor Franco Ianeselli: “Trentinians like sport, the investigations and champions like Battocletti say so. We love practicing it, supporting it. This Festival teaches us that talking about sport means understanding the great champions, what lies behind the training, the effort, the beautiful stories of integration. And then we can also talk about peace, as she said Velasco da Mattarella”. Flavio Deflorian, rector of the University of Trento, underlines how “sport and culture, research and innovation have many characteristics in common. Performance counts. Nobels are not given based on a person’s origin but on merit, and this also happens in sport. Culture and sport are bridges, with common values, and we have always encouraged them, both for the high level and for amateur activity. Nadia Battocletti is a great athlete but also a great student.” Luciano Buonfiglio, president of CONI, welcomes “the eighth edition of an increasingly growing, increasingly international Festival. It’s something exciting, nothing but adrenaline. The upcoming Olympics? You don’t improvise, but you take care of the smallest details. We have assisted the federations in everything. Malagò has spent all of himself to make these Games a success. I have just arrived, I can only rejoice and say that I am full of adrenaline”. According to Marco Giunio De Sanctis, president of CIP, “We have a competitive team. The high Paralympic level has grown a lot, we have won the swimming medal table, we have extraordinary athletes and a competitive team. In Milan Cortina we focus a lot on skiing and snowboarding”.
TOWARDS THE GAMES
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The upcoming Winter Games will inevitably be a focus for the Festival, a mantra for the coming months. President Urbano Cairo again: “The message of peace of the Games is important, and then having them in Italy is a great opportunity to put yourself at the center of the world. In 2006, in Turin, the city was reborn. It was a special moment. There may be delays, but at the last second everything can be sorted out. It will be a wonderful opportunity to see how the athletes will enliven the Olympics”. “La Gazzetta was born in 1896 like the Games of the modern era, it was born to report on the Games – adds Barigelli -. The Olympics is a celebration, and I don’t feel tired if I have to tell about it. I have fun and I still like watching sport, I believe it is the greatest spectacle that exists”. Giovanni Malagò, former president of Coni, member of the IOC and now president of the Milano Cortina 2026 Foundation, intervenes: “We are not ready. In fact, if the Games started tomorrow, we would be ruined – he jokes as he goes on stage -. You want to put China, which had everything ready six months earlier… Jokes aside, there are all the conditions to continue doing well. The findings put us at the top of the rankings. As Italy, we need these big events, because they accelerate what we usually can’t normally accomplish. Milan will have a huge sports hall, the facilities will be modernized, Cortina will have the sliding center. This puts you in a position to have more prestige. Even so, the province of Trento had the credibility to host the 2031 Cycling World Championships. And let’s remember that on 6 February there will be two and a half billion people connecting with San Siro for the Opening Ceremony”.
KOSTNER AND TAMBERI
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It ends with the stories of two great champions. Carolina Kostner begins: “I remember when the Olympic fire was lit inside me, as a child. Now I can spend time telling my story to kids, and seeing the same flame light up in their eyes, it’s a great emotion. I love being together with young people, telling my journey which hasn’t always been linear, but has had ups and downs. Kids today see sport in a different way, when I was a child I had the World Championships skating on the other side of the world I had to convince my mother to be able to watch them on TV at night. There was no YouTube. They have many distractions today, but they also have a lot of determination. Hearing a true story, perhaps, helps them to put order in their heads, in their dreams. As far as I’m concerned, the emotion I felt in Turin, carrying that flag in the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Games, I wouldn’t exchange for any medal.” Gianmarco Tamberi, Olympian in the high jump at Tokyo 2021, who has just become Camilla’s father, closes: “Life is turned upside down, but it’s beautiful, it fills your heart. The life of an athlete has many changes, the difference lies in taking the best. The right balance must be found. When I learned that Camilla would come into the world, I put an end to the post-Paris period. For 3-4 months I found myself crying in the car, because when you can’t even compete, and through no fault of your own, it’s very hard. That news made me change the way I see things.”
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