The last Italian medal is gold and the most successful of all puts it around his neck. Giacomo Bertagnolli puts the exclamation point on a Paralympics that forcefully enters the history of Italian sport. Seven gold, seven silver and two bronze, a total of 16 podiums for a movement that 12 years ago, in Sochi, collected zero. The haul of Turin 2006 was doubled and the result of Lillehammer 1994 was clearly surpassed, thirteen medals but never the most precious metal. Bertagnolli, the thirteenth podium of his career, took home the fifth medal out of five in the vision impaired alpine skiing program in Milan Cortina.
He was second at the end of the first heat, then recovered together with his guide Andrea Ravelli. «This is the most beautiful, it’s the most hard-fought one», was the comment from the Trentino athlete who also has the gold in the combined, the silvers in the Super-G and giant slalom and the bronze in the downhill. Shortly before him, Giuseppe Romele won bronze in the 20km cross-country sitting category, the first podium on narrow skis in Tesero in these Games which saw a lot of blue on alpine skiing and snowboarding in the shadow of the Tofane. Italy finishes fourth in the medal table, behind Russia who finished on the podium four fewer times but won one more gold. This is the best placing in the ranking by nations at a winter Paralympics.
A result that places the Azzurri “in the elite of Paralympic sport”, comments Marco Giunio De Sanctis, president of the Italian Paralympic Committee: “It is an enormous satisfaction – underlines De Sanctis which is accentuated by the fact that the organizing committee is the Italian one. We could not have expected more both in terms of results, both in terms of organisation, and in terms of public participation, participation of the institutions and above all of all those who love Olympic sport and Paralympic”. The depth of a team capable of sending seven athletes to the podium in three different sports is striking, something that “rewards the great work of the federations, the great work of the Italian Paralympic Committee in all these years of preparation for the games”. For the president of the Milano Cortina Foundation, Giovanni Malagò, “the words are empty, the numbers say everything”. divided into 55 delegations: among these the newcomers Haiti, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Portugal, El Salvador.
412 medals were played, thanks to the support of 84 guides and 370 repairs carried out by Ottobock on wheelchairs, prostheses and equipment at the Service Center. “Since I became president in 2017, these have been my favorite Paralympics,” the president of the International Paralympic Committee Andrew Parsons assured at a press conference. «There are many reasons why these are my favorite Games – he continued -. Probably the main one is sport. The sport here was simply incredible, we saw incredible performances.”