Italy’s elite three-in-one ski team is a rarity
The Olympic downhill champion. The overall World Cup champion. And the recently crowned parallel co-world champion. All on the same team.
Sofia Goggia, Federica Brignone and Marta Bassino have won so much recently that the rest of the skiing circuit has taken notice — and not just because of the Italians’ results.
It’s more about how the results have been attained — with a three-woman “elite” squad within Italy’s larger team that means Goggia, Brignone and Bassino train together constantly.
“What I marvel at is how they handle three such different athletes. Making a team work like that is a huge challenge,” said Tina Maze, the retired former overall World Cup winner from Slovenia who used to have her own personal coaching team.
Personal teams have become the norm for the top women on the circuit, with Mikaela Shiffrin, Petra Vlhova and Lara Gut-Behrami each having their own individual coaches, even if they still operate within the broader spectrum of their respective national squads.
“Ours is a team. We don’t have private squads,” said Italian Winter Sports Federation president Flavio Roda. “All of our teams are groups. With Goggia, Brignone and Bassino it’s a small team.”
The elite team is in its third season together.
“They’re always together. Always. Sometimes they join up with other groups — other downhillers or other giant slalom skiers — but the three of them always stay together,” Roda said. “They work well together.”
Goggia won the downhill at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, Brignone won last season’s overall World Cup title and Bassino has won four giant slalom races to lead this season’s discipline standings.
While Goggia is out injured for the world championships, Bassino won the parallel on Tuesday and both Bassino and Brignone are among the favorites for Thursday’s giant slalom race.
Bassino dedicated her parallel win to Goggia, who arrived in Cortina on Wednesday to support her teammates.
“I’m here for them,” Goggia said. “Today I had lunch with them.”
“Putting three really high-level athletes together in the same team raises the bar and makes you willing to work harder in training. It also helps lighten the mood when you’re working that hard, within that tight circle.”
The elite team is coached by the whitehaired Gianluca Rulfi.
“One day, with a laugh, I asked Rulfi, ‘How do you handle us all?’” Goggia said. “He responded, I’m like the man in ‘Mission Impossible.’
“At times it’s easy, sometimes less so. Everyone has their own goals and we use each other to improve.”
Goggia is the most outgoing of the threesome, with her carefree approach matching her brazen, attacking downhill style.
Brignone became an overall threat when her brother Davide started traveling with her full time a few years ago. Brignone’s mother, the former World Cup racer Maria “Ninna” Rosa Quario, also travels the circuit as a journalist.
Brignone was fuming when she was eliminated by Bassino in the parallel race.
“I would bet on her grit and anger inside,” Goggia said. “She sometimes pulls out these nasty, hard-charging runs that very few athletes are capable of.”
Bassino is nicknamed “Dory” after the Disney film character because she’s always so laid back that it sometimes seems like she’s distracted. A former gymnast, the relatively small Bassino makes up for her lack of physical strength with a perfect feel for the snow.
“Technically,” Goggia said, “she’s the best skier.”
Unusual for a snow-sport athlete, Bassino openly acknowledges that she hates the cold.
Having three standouts on one team also has its drawbacks, like when Goggia fell and injured herself skiing down to the valley while carrying a heavy backpack. That’s something that would never happen to Shiffrin, Vlhova or GutBehrami, who have enough staff to carry their equipment.
“Goggia, Brignone and Bassino are the equivalent of skiing diamonds,” said Livio Magoni, the Italian who coaches Vlhova and formerly worked with Maze. “But if they had more support nobody would be able to catch them.”
As Magoni pointed out, the Italians currently stand fourth (Bassino), fifth (Goggia) and sixth (Brignone) in the overall World Cup standings behind Vlhova, Gut-Behrami and Michelle Gisin.
“(Italy) has three stars but at the end of the season, they might not even finish on the overall podium,” Magoni said. “But they’ll win medals here, because they’ve got so many great chances.”
Putting three really high-level athletes together in the same team raises the bar and makes you willing to work harder in training.
Sofia Goggia
2018 Olympic downhill champion
Before printing was invented in China in the early Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), the only way to read and circulate articles was to copy them by hand. Errors were therefore inevitable.
In AD 175, a dozen scholars, including the writer and calligrapher Cai Yong (AD 133-192), suggested carving classics onto large stones for correction and study. Thus, a project was initiated, transforming seven officially recognized Confucian classics into stone inscriptions.
It took nine years to complete the whole project, entitled “Stone Classics of the Xiping Period,” which are regarded as the earliest official stone inscriptions of Confucian classics. Xiping refers to the period of AD 172-178 during the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220).
Standing outside the front gate of the then imperial college in today’s Henan Province, it boasts 46 stelae, each measuring 1 meter by 3 meters. With more than 200,000 words, it embodies some of the widely circulated Confucian texts, such as “Analects of Confucius” and “The Book of Changes.” The texts were first written onto the stone using cinnabar and then engraved by craftsmen.
The stelae caused a stir around the country and people flocked to the capital city of Luoyang to copy and study the inscriptions.
Historical records reveal that ever since the inscriptions were first unveiled, thousands of carriages traveled every day to visit the stelae, causing traffic jams.
Written by Cai and his fellow calligraphers, it not only provides standard texts for students and scholars all over the country, but also gives an example of the standard clerical-script writing.
One of the best-known calligraphers of his time, Cai is famed for his signature Fei Bai style, or in English “Flying White,” which features hollow strokes, as if written with a half-dry brush. He is best known for his excellence in seal and clerical script, which prevailed in the Han Dynasty (202 BC-AD 220).
Clerical-script calligraphy art has a history of more than 2,000 years, and reached its prime during the Han Dynasty. In general, it boasts a square-and-upright composition, showing strength and solemnness; and slight variations in brush strokes. For example, almost all the horizontal strokes in clerical-script calligraphy are more than just one single flat stroke. It usually begins with a full dot that looks like a silkworm’s head and ends with an ascending arc, like a wild goose’s tail.
Five years after the stelae were set up, a riot broke out and the rebellion army occupied the capital, dethroned the emperor and set the royal palaces on fire, including the college.
The stelae were also ruined and crumbled. Only a dozen survived the warfare and were relocated to other places; most of the remains were buried under the former site of the burnt-down college, until they were gradually unearthed in the early 20th century.
In 1931, Yu Youren, a politician, found a piece of a fragmented stone at an antique market in Luoyang. A renowned calligrapher himself, Yu recognized that a few words on the stone had come from “The Book of Changes,” and discovered it was in actual fact one of the many Xiping inscription stelae remains. Today, 437 words can still be identified on both sides of the stone.
At the time, Yu didn’t have enough money
to buy the stone, priced at 4,000 silver dollars. He had to pay 2,000 as a deposit and asked his friend, general Yang Hucheng, to pay the rest for him two year later.
He had the stone sent to Shanghai and passed around rubbings of the inscriptions among his scholar friends, which led to a craze of studying Han Dynasty calligraphy art.
In 1936, he transported the stone to Xi’an and donated it to the then Shaanxi provincial government. However, before the stone got exhibited, the war against Japanese aggression erupted.
To protect the relic, Yu’s friend had it buried in the east yard of Xi’an Beilin Museum, or The Museum of Forest of Stelae. Still worried, he later took it back to his hometown in Fuping County, central Shaanxi and hid it in a deserted well.
Today, the piece is displayed in the No. 3 exhibition hall of Xi’an Beilin Museum.