Italian team for Val di Fiemme

Armin Bauer, Aaron Kostner, Manuel Maierhofer, Lukas Runggaldier, Luca Gianmoena and Raffaele Buzzi will comprise the Italian home team for the upcoming World Cup in Val di Fiemme, Sports Director Sandro Pertile announced. As usual, the team will be lead by Olympic and World Championship medallist Alessandro Pittin.

“On the one hand, it was a shame that Otepää had to be cancelled as this would have been a nice trip but it would also have meant a lot of stress for a single individual competition. So we tried to make the best of it and changed the programs a bit by training in Val di Fiemme, hoping that these extra days would allow us to be even more ready”, Pittin sums up the situation of the past week.

But what can Pittin offer his home crowd? Often struggling on his home hills in the past, Pittin comes fresh of a second at the last World Cup in Ramsau am Dachstein, Austria, and a and fifth place in Lillehammer and has a new confidence in jumping on larger hills.

“To go from the small to the large jumping hill, we worked a lot this summer on certain technical aspects that have always limited me in recent years, especially the pushing phase, the takeoff, and the first part of the flight. Those are very important: the bigger the jumping hill, the more important those 20/30 meters become. You have to keep the speed high, and one of my problems was that I was a little "steady" and I was losing speed. So I worked a lot this summer, I improved and it was especially from the beginning of winter that things were starting to go well. It is a bit of a trend reversal but, for now, that's okay, it gives me more confidence.”