The Torino-Biella cycling Trophy will be awarded for the 80th time on Sunday. A race that today, due to the prevailing bureaucracy in Italy of cards, inflicts itself only on the local roads with the Giro della Provincia di Biella for the Under 23 / Elite which blows out the twenty-six candles instead. It was 1940 when the race started for the first time from the Piedmontese capital towards Biella and in that same year one of its many winners was born, Pasquale Zerbetto, born in Padua but a full citizen of Cossato. Zerbetto, the first and in fact the only one from Biella to win the race in 1960 which, again with the colors of Valais, arrived a year later. The success of a local team is also a rarity and as many now remember, the UCAB that organizes the test from the beginning, has never managed to win it. “The UCAB 1925 is almost 100 years old – remembers the provincial delegate of the Federciclismo – and eighty years since the edition of the race: together they are the history and tradition of the whole territory”. Words that explain the whole. And it is for this reason that the mayor Claudio Corradino in the council chamber of Palazzo Oropa asks “that the city be welcoming” in the new perspective of living an afternoon of celebration in the name of sport and youth. With clear reference to any inconvenience that the citizen will have to endure for a few minutes when the runners pass on roads that are only temporarily closed for a maximum of an hour and a half: arrival around 4.15 pm.
«Among the thirty-seven teams registered, Filippo Borrione says the 24th president of the Rossoneri association – he will miss Russia as he has been since the first time the race became international in 1992, but there are those of Ukraine and Uzbekistan. A shame because sport must unite and not divide. And to unite they have decided to decrease the number of participants per team, bringing the riders per team from seven to five. Thus the companies that will be in Biella have increased ». Borrione then illustrated the path that follows that of the last editions with an extension on the plain at the start of the race and a cut to lighten the impact on the city, the final laps of the Piazzo-Vandorno-via La Marmora circuit, to be done only three times instead of five. “Citizens – says the commissioner Giacomo Moscarola – will be able to climb and cheer along the cobblestones of the Costa del Vernato, our Piazzo wall, like the classic ones in the North”.