Ellena’s Drone Hopper begins the great adventure

From Sunday the first matches in Venezuela, the Canavese sports director explains the season’s plans and ambitions. Primary objective the Giro d’Italia: “We are confident”

PERTUSIO

It begins “on the other side of the world“, to use the expression dear to Pope Francis, the new adventure of the Hopper-Androni Toys Drone, which on Sunday 16 will be at the start of the Vuelta al Táchira, in Venezuela. Lots of news for the 2022 season, but also a solid certainty, the Canavese Giovanni Ellena in the flagship, in that role of sports director that he has been playing for 15 years alongside Gianni Savio, manager of the training. “In Venezuela we will run a young team, guys who need to gain experience and kilometers in a group – explains Ellena -, but we will not give up on taking away some satisfaction from the start”. The Vuelta al Táchira in the past has been generous with satisfactions for the team: last year two stages and two athletes at the top of the ranking (Umba in fourth place and Muñoz in fifth), five stages and Rivera’s podium in 2020, two more stages the previous year and so back. The six standard bearers who will debut the new Drone Hopper-Androni toys jersey will be the Colombian Juan Diego Alba, born in 1997 with two seasons in the World Tour, with Movistar, Leonardo Marchiori (1998), the other Colombians Didier Merchan (1999) and Brandon Alejandro Rojas (2002), Filippo Tagliani (1995) and the Spanish Martí Vigo (1997). «We are certainly betting a lot on Marchiori for the sprints – analyzes Ellena -: we are convinced that he can conquer at least one stage, while Alba could think about the general classification. We will see, step by step, what comes out. The team leaves without pressure, because gaining experience is really the first goal of this seasonal debut ».

Ellena will not follow the team in Venezuela because her attention is already turned to the next race that will see the Drone Hopper-Androni, the Challenge Mallorca which will run from 26 to 30 January, with five days of competition with five distinct races. And here the most ambitious and highly rated athletes will be lined up, first of all Santiago Umba and Jhonatan Restrepo: «We will go to Spain as early as the 19th of the month with 13 riders for a short retreat and to train in the Challenge area. Surely this year we will look at the Spanish calendar with greater attention than in the past, given that the Spanish is our new main sponsor ». Drone Hopper has never hidden that it has focused on Savio’s team with ambition: “The sponsor aims to level up with respect to our reality in recent years and we are organizing ourselves to support this legitimate ambition”. An ambitious project cannot fail to include the Giro d’Italia in May: “The organization has not yet announced which teams will be invited, but we are confident and aim to be there”. –

Federico Bona