Today starter with the Cortina Sky Race, tomorrow morning the Cortina Trail and again tomorrow at 11 pm the most important race that passes around the Tre Cime
The Lavaredo Ultra Trail festival will raise the curtain on Cortina’s summer. 3800 will be at the start in the four races scheduled from today to Sunday.
Fifty nations represented in the trail running event par excellence that returns to the starting line after a year of stop imposed by the pandemic. The 14th Lavaredo Ultra Trail, also this year signed by the La Sportiva brand, will open at 5pm today when the Cortina Skyrace (sixth edition) will start: 330 participants and twenty kilometers on a track that includes a thousand meters of positive altitude difference .
Tomorrow morning the start of the Cortina Trail (ninth edition): 1350 entrants to the 48-kilometer race for 2600 meters of elevation gain.
All in anticipation of the mother of all distances: a very confirmed format for the Lavaredo Ultra Trail which will start at 11 pm tomorrow from Corso Italia.
Numbers to make your wrists tremble: one hundred and twenty kilometers and 5800 meters of elevation gain. Also in this case the athletes at the starting line will be 1350. Each of them will have thirty hours to cross the finish line.
Many well-known faces of international trail running at the start: spotlights on South Tyrolean Andreas Reiterer, fresh Italian trail champion. The hopes of an Italian success at Lut, missing for eight years, will be placed in him. Within the walls of the house, eyes also focused on the Lombard Marco Degasperi. They will have to contend with long distance “sacred monsters” such as the French Xavier Thevenard and Germain Grangier, the German Hannes Namberger and the Spanish Andreu Simon Aymerich and Tofol Castanyer. In the women’s field, a stellar challenge between five champions of five different nationalities: the American Katie Schide, the Spanish Azara García, the French Camille Bruyas, the Swedish Mimmi Kotka and the Swiss Kathrin Götz, winner of the Lut 2019.
At eight in the morning on Saturday the last born among the Lut events will be kicked off, the Ultra Dolomites which will see the start from Sesto (780 participants, 80 kilometers of route and 4100 meters of altitude difference). All departures, in compliance with anti-Covid regulations, will take place every ten minutes, in brackets of four hundred athletes with grids determined by bib numbers, assigned based on the Itra ranking. New for 2021: the Lavaredo Ultra Trail has been included in the exclusive Spartan Trail World Championship circuit.
«After many months of work and uncertainty, we are finally here» commented Cristina Murgia and Simone Brogioni, responsible for the event, «there was some fear regarding the snow still present in the higher sections but the high temperatures of these days they are giving us a hand. Fundamental is the support that Cai and the numerous volunteers have given and are giving mountain rescue who, together with the municipal administration of Cortina, represent irreplaceable partners ».