Giacomo Bertagnolli and Andrea Ravelli (Photo by Linnea Rheborg/Getty Images for IPC)
The 2026 Milan-Cortina Paralympics gave many stories to tell, few proved as compelling as that of Giacomo Bertagnolli and Andrea Ravelli. Theirs is an athletic partnership forged over years of shared effort – built on trust, deep listening, and mutual accountability – whose significance stretches far beyond the podium.
The Winter Games only strengthened that bond. Bertagnolli, one of the most accomplished visually impaired skiers on the international circuit, capped his Paralympic career with a remarkable five-medal haul: gold in the alpine combined and slalom, silver in the giant slalom and super-G, and bronze in the downhill. His contribution to Italy’s overall medal tally was decisive. With those results, he became the most decorated Italian athlete in Winter Paralympic history, bringing his career total to 13 Paralympic medals.
Results of that kind are never accidental. In Paralympic alpine skiing, the athlete-guide relationship is the axis around which everything turns – not a support mechanism, but the very engine of performance. Every racing line, every carved turn, every decision taken in a fraction of a second is the product of two minds working as one. Over the years, Bertagnolli and Ravelli have made that interdependence their competitive edge, building a shared instinct that holds firm precisely when the pressure is highest. Coordination is part of it, but the deeper element is trust, the kind that can only be earned over time, and that allows both men to commit fully to the mountain, whatever the conditions.
There is, in their partnership, a reflection of what Paralympic sport is really about. Performance here is never the work of one person alone: it is the cumulative result of collaboration, of two people committing to a shared goal over and over again until the commitment itself becomes instinct. That dynamic also carries an ethical dimension: a kind of fair play rooted not in compliance, but in genuine respect, the daily acknowledgment that the result belongs to both, and that neither could have reached it without the other.
The Fair Play Menarini International Award had already drawn its own conclusions. In 2022, the pair were inducted into the Roll of Honour under the category “Sport Beyond Sport” – an acknowledgment that the way they compete matters as much as the results they produce. Bertagnolli has returned to this theme more than once: the sense of responsibility that comes with representing the Paralympic movement at the highest level, and the awareness that for many young athletes still finding their way, what he and Ravelli embody is proof of what dedication and the right partnership can achieve.
Milan-Cortina 2026 was a landmark, not a finale. The medals added to a career already rich in distinction, but did nothing to suggest the story is over. What they confirm is a sporting intelligence that has long since stopped needing validation. And yet, beyond the results, it is the texture of their collaboration that lingers: the particular way Bertagnolli and Ravelli have chosen to pursue excellence together, which gives everything they achieve a meaning that outlasts the podium.