One of the forms of cycling overseas is the “Granfondo Races”. These consist of races of various distances over 100km, of different categories depending on the number of mountains height, length and difficulty.

Up to some years ago, no local cyclist ventured or even thought of participation in one of the vast calendar of events. It was in 1999 that Mario Brincat of Mosta AF Sign Studio C.C. who first participated in the Granfondo Nove Colli in Cesenatico, Italy.

He was soon followed by Edwin Spiteri, Tony Micallef and George Gauci of the same club and formed a group of four that kept repeating participation first in the 210km for some years and then in the 133km course because they were restricted from doing the long course due to their age group of over 60.

Their repeated participation up till today earned them a trophy for Perseverance, presented by the organisation’s president for the whole group.

These last two years each one completed ten editions of the Granfondo Nove Colli, and whoever reaches that number is presented with a personalised trophy Premio Fedelta’ besides other benefits which all four had.

Also last month, Mario Brincat participated for the first time in the “Circuito Romagnolo”. This consists of a group of five Granfondo races in close localities in Regione Emiglia Romagna under the auspices of USIP Sport per tutti.

He managed to finish them all, and after the last one he was presented a trophy bearing the emblems of the five localities, and another one by the president as he was the only participant from Malta who completed all five races. This year he finished the Dieci Colli, Nove Colli and Maratona dles Dolomites besides those five.

Besides the Nove Colli 1st class category, most of the group also participated in the Maratona dles Dolomites in Alta Badia, Corvara which is considered as Hors Categorie because the mountains reach an altitude of over 2200 metres, and the Dieci Colli on more than one occasion.

Since then, other cyclists from the club joined the group, and few repeated the venture. The results obtained were very satisfactory when considering that there are no mountains in Malta to train on. Most of the results were in mid classification and even better. One case in point is the achievement by Emanuel Camilleri who always finished in the first 10 of his category i.e. 6th and 9th; but this year he finished 2nd, by just 33 seconds, out of 107 in his category of over 60 and 47th out of 1,156 overall in the 55km course of the Maratona dles Dolomites, a course of 1st class category.

Other younger cyclists from other started joining the group and an ex club cyclist, Partick Scicluna, this year covered the whole distance of the Maratona dles Dolomites obtaining 39th place out of 552 in his category and 193rd place out of 3,857 overall. The participation in these events is high considering that for the Nove Colli this year there were 12,000 and the Maratona dles Dolomites 9,000 participants