Lausanne – Everything is ready for the ISMF World Championships that will assign the World Master titles on the snow of Piancavallo, Italy. The regions of Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto, as well as the locations of Piancavallo and Alpago are once again the organisational machine of an international ski mountaineering event. After the ISMF World Championships in 2017, on the border mountains between the two regions, the titles of the Vertical e Individual races will be awarded.
In these last days the insiders of the Transcavallo Committee prepared and made safe the race tracks. The first competition scheduled will be the Vertical race to be held on Friday 4 March (start at 11:00) with the same track of the 2017 World Championships edition, including 580 m of positive difference in height and 3400 m of development. The starting line will be set in Piancavallo while the arrival will be placed at the Refuge Val dei Sass. The record time for men to beat is 24’06” set by the famous Spanish ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet Burgada, while for women the best performance is by the Austrian Andrea Mayr who stopped the clock at 28’45”.
On Sunday 6 March (start at 8:00 from the ski area Piancavallo-Tremol 1), instead, the Individual race will be staged, with a technical and challenging track that will surround the two provinces of Pordenone and Belluno. In this case the positive difference in altitude will be of 1540 m with a length of 13 km.
The first ascent will reach Mount Tremol passing through the Refuge Arneri and facing the last part of the ridge on foot with the skis in the backpack. After the subsequent descent, the competitors will arrive in Alpago by crossing the area named Forcella Alta di Palantina, then shortly after Casera Palantina the race will start to climb up again towards Forcella Colombera. After the last descent the competing people will return to Piancavallo crossing Forcella Palantina and reaching the spectacular Antro delle Mate, a karstic cave of considerable size. At the end of this long track the new ski mountaineering Master World Champions for the Individual discipline will be awarded.
The two planned races will see the participation of competitors representing 12 countries: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland and USA.
