Laura Pirovano returns to talk about her unforgettable winter
Tuesday in Milan will see the Italian Winter Sports Federation’s end-of-season Media Day, an event dedicated to celebrating a particularly positive year for the Italian athletes, who have been the protagonists of numerous successes. The event will be attended by the Milan-Cortina 2026 medalists, the athletes who finished fourth in the same competition, and the winners of the 2025/26 World Cups. Among the most anticipated figures is Laura Pirovano, fresh winner of the overall downhill World Cup.
A historic achievement: she is in fact the first female skier from Trentino to win a Crystal Cup, picking up the baton from Federica Brignone, who held the title. Pirovano thus becomes the fourth Italian to win the trophy, following Isolde Kostner (2001 and 2002), Sofia Goggia (2018, 2021, 2022 and 2023) and Brignone herself (2025).
Pirovano’s season has been simply extraordinary. The woman from Spiazzo Rendena in Trentino won her first two World Cup downhill victories on the memorable weekend in Val di Fassa, edging out her rivals by just one hundredth of a second on both occasions. A triumph that the athlete herself struggled to digest in the immediate aftermath: “I can’t wait to relax and try to give emotional meaning to what this season has been for me. An unforgettable winter that I will carry inside me for the rest of my life,” said the Italian skier. In the final overall standings, Pirovano finished seventh with 745 points, while on the economic front her golden season earned her 236,000 euros in prizes, making her the seventh highest paid female skier on the circuit in 2025/26.
Sofia Goggia, the star of another top-notch season, will also be present at the Media Day. The Bergamo native won the World Cup super-G for the first time in her career, adding a fifth specialty trophy to the four already won in downhill. The decisive race came in Kvitfjell, where Goggia stopped the clock at 1’29″23, 32 hundredths better than Corinne Suter. It was a success that moved her to tears during the awards ceremony, a sign of pressure built up in the weeks before: “I was under pressure, especially inside my head, so much so that I was afraid of not making it, of making a mistake like in the Olympics. I took two risks but mentally I freed myself. Now I have this super-G Cup that I will put alongside the four downhill races and for a sprinter who wants to be complete it was very important to win it,” said the champion. In the final overall standings, Goggia finished in fourth place with 982 points, fifth also in the ranking of the highest-paid skiers with 295,000 euros in prizes.
Attended also by Federica Brignone, who despite a season that in fact lasted about a month due to the very serious injury suffered ten months earlier, managed the sensational feat of winning two Olympic golds at Milan-Cortina 2026, in the super-G and the giant slalom on the Tofane Olympia. The Tiger of La Salle thus brought her Olympic record to five medals, adding the two golds to her previous silver in the giant in Beijing 2022 and bronze medals in Pyeongchang 2018. At 35 years old, the champion from Valle d’Aosta admitted that reasoning about the future is still ongoing: “Now the priority is to resume treatment. I have rested my leg, but there is still a need for attention and further treatment in order to really recover,” she confided to reporters on the sidelines of an event at the Carabinieri Sports Center in Bolzano.
Also hovering in the background of the Media Day is the question of the future technical setup of the women’s team. According to rumors circulating in skiing circles, Gianluca Rulfi, the technical director who has guided the Italian women’s sector to absolute levels of excellence, could change roles: his name has been mentioned alongside that of Sofia Goggia as a possible personal coach. A prospect that, if confirmed, would leave a major void in the leadership of the national team, at a time when the Italian women’s movement has never been so strong and competitive at the world level.
