The Luna Rossa female sailors honored at Garmin beat yesterday Awards 2024

The ninth edition of the GARMIN Beat Yesterday Awards — held in Garmin’s new Milan venue designed with a focus on wellness and sustainability — once again served as a meeting point for great sports champions and “ordinary” people capable of extraordinary achievements. The motto of the event is a celebration of resilience, perseverance, and life: leave the past behind and chase your dreams.

Introduced by well-known journalists and radio-TV hosts, Olympic athletes from various disciplines took the stage, to then present the awards to the “heroes” of 2024. The first champions to share their stories with a large audience, which included iconic sports figures of the past, were Ruggero Tita and Caterina Banti, the “golden couple” of Italian sailing, who have secured — among countless other titles — two consecutive Olympic gold medals in the Nacra 17 class.

In a symbolic relay between the sailing world of today and that of the future, and in the spirit of greater gender equality, Tita and Banti presented the award to Maria Vittoria Marchesini and Giovanna Micol, two of the key players in the historic victory of the Puig Women’s America’s Cup by the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli female crew.

Ruggero Tita, who competed simultaneously in the Olympics and was part of the Luna Rossa sailing team during the 37th America’s Cup in Barcelona, is well acquainted with the “girls” and the immense effort behind their success, knowing it was the result of incredible teamwork that involved the entire Italian challenger.

In addition to this historic achievement — which the female sailors hope will be a first step toward full gender equality in the oldest sporting event in history — the victory in the first women-only America’s Cup was, indeed, the result of impeccable teamwork. Following the same path adopted for the youth team, which went on to win the Unicredit Youth America’s Cup reserved for Under-25 sailors, Simone Salvà and Jacopo Plazzi (respectively coach and coordinator of the Y&W project) managed to transform individual female sailors — often competitors — into a cohesive, determined, tireless, and highly professional team. The recipe for success was their ability to view men and women as a single team and to foster interaction, orchestrating diverse personalities, backgrounds, and ages to bring out their best individual skills.

At the conclusion of the evening, the women’s team of Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli received a delightful surprise when Garmin dedicated the last panel in the Nanga Parbat Hall of Fame to their sailing achievement.