Treviso, 11 July 2021 – It is women who make the world go round. They make the world go round and they dye it pink, the colour of tenacity, joy and solidarity. Treviso is starting again,
back to normality: hurray for Treviso in pink”, shouts Mayor Mario Conte at the microphone. It’s 8.30 a.m., in Piazzale Burchiellati, when Treviso in rosa, after a year of absence,
comes back to fill the city with music and smiles, emotions and memories.
Treviso starts again, in the sign of women. There is Elena from Mogliano, soon to be married, who shows up with her wedding veil and her friends accompanying her. There are the Venetian
girls of “Vivi in rosa”, who run with the photo of their friend Viviana hanging from their shirts: she is no longer with us and they struggle to hold back their emotion. There are Laura
and Alessandra, who come from Padua and take the race (moderately) seriously, so much so that they arrive at the finish line first, after completing the 6.5 km route along the city
streets, in about forty minutes.
And there is Silvia Furlani, the 61-year-old Friulian marathon runner who has been battling with multiple sclerosis all her life, who started first and finished last, but always with a
beautiful smile: I used to run the marathon in 3 hours 15, today I struggle in 8 hours. But sport is life, and life goes on. Hats off to those who got involved again and managed to organise an
event of this level.
The volunteers of Trevisatletica and Corritreviso, the two city sports clubs that have been organising Treviso in rosa since 2015, have put in a lot of hard work: the go-ahead for the 2021
edition arrived just over a month ago. The organisational machine was immediately set in motion and in the end, despite the compressed timeframe and restrictions due to the health emergency,
there were around 1500 participants, of all ages and from all over the Triveneto.
The important thing was to start again, – say Filippo Bellin and Enrico Caldato, on behalf of the organising committee. – Today we were full of enthusiasm and, after the
summer, we will start planning the 2022 Treviso in rosa: we will be back in spring and it will be an edition full of surprises, hoping that the pandemic will pass in the meantime.
In spite of everything, we ran (and walked) in complete safety: there were two starts twenty minutes apart, there was an obligation to distance ourselves from each other and to wear a mask for
the first 500 metres of the race. Everything went smoothly. Fun reigned supreme. And many people did not miss the opportunity to improvise a dance to the music of Raffaella Carrà or the
Village People.
Alongside Trevisatletica and Corritreviso was, as in the first edition, LILT, the Italian League for the fight against cancer, which arrived in Piazzale Burchiellati with its modern bus equipped
to transport patients, purchased with the proceeds of the last Treviso in rosa.
This year’s contribution,- explains vice-president Nelly Raisi Mantovani, – will be used for a year to support the psychological support service for women suffering from those
cancers that can affect their femininity more than others. The initiative will further enhance the services offered at our new headquarters in Via Venzone, where five outpatient clinics, a large
gymnasium and spaces dedicated to Playing in the Ward will soon be available. A woman alone can do a lot, but in a group she becomes an unstoppable force: Treviso in rosa is a splendid example.
There is also the desire to network between associations, as demonstrated by the success of the event “La forza torna in passerella” (“The strength returns to the catwalk”), which on the
evening before Treviso in rosa, again in Piazzale Burchiellati, saw around fifty women who have faced and been treated for breast cancer walk the runway as models. Treviso in rosa is truly
a universe on the move. Having successfully applied the slogan “restartAMO” in the field, the future now turns pink again. Appointment for spring 2022, when – hopefully – smiles will no longer be
covered by the mask.
Attached: photo of Treviso in pink 2021 (credit VETTORATO).
About Treviso in rosa
Treviso in rosa was born on the initiative of two sports clubs, Trevisatletica and Asd Corritreviso, which on 17 May 2015 organised a running event, exclusively dedicated
to women, on the occasion of the passage through the city of the Pink Race par excellence, the Giro d’Italia. The first edition of Treviso in rosa was staged in less than a month and
was an immediate success.
Since then, Treviso in rosa has become a fixed appointment in spring. The second edition, in 2016, involved over 4,500 women, three times as many as the previous year. The third,
in 2017, exceeded 11,000 participants. The growth continued in 2018, when there were more than 16,000 registered (16,314, to be precise), and in 2019, when
memberships reached 17,543. In 2020, due to the pandemic, Treviso in rosa took place only in virtual form. Since its inaugural edition, Treviso in rosa has been sponsored by the
LILT provincial section of Treviso.