28/02/2010 Final game between Audi and Hotel de la Poste: the Audi Gold Cup back to the home team
The 21st tournament has been faithful to its consolidated traditions. Snow polo, in fact, has been played in Cortina since 1989 when a group of friends from Rome, drawing inspiration from the experience of St Moritz, decided to bring their sticks, balls and ponies up to the snow clad Dolomites to experience the game of polo on the snow.
The winner of the Audi Gold Cup is the Hotel de la Poste team, the historic hotel of Cortina d’Ampezzo which has hosted the opening ceremony for twenty years. Dressed in their red polo shirts and captained by Alessandro Pastorino from Genoa with Argentinean players Lucas Labat, and the brothers Cristian and Gonzalo Bernal. The team defeated the dreaded Audi team by only half a goal.
The Hotel de la Poste team won all the matches of the round robin tournament by a narrow margin and with strong determination qualified for the final game with the unbeaten Audi team who had qualified with ease.
The polo team defending the colours of the “Four Rings” car manufacturer, who were the title sponsor of the tournament, has always been a solid and expert team. This year Audi took the field with Luca D’Orazio, captain, Rommy Gianni and Argentinian players Dario Musso and Eduardo Menendez. To qualify for the final game, the team had defeated two teams who have been announced as particularly challenging: Julius Baer and Ruinart.
The Julius Baer team wearing the colours of the Swiss bank have been very unlucky in this tournament. Their Russian captain , Dimitry Vozianov, brought with him Argentinean players Juan Manuel Gonzales and Tatu Gomez Romero together with Martin Espain Gastaldi, of Italian extraction, to compete on the snow of Cortina. Unfortunately, Mr Vozianov suffered an accident in the first match vs the Hotel de la Poste team and was replaced by two excellent lady players: Ginevra Visconti and Allegra Nasi.
Ruinart was captained by Francesco Mitrano, and his team were ,b>Carlos Alberto and Rico Mansur from Brasil, and Leroux Hendriks from South Africa. The two players from Brasil, uncle and nephew, had their first experience on the snow. An extremely difficult debut among all the other experienced teams, which certainly prevented top player Roco Mansur from performing at the best of his habitual competitive spirit.
Third in the final ranking, behind Hotel de la Poste and Audi and before Julius Baer and Ruinart, was U.S.POLO Assn. Team - with both Aldo Donadi and Gif Turati alternatively leading the team, and players Oscar Carona, Argentinian of Italian descent, Julio Coria and Francisco Menendez from Argentina. The team had begun the week under performing (plus a few technical slips) but recovered well and won three of their games, including the one for the 3rd place against the Julius Baer team.
The even distribution of the goals among the four top scorers did not allow any of them to beat the record (Eduardo Menendez, with 28 goals), but brought to the limelight the excellent performances of Cristian Bernal (22) followed by Menendez (17, stopped by a game which was concluded after the first chukker due to snow), Espain (16) and Francisco Menendez (13).
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VERSIONE ITALIANA
