On the 27th July  three athletes from Como’s rowing club, Canottieri Lario, and a further three from the neighbouring Canottieri Moltrasio will be leaving for Paris to compete in the 2024 Olympics. The three Comaschi are Aisha Rocek, Giorgia Pelacchi and Jacopo Frigerio. The Moltrasini are Elisa Mondelli, Matteo Della Valle and Davide Comini. They will be accompanied by Stefano Fraquelli, Canottieri Lario’s Technical Director who is the National Italian Rowing Team’s Female Coach – a position he also held at the 2020 Olympics hosted in Tokyo in 2021 (due to Covid). 

The representation of six athletes and a national coach from neighbouring clubs on Lake Como is a source of great local pride. The six athletes all hold ‘doppio tesseramento’ or double club membership in which they not only belong to the local ‘canottieri’ but also to national teams. Aisha belongs to the Gruppo Sportivo (G.S.) Carabinieri, otherwise known as the Fiamme D’Argento. Giorgia is a member of the G.S. Vigili del Fuoco, aka Fiamme Rosse. Elisa is a member of the G.S. Guardia di Finanza, aka Fiamme Gialle whilst Jacopo, Matteo and Davide belong to the G.S. Polizia di Stato, aka Fiamme Oro. 

 All the athletes with the exception of Davide are in the rowing eights with Davide rowing in the coxless pairs. Look out for the first elimination round scheduled for the 29th July with the possibility for the losers in that round to retry for the finals on the 1st August. The finals themselves take place on the last day of the games – 3rd August. Let’s hope we see some of our local athletes there!

 This will be the first time at the Olympics for all these athletes except for Aisha Rocek who participated in the Tokyo Games in the coxless pairs. For Elisa Montelli and for her companions from the Canottieri Moltrasio, her participation at the Olympics will be particularly poignant. Her elder brother Filippo was due to row in the Tokyo games but was struck down with bone cancer in 2020 and tragically died the year after. 

Whilst there are a particularly high number of local rowers representing the nation this year, there has been a tradition of consistent participation from Canottieri Lario in each of the Olympics since 1996.  One of the Canottieri Lario’s greatest stars, Sara Bertolasi was in the coxless pair at London in 2012 and at Rio di Janeiro in 2018. In fact, her participation in London with Claudia Wurzel represented the first time in Italy for a coxless pair to come out of the same rowing club without the ‘doppio tesseramento’. 

 Sinigaglia’s Heritage 

 Of course the greatest hero in the name of the club is that of Giuseppe Sinigaglia, the man who gave his name to the nearby football stadium and who is the subject of various memorials around Como. Sinigaglia joined the Canottieri Lario in 1903 having been expelled from the Ginnastica Comense for ‘ill-discipline’. From 1906 onwards he started winning national and European awards culminating in his greatest success on 4th July 1914 at Henley-on-Thames where, as the first Italian ever to participate, he won the Diamond’s Skulls, deemed to be the equivalent of a world championship title.

 As with Filippo Mondelli, Giuseppe Sinigaglia’s life was cut tragically short. He fell in action on 10th August 1916 fighting on the Carso front against the Austrians in the Italian bid to seize Gorizia. He and the futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia were the two best known citizens of Como to fall during the Great War. They and others are commemorated by the War Memorial designed by Giuseppe Terragni and built within metres of the Canottieri Lario’s clubhouse. This clubhouse and the neighbouring football stadium – the Stadio Sinigaglia – were designed by the rationalist architect Gianni Mantero in 1931 and built with funds partially provided by Giuseppe Sinigaglia’s mother.  Giuseppe Sinigaglia has thus come to symbolise both achievement and sacrifice to the people of Como and to the members of the Canottieri Lario. His memory also stands as an inspiration to those six young athletes who will shortly be heading out from the lake to participate in a world class competition in a bid to perform their best for the national team. They have all already achieved so much yet with so much more to achieve before them. 

Other mentions

Moving on from rowing to track events, look out for Chituru Ali also going to Paris to run in the 100 metres sprint. Chituru was born and brought up in Albate on the southern edge of Como as the child of a Nigerian mother and Ghanaian father. His recent record puts him as the second fastest man in Italy after Marcell Jacobs so he is well worth looking out for. We wish him and all the other Comaschi athletes the best of success and well deserved fame. 

 Further Reading

 We featured an article on the Canottieri Lario back in June 2017.

The Rationalist architecture of the Stadium area was covered in Como’s Rationalist Architecture 1: Around the Stadium