Garmin Beat Yesterday Awards 2021

In December, the five winners of the Garmin Beat Yesterday Awards were presented in Milan: prizes that the brand gives every year to the most deserving active projects.

For six years now, Garmin Italia has been offering prizes to those who want to engage in special sporting projects, no matter how incredible they may be: the disclaimer for all is that they must overcome their own limits. Here are the five winners of the Garmin Beat Yesterday Awards 2021 edition: from trail running to cycling, from boating to motorcycling, passing through the outdoors with the constant determination and passion put into reaching one’s goal.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, 2021 has been a very challenging year. After months in which the world had to stop, it restarted with even more energy and a great desire to leave the difficulties behind. This was also the case for the protagonists of our Garmin Beat Yesterday Awards 2021 –  said Stefano Viganò, CEO of Garmin Italy – Five worlds, five stories, five personalities and five goals, with their relative fears and complexities. They all have one thing in common: passion and the will to succeed”.

The five winners were honoured by sporting idols in their respective fields: Team Luna Rossa‘s Michele Cannoni, mountaineer Hervé Barmasse, former cycling world champion Alessandro Ballan and Italian motorcyclist Alessandro Botturi, while TV presenter Matteo Viviani led the discussion. We spoke to two of the winners, with the most beautiful stories: Roberto Carnevali and his son Manuele and Enrica Gouthier.

“Manuele is a high-functioning autistic, so relating to him is a bit complicated: he is difficult to interpret some things and he experiences the same difficulty with us, so he has difficulty interpreting our world. We have known each other for a long time, but we have to explore each other constantly – says Roberto Carnevali – In addition to the ‘classic methods’, i.e. studying alongside a psychologist, we also tried sport. I’m a sportsman and I tried to take Manu to the mountains, isolated, to walk and struggle, to see if, in this world that demands your cooperation, something would change. The mountains present challenges and unforeseen events, something for which those with this pathology are not at all suited, and the discovery was that, by doing this together, we made a lot of progress, not only towards him, but also towards me, in understanding me and getting to know me better”.

Enrica Gouthier, on the other hand, completed the 170 km of the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc: “This is a race that many people do, there is nothing heroic in what I did, but for me, winning and having succeeded means having realised a dream, but it also represents the fact that by committing oneself one is able to realise ideas that may seem unrealisable – confides Enrica – I’ve had a very complicated life, mostly lived on my own, I was a mother at 18 and I have problems with former classmates that are difficult to overcome. For me, closing the competition means embracing the beginning of a new life that is realised”.

The other award-winning projects were those of Marco Martinez, who went by boat from the Arno to Turkey, Wolfango Poggi, who raised 10,000 euro for the Novak Djokovic Foundation by cycling from Florence to Belgrade, and Domitilla Quadrelli, who completed the Swank Rally in Sardinia just two months after giving birth.