Martina Valmassoi, the consecration to the UTMB of a jack-of-all-trades trail
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Like many trail running athletes, she didn’t make her weapons on the trails but on skis. Member of the Italian youth and senior ski mountaineering teams, the young woman experienced the density of the starting lines of the ISMF World Cup. A real school of high-level sport where she will not have known the consecration but where she will have approached the podiums on several occasions. At the same time, her abilities complemented by a bright personality allow her to join the Salomon team as a trail athlete but also as an ambassador and content producer.
Essential in the trail community
She won’t immediately win the grail on the trails, and it’s ultimately more her talents as a photographer and ambassador that have kept her the most busy over the past five years. A presence behind the lenses, the social network accounts of different brands and the microphones that boosted her popularity: 100,000 “followers” on Instagram later, the young woman became a must in the trail running community.
She does not let go of her first passions, however, participating every year, or almost, in the Pierra Menta in ski mountaineering and aligning herself on several trail start lines every summer. And the results begin to follow as the durations of the race get longer, as evidenced by his victories on the Orobie Ultra-Trail in 2018 or the Garda Trentino Trail in 2019. In 2021, the desire to launch more big challenges emerge and here she is piling up the miles. As evidenced by her victory at the Ultra Dolomites du Lavaredo, where she took 11th place overall (men and women combined)!
A few months earlier, it was in another field that the young woman distinguished herself: with her exceptional endurance in the vertical, she spent 24 hours going back and forth on a ski slope to sign the record for the women’s world of elevation gain in one day on skis (16,777 m).
Confidently, she lined up, at the end of August 2021, for one of the UTMB races: the TDS, the most technical of the UTMB races. And if it doesn’t pass on her first attempt (she subscribed halfway through the race), the second try the following year was the right one. This Tuesday, she crossed the Chamonix finish line, bruised but happy, after a long solo race of more than 10:42 p.m. between Courmayeur, Savoie and Chamonix.
“There were terrible moments in this race, says the 33-year-old Italian. Times when I wondered what I was doing there. Especially on long descents. But all put together, I’m very happy with my race and my management. My friend Courtney Dauwalter (the American, two-time winner of the UTMB) can be proud of me: I managed to draw very far into my resources to finish this event. »
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