Vitamina Sailing with Cetilar® for season 2019

Three boats, eleven competition sessions between Italy, Spain, Croatia and Holland, for fifteen athletes engaged for around seventy days at sea in both races and training. The season of Vitamina Sailing , the sailing team that forms part of the ambitious Cetilar Sailing project, headed by businessman Andrea Lacorte, founder with his brother Roberto and current President of the PharmaNutra S.p.A. Group, has emerged as the most intense of the eight held so far, a hymn to the eclecticism and a total commitment that has few equals in the field of Italian sailing.

Vitamina Sailing, which, this year, relies on a completely new entry, in the form of tactical Tommaso Chieffi – the most famous name in Italian sailing worldwide, with his active participation as the key player in the Olympic Games, the American Cup, Admiral’s Cup and world tour in a crew in stages (Volvo Ocean Race) – will attend class Melges 32 (a return, after five seasons held between 2013 and 2017), in the context of the rated races with Melges 40 Vitamina Cetilar – vested, for the occasion, with an ORC International tonnage certificate – in addition to three events of the catamarans M32 circuit.

More specifically, the Melges 32 season (again, the tactical Chieffi and expert coach Carlo Fracassoli of Quantum International), which will be branded Cetilar^® – the innovative anti-inflammatory cream based on cetylated esters (7.5% CFA) intended mainly for athletes – involves, after training in Marina di Pisa and Cala Galera, World League races in Sardinia (Villasimius from 29 to 31 March and Puntaldia from 17 to 19 May), Riva del Garda (5-7 July) and Spain, where, between Barcelona and Valencia, the final stage of the circuit is scheduled (26-28 September) and the long-awaited class World Championship (22-26 October).

On the other hand, there are three events in the ORC International season for Melges 40 (the tactical Gabriele Benussi from Trieste, winner of the last two Barcolana editions), which, in the new conformation, optimised by planner Maurizio Cossutti, will make its racing debut during International Sailing Week in Alassio (15-17 March). In the first week of June, the team will then be on stage in Sibenik, in Croatia, to participate in the ORC International World Championship – a super event in which about 150 boats are expected to take place – and in Palma de Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands, where, from 27 July to 3 August, the MAPFRE Copa del Rey is scheduled to take place, the most famous deep sea sailing event in Spain.

To conclude, the catamaran M32, which, in the last two years, has been a key player in Vitamin Sailing, thanks to its victory in the 2017 European Circuit 2017 and second place overall, with success in the Corinthian ranking in 2018: this year, Lacorte and his crew, which, on the multihull also includes the two young Australian champions, Torvar Mirsky and Cameron Seagreen, will descend into the water on three occasions: at the end of May in Marina di Pisa and at the end of June in Amsterdam for two stages of the European circuit and at the end of August at Riva Del Garda, on Lake Garda, for the World Championship.

“It will be an intense and demanding season, as it will not be easy to manage three different boats and be able to compete at the highest levels in all categories”, enthusiastically explains Andrea Lacorte, shipowner and, especially, helmsman of all Vitamins Sailing boating teams, in the race for the Yacht Club of the Maritime Republic of Pisa and with an operating base at the Port of Pisa. “The return on the Melges 32 one design is mainly due to the fact that the Melges 40 class, in which we believed from the beginning, will, this year, take a small break, awaiting its restart with the arrival of its new owners. The best choice was therefore to optimise our boat for the ORC International races, providing it with a tonnage certificate that will enable us to compete, thanks to the compensation system, with other high-level hulls. In addition, the Melges 40 is also the most modern and highest performing one-design boat afloat, therefore allowing it to continue sailing was the most obvious choice. Returning to one-design racing with the Melges 32, however”, Lacorte continues, “is a pleasure for me personally and for the whole the crew, partly because it is a class to which we are loyal and that is experiencing a second youth: doing it with a champion such as Tommaso Chieffi is something extraordinary. We look forward to getting back on board, to start this season that has no precedent and in which we will work hard, from all points of view” .

Coordinated by Team Manager Matteo De Luca, the Vitamina Sailing event comes under the Cetilar Sailing project and the broader Cetilar Sport project, which will shortly be presented in detail and also provides for a close partnership between major Italian sports entities for mentoring activities.