The Queen of the Dolomites team plays in the Third Category and for the Olympics loses the pitch, which will become a car park. But that doesn’t mean he loses his passion
The Games are coming, football takes its bow. Milan lends the cathedral of San Siro, the Queen of the Dolomites even more. The Cortina Calcio field, Third Category, next to the Olympic Village in Fiames has become a large car park: steel plates, gravel. Goodbye grass. Bulldozers and gravel also on the training field, under the Olympic trampoline, for Mattarella’s helicopter, they say. Cortina coach Mario Liguori says: “I remember Mihajlovic’s Fiorentina on our lawn. Now we only have the gym left to train. I live in Calalzo di Cadore, 34 km from Cortina. It snowed heavily and I don’t have a pass for the Games. The president told me: ‘Yesterday there were only 8 boys. Stay at home’. But those eight boys put passion into it and I will be there for them.”
recovery
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The championship will resume in March. Cortina is downhill: 9 defeats in 9 games. The promotion is prohibited regardless because the Second Category does not stop for the winter and the Cortina boys, who work on the slopes and in the clubs, cannot skip the high season. In 2025, 16 children were born, half of them girls: how do you make a cantera? The merger with the Val Boite of San Vito Cadore which preserves historical roughness is inevitable: the Old Customs of Austria and Italy passed between the two towns. But football binds and so does the Olympics. Mister Liguori is ready: “I’ll be there to support Marta Lodeserto, curling, daughter of one of our managers. A dream? Having dinner with Arrigo Sacchi to talk about football. She should arrive, she has a home here. And another: that the boys from Cortina retain their passion for football”. And maybe a field to play on.
