Giacomo Bertagnolli was born in Trento, in the Italian Alps, in a region where kids learn to ski the same way they learn to ride bikes. He started losing his central vision as a child. By the time he was competing at the Paralympic level, he could no longer see the course in front of him.

At the 2026 Winter Paralympics at Cortina, he won gold in the men's combined visually impaired category. It was his 11th Paralympic medal. The race took place in the Dolomites, a few hours north of where he grew up.

What Stargardt Disease Does

Stargardt disease is a form of inherited macular degeneration. It damages the central retina, the part of the eye responsible for sharp, detailed vision, and it usually begins in childhood or adolescence. Peripheral vision generally stays intact. What deteriorates is everything in the middle of what you're looking at.

For a ski racer, that matters in a specific way. The gates, the terrain ahead, the line through the course: that information lives in the center of the visual field. Bertagnolli can see the edges of what's in front of him. He cannot see what's directly ahead.

That is why, in the visually impaired classification, athletes race with a guide. The guide runs just ahead, wears a radio transmitter, and calls the course in real time: left, right, tuck, flat section, gate. Not a broad summary of the terrain but a continuous stream of specific instructions, each one narrowing the time between hearing and acting to fractions of a second. The athlete processes each call and sends their body into the corresponding movement, at speeds that leave almost no time to second-guess anything.

Bertagnolli has been doing this since he was a teenager. His guide at the 2026 Games was Andrea Ravelli, with whom he has built the kind of working relationship that takes years to reach full function. Ravelli is not just a voice in Bertagnolli's ear. He is the entire map of every course they run together.

Three Games, 11 Medals

Bertagnolli competed at his first Paralympics at PyeongChang in 2018, at 17. He medaled. He medaled at Beijing in 2022. He came to Milan having accumulated ten Paralympic medals across those two Games, a total that makes him one of the most decorated VI alpine skiers of his generation.

The combined gold at Cortina on Day 4 was medal number eleven. He followed it with silver in the giant slalom on Day 7, adding a twelfth across these nine days.

Para alpine combined is a single-result event drawn from super-G and slalom times. It rewards range: an athlete has to carry speed through the open gates and hold form through the tight ones. The athletes who perform well across combined tend to be technically complete, which requires years of work rather than a single dominant physical attribute. Bertagnolli winning there is not an accident of one strong run.

What It Sounded Like in Cortina

The Tofane Alpine Skiing Centre sits above Cortina d'Ampezzo. The crowd that gathered for the Italian athletes was not small. Italy had its best Winter Paralympics ever at these Games, surpassing its all-time medal record from Lillehammer 1994, and the alpine venue was where some of that happened.

Bertagnolli knows this mountain by sound. He has skied similar terrain in the Dolomites for most of his life, and his spatial sense of how Alpine courses in this region flow is part of what he brings to the start gate. But when the gate opens, the course is Ravelli's voice. Turn calls, terrain warnings, rhythm cues. The race plays out through audio in real time.

When Bertagnolli's combined time posted at the top of the leaderboard, the home crowd at Tofane heard it before he did. He won in front of an Italian crowd on Italian snow, which is not a sentence many athletes get to use.

What's Next

The next Winter Paralympics go to the French Alps in 2030. Bertagnolli will be 29 or 30, deep in what should be the most productive years of a para alpine career. He has three Games and eleven medals already. A fourth Games in the French mountains is a logical next destination.

The para alpine skiing program at the 2026 Games ran 30 medal events across five disciplines at Cortina. Of those events, Bertagnolli turned two starts into two podiums. He has been doing something like that, in some version or another, since he was seventeen years old.