Simply The Best. Italian Edition. Quiz

Answer: Giacomo Agostini

Between 2001 and 2009, Rossi won six MotoGP championships riding for Honda and Yamaha. Also in his career, he won the 125cc, 250cc and 500cc championships before switching to MotoGP.
Giacomo Agostini raced against some of the greats of bike racing, such as Mick Grant, Phil Read and Barry Sheene but bested them all, not just in the 500cc class but also in the 350cc series in which he won seven world championships during the same period.
Apart from his championship wins in 1974 (350cc) and 1975 (600cc), all of Agostini's glory came while riding for Italian manufacturer, MV Agusta.

Answer: Alpine Skiing

Compagnoni is quite rightly seen as an incredible athlete, not just because of her three gold medals in consecutive Olympics. In the 1992 Albertville games, she took gold in the Super G event, followed that with a gold in the Giant Slalom at the 1994 Lillehammer games and rounded her run off with another Giant Slalom gold at Nagano in 1998.
What makes her success even more remarkable is that in 1988, she broke her right knee in a downhill race at Val d'Isere, an injury that required four operations.
As if that wasn't enough, in 1992, the day after winning the Olympic Super G and while competing in the Giant Slalom event, she damaged the cruciate ligaments in her left knee.
These injuries forced to to give up competing in Super G as they meant her knees remained fragile for the rest of her career, but through a combination of determination and talent she went on to win two Olympic golds as well as three World Championship gold medals.

Answer: Windsurfing

Not just gold at Sydney either, as Sensini's medal run began at the 1996 Atlanta games when she won bronze in the Mistral class. Following her Sydney gold, she competed in Mistral again in 2004, winning another bronze and then Beijing in 2008 in the RS-X class, where she won silver to become the most successful woman in Olympic sailing events.
Amazingly. she competed in her fourth Olympics in 2012 at London but was unable to add to her medal haul, finally finishing ninth.

Answer: Flavia Pennetta

Two Italians were seeded going into the tournament, Pennetta at 26th seed and Sara Errani at 16, while unseeded Italians were Camila Giorgi, Karin Knapp, Francesca Schiavone and Roberta Vinci.
Giorgi and Knapp both made it through the first round before losing to German opposition in the form of Sabine Lisicki and Angelique Kerber respectively.
Schiavone didn't make it past the first round and highest seeded Italain, Sara Errani made it to the third round, where she lost to number 22 seed Samantha Stosur of Australia.
This left just 26 seed Penetta and unseeded Vinci in the tournament for Italy, and what a run they had.
Penetta beat number five seed, Petra Kvitova in the quarter finals before despatching number two seed Simona Halep in straight sets in the semi finals.
Unseeded Vinci had a slightly easier quarter final, playing and beating fellow unseeded player, Kristina Mladenovic of France, but then came up against the might of three-time defending champion Serena Williams in the semis. She prevailed against Serena to set up the all Italian final, in which she was beaten by Pennetta in straight sets of 6-7 and 2-6.

Answer: Ludovico Scarfiotti

Just a week after winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1963 in a Ferrari, Scarfiotti made his debut in Formula One, also in a Ferrari. In his first race he finished sixth at the Dutch Grand Prix and the following year he placed ninth in the Italian Grand Prix.
In the 1965 Syracuse Grand Prix, a non championship race, run to F1 rules, he finished fifth and then in 1966 came his moment of glory, a first place for an Italian driver in an Italian car at the Italian Grand Prix. He beat fellow Ferrari driver. Mike Parkes by a time of almost six seconds and the rest of the field, which included the like of Denny Hulme, Jochen Rindt, Jackie Stewart, Graham Hill and Jim Clark were left trailing by the Ferrari duo.
Scarfotti is also the subject of an interesting piece of F1 history, which occurred when he and Parkes crossed the line at the end of the 1967 Syracuse Grand Prix in a dead heat. Again though this race was a non championship event, although still run to full F1 specifications.

Answer: Federica Pellegrini

With a record like Pellegrini's, one would expect her to be a household name, rather than just famed within swimming fans.
Her World Championship medals for the 200 metres freestyle include silver at Montreal in 2005, bronze in Melbourne in 2007 and gold in Rome in 2009. She followed this with another gold in Shanghai in 2011, and silver medals in Barcelona in 2013 and Kazan in 2015. For 2017, she was back on the gold trail, taking first place in Budapest, followed by another gold in 2019 in Gwangju.
World Championship medals aside, Pellegrini won silver at the 2004 Olympics aged 16, thus becoming the youngest Italian Olympic medal winner in an individual event and won the gold four years later at Beijing.
In 2009, she also became the first female swimmer to break the four minute barrier in the 400 metres freestyle when she set a time of 3:59.15 at the World Championships in Rome.

Answer: Cross Country

Belmondo first represented Italy aged 19 when she took part in the 1988 Winter Olympics, held in Calgary, Canada. She built on this experience and at the 1992 games in Albertville, France she took gold in the 30 kilometre freestyle event as well as silver in the women's ten kilometre freestyle pursuit cross-country skiing event.
In the 1994 and 1998 Olympics she took bronze medals but in her final year of competition, 2002, at the Salt Lake City Olympics, she was back on the top step as she won gold in the 15 kilometre freestyle along with a silver in the 30 kilometre classical.
In the World Championships she won two gold medals at the 1993 event in Falun, Sweden in ten kilometre combined pursuit and 30 kilometre freestyle. She also managed two golds at the 1999 event in Ramsau, Austria, winning the ten kilometre combined pursuit and 15 kilometre freestyle.

Answer: Marco Pantani

Pantani became the first Italian to win the Tour de France since Felice Gimondi did do in 1965, but unfortunately his career was beset with "doping" allegations, which were rife in the sport at the time, and especially amongst Italian cyclists.
Although Pantani was never excluded for banned substances, he was disqualified from the 1999 Giro d'Italia on health grounds as his blood values were irregular and this was taken by many to indicate there were traces of a performing enhancing drug in his system.
Doping allegations followed him and caused Pantani to suffer with severe depression, culminating in his death from acute cocaine poisoning in 2004.

Answer: Luge

Zoggeler began his Olympic medal haul in 1994 at Lillehammer when he took bronze, following it with a silver at Nagano in 1998. He then won gold in 2002 and 2006 before winning bronze medals at both the 2010 and 2014 Games. This impressive medal tally made him the first person ever to win six medals in the same individual competition in six consecutive Olympics and he retired soon after, still at the young age of 40.
The number of medals won by Zoggeler was made even more impressive by the fact that until the 2006 Turin Olympics, there were very few luge tracks in Italy, so practice for him while a junior luger was extremely difficult.

Answer: Pierluigi Collina

Collina started his career as a player, but soon realised that his skills lay in interpreting the laws of the game and enrolled on a referee's course. His reading of the game, and ability to allow play to flow whenever possible soon saw him rise through the ranks.
By 1991 he was officiating at Serie A games in Italy and after just 43 games, he was listed as a FIFA referee by 1995. He spent ten years as a FIFA official, during which time he was honoured with taking charge of the Olympic finals in 1996, the UEFA Champions League Final in 1999 and the World Cup final in 2002.