A mountain's memory, one runner at a time: Col Canil's long-dead chairlift speeds back to life

For more than two decades the steel line had hung silent over the meadows of Col Canil. Then, on a late-August morning, the old valley-station gates swung open again — not to carry skiers, but to launch a race that exists for one reason: to remember the lift that built this corner of the Nevegal.

The gates reopen

The Nevegal, the Dolomite plateau that rears up behind Belluno, has its heroes: the Coca, the steep Erte, the wide Lieta, the shoulder of the Grava. And it has its ghosts. Chief among them is the Col Canil chairlift, opened in 1971, decommissioned some time in the early 2000s, and left to rust above the ski pistes it once fed.

On Sunday 30 August, for a brief morning, those turnstiles "symbolically reopened" — not to return the plant to service, but to host the first edition of La Col Canil, a vertical race sewn by the ASD Nevegallika association directly onto the sporting memory of the hill. It was run in the same community-driven spirit that has made the club's Trail del Nevegal a fixture of the Dolomite running calendar.

1,700 metres of straight-up

The heart of the event was its course. Runners left from the valley-exit square that marked the old chairlift's base station, took on the ~1,700 metres of climb and 430 metres of positive elevation, breaking up the slope at the Muro della Grava and the gradient change toward the Toront — before crossing the finish line at the height of the ex-lift's arrival station.

The full ascent, for the winner, took just under a quarter of an hour.

How the podium fell

The men's race was a genuine battle up the hill's maximum gradients, with Gianpietro Barattin (Alpago Tornado Run) taking the fastest time of the day in 14'55" — losing a few metres on the Grava wall, but timing a decisive surge on the penultimate climb toward Malga Toront and holding it to the line. Luca Fabris finished 16 seconds back in 15'11", with young Tommaso Gerardini (G.S. Quantin Alpenplus) third in 15'19". Giovanni De Bon (Marciatori Calalzo) and Raffaele Teza (Macelleria Angeloni Cranner Team) completed the top five in 15'29" and 15'32".

Among the women, Sara Campigotto (Team Karpos) dominated, stopping the clock at 19'30" — 49th overall and clear of the field — with Elena Funes (A.S.D. Team Rosa) second in 19'40" and her club-mate Sara Cavallet third in 19'53". Ilaria Comiotto (21'10") and Sara Giazzon (21'41") rounded out the top five.

More than a race

Once the last runner crested the hill, the party moved to Malga Col Toront for the pasta party, prize-giving and the easy conviviality that drew athletes, supporters and volunteers together — a debut, organisers said, that already "tastes of tradition."

That tradition has been a while coming. Nevegallika built its name with the Trail del Nevegal, a 21-kilometre, ~1,700-metre-up race reinvented year after year since a group of friends sketched it out over a beer around a decade ago. The association's newest addition inverts that logic: a short, brutal vertical that forces a whole community to look up, one last time, at the silent towers of a lift that helped define their mountain.

For now the Col Canil chairlift will keep its long sleep. But on this one morning, under the Dolomites, the old lift was the fastest thing on the course.

The race ran Sunday 30 August 2026, with a 10:15 start from the Piazzale del Nevegal and finish at Col Canil. Nevegal, ~15 minutes by road from Belluno, is the ski resort of the Bellunesi, offering around 40 km of slopes and access to the wider Dolomite ski circuit.