Italy Folds Winter Para-Sports Into Its Olympic Ski Federation

Six months after delivering Italy's greatest Winter Paralympic medal haul in history, the federation behind that success has effectively ceased to exist — absorbed into the same organisation that runs able-bodied skiing, in a move some of its own clubs say they never saw coming.

From 1st October, Italy's Paralympic winter sports — alpine skiing, cross-country, biathlon, snowboard and bobsleigh — will be run by the Federazione Italiana Sport Invernali (FISI), the country's Olympic winter sports federation, under a decision handed down by the Italian Paralympic Committee (CIP) on 8th September. FISI will take over technical, organisational, training and financial management of the disciplines at both national and international level, folding Paralympic athletes and coaches directly into its existing structure rather than standing up a dedicated department. FISI has described the move as being "in the name of maximum inclusivity," aimed at fully integrating and valuing all athletes within a single sporting system.

On paper, it's a tidy piece of governance reform. In practice, it marks the end of the road for the Federazione Italiana Sport Invernali Paralimpici (FISIP) — the body that had represented Italian Paralympic skiers for decades, and which, just seven months ago, delivered the best Winter Paralympics performance the country has ever produced.

A record medal haul, then a countdown to dissolution

At the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Paralympics in March, Italian athletes won 16 medals, seven of them gold — comfortably beating the country's previous record of 13 total medals, set at Lillehammer in 1994, and its best-ever gold tally, which had never exceeded three. Alpine skiing carried most of that haul, with 12 medals from Cortina d'Ampezzo's Tofane courses alone, second only to Austria's overall tally in the discipline. Vision-impaired skier Giacomo Bertagnolli, guided by Andrea Ravelli, won gold in both the men's alpine combined and slalom; sit-skier René De Silvestro added gold in the giant slalom; and Chiara Mazzel, guided by Nicola Cotti Cottini, topped the women's super-G. Snowboarder Emanuel Perathoner won two golds and Jacopo Luchini a third, while Giuseppe Romele took bronze in cross-country. Mazzel and De Silvestro were chosen as the athletes to hand Italy's flag back to President Sergio Mattarella at the Games' closing ceremonies.

That triumph came in spite of, not because of, FISIP's institutional health. Roughly two months before the Games opened, on 15th December 2025, CIP removed FISIP president Paolo Tavian and placed the federation under special administration by a panel of commissioners, citing unspecified administrative irregularities. Lorenzo Repetto, president of DiscesaLiberi — one of FISIP's longstanding affiliated clubs — has said the move came without adequate justification or advance notice to member organisations, and that the special-administration period, originally due to end shortly after the Games, was repeatedly extended rather than resolved. Athletes and technical staff nonetheless went on to produce Italy's best Paralympic result on snow. On 8th September, rather than restoring FISIP to normal governance, CIP president Marco Giunio De Sanctis revoked its recognition as a national Paralympic sports federation entirely, effectively emptying it out and clearing the way for its disciplines to move to FISI. FISIP, as an association, will continue to exist on paper for now, but CIP's own language points toward its eventual dissolution.

Clubs left in the cold, CIP points to a bigger pattern

Repetto and other club leaders affiliated with FISIP have been blunt about how the transition has felt from the ground up: decided in Rome without the affiliated clubs — the organisations that actually train and field the athletes — ever being consulted, even as they had spent months asking CIP to allow FISIP to hold elections and install a permanent leadership of its own. One regional outlet covering the story described it as bureaucracy in the capital dissolving a federation whose athletes had just made Italians proud on the biggest stage in the sport.

CIP's own account of the decision situates it differently: as part of a wider institutional push, discussed at length during the same September meetings that also unlocked long-delayed Milano Cortina 2026 funding and set logistics strategy for Los Angeles 2028, to fully integrate Paralympic disciplines into their equivalent Olympic federations wherever the international sporting structures allow it. Under that framing, folding FISIP into FISI isn't a punitive dissolution but the local application of a governance model already common elsewhere — many countries run their Paralympic alpine skiing and snowboard programmes through the same national federation that oversees the Olympic teams, rather than through a standalone parallel body. De Sanctis has said the goal is to consolidate CIP's resources around its historic sports while pushing through what he's called courageous reforms with athletes kept at the centre.

An awkward political backdrop

The timing complicates that message. FISI itself is in the middle of a presidential election, with voting due on 10th October and three candidates — including current president Flavio Roda, seeking another term, alongside challengers Livio Bortoluzzi and Andrea Noris — competing for the job. CIP's decision means the formal allocation of funding for the newly absorbed Paralympic disciplines won't be finalised until after that vote, leaving Italy's Paralympic winter athletes' financial footing tied, at least procedurally, to the outcome of an Olympic-side election they have no part in.

What happens now

FISI has said its existing federal structure — its coaches, its regional networks, its competition calendar — will simply absorb the Paralympic disciplines without a bespoke team being created around them, and that CIP and FISI officials will spend the coming weeks working out detailed regulations and a programme of activity for the rest of 2026 and the full 2027 season. For athletes like Bertagnolli, De Silvestro and Mazzel, the skis, the start gates and the classification system stay the same. What has changed is who signs their federation's letterhead — and whether an integration built this abruptly, on top of a body many of its own clubs feel was dismantled without a hearing, ends up strengthening Italian Paralympic skiing or simply absorbing it.