Italy’s most loved rider, Giovanni Sala, has achieved forty-six wins and five overall titles in the Enduro World Championship. After the first success in the 500 class in 1993, he switched to 250. There, he called the shots in 1994, 1995, and 1998. His other achievements are also unique: he was runner-up in the World Championship four times (1992, 1996, 1997, 2003), and overall winner of the Italian national championships six times as well as national champion in his category an incredible thirteen times. Those who know him talk about him as a correct, professional, and nice rider.

The career of this absolute champion was launched in parallel with the Farioli Team. In the International Six Days of Enduro, Sala was victorious on his KTM in the absolute rankings three times (Australia in 1992, Finland in 1996, Italy in 1997), first in his class four times, and team world champion another four times (Australia in 1992, United States in 1994, Italy in 1997, Spain in 2000).

He discovered Enduro as a boy when he used to watch a neighbour’s training sessions: Gualtiero Brissoni won the most difficult edition of the Valli Bergamasche in 1974, when he was the only one of thirty-two riders actually to make it to the finish line, and he also became European champion in 1978 and 1982. Brissoni trained on a track close to Gorle and, after he had finished, Sala and his friends would get on it with their bicycles. The first times Sala got on a motorbike, a Fantic Motor 50, it didn’t immediately lead to racing. He was an emotional young man and that stress had affected him also during his first amateur ski races. He started competing on a motorbike, a Fantic Motor 125, in 1979.

The first results were achieved soon and he won the Italian championships in 1981, even if he then unexplainably switched to Motocross. In 2016, he confirmed in an interview with Endurista Magazine that he stayed in that discipline until 1990. After several championships, including a World Championship in Czechoslovakia, he decided to quit as the costs were decidedly too high.

Arnaldo Farioli offered him a contract to race and Sala used that money to pay someone to substitute him at the delicatessen where he was working. This is how the second part of his story started, and he soon progressed from third, over second, to first in the World Championship by 1993. 

He said in another interview that you need “passion, tenacity, and self-sacrifice” to be successful. A bit of stubbornness also helps in any discipline, not only when racing. Furthermore, he has recently explained his focus and techniques, both obviously essential, in a series of videos for Moto.it. In his lessons, he clarifies that it’s important always to lift the front fork when climbing uphill on loose stones, and on rock terraces even if the bike might spin around and you have to try again as not to burn the tyre and radiator. He analyses the importance of riding standing up to control your speed when going downhill, and of reconnaissance to gain decisive seconds in a Cross Test where world champions are often crowned. 

He believes that Enduro should remain a difficult discipline also for the fans who spend hours and hours in forests just to see the riders grapple with particularly technical and tricky passages of the routes. 

Moreover, Sala has dedicated himself to the Rally-LC8 project in his career. After the first tests at a speed over 200 km/h in the desert, “Gio” proved his abilities at the Dakar where he was ranked sixth in 2002 and third in 2006. 

He explained that the Dakar gives you a lot also from a human point of view: “You get to know yourself better, it provokes outbursts of solidarity, it toughens your spirit”. Just like Enduro puts you in touch with yourself. In order to win in a discipline in which you literally have to get your hands dirty, you have to accept to make sacrifices and not let the first difficulties scare you. 

This is exactly why effort, tenacity and stubbornness will always be rewarded.