Golf, Cristiano Berlanda: “Professional even with a prosthesis”

“Twenty years ago in Sharm el Sheikh.” It is the time when Cristiano Holland, 47 anni, fell in love with golf. He already had the prosthesis in his leg and for him it is anything but an impediment. “Before, I was fencing, I was a deejay, I was in holiday villages, I worked in family hotels, I did a lot of sports, I was a scout, I went to Assisi by bicycle, climbing on the Presonalana” he says. It is a river in flood when he speaks and tells everything with great enthusiasm. Even the beginning of his life. Phocomelic, missing his right leg, was in an orphanage until he was adopted by a family from Bergamo.

Golf has become his passion and his life. The goal is to become professional and also go to Paralympics of 2024 in Paris. «Accepting my handicap in clubs has been difficult, but I always start in fourth place. I’m not the only one, there are players all over Italy, but it was difficult even just to make us think at the beginning that a disabled person could become a professional »he explains. He pursues this result with a work out which is methodical and continuous: 500 training balls, 18 holes going back and forth from Bellagio to Brescia.

I play with the able-bodied and with the disabled and goes on the podium in both competitions. A motto that belongs to a sports brand applies to him: nothing is impossible. “The federation has invested a lot by creating a national team made up of different parathletes, touching all three categories to face every challenge and every tournament in the best possible way”. The technical commissioner is Tommaso Perrino in turn a Paralympic player. Cristiano has been a player of national interest since 2020, in 2021 he joined the First National Paralympic team and plays on the Edga circuit, for disabled players, throughout Europe.

This year there has been an acceleration. “I changed Maestro, Nicola Maestroni, which completely changed my swing ». With him she created the project for the prosthesis to play golf with INAIL Prosthesis Center of Budrio and several sponsors. “The state does not provide us born with a malformation prostheses specific techniques, but these have come to give the same sensations as an able-bodied person, those for playing golf make the foot completely rest and the knee has a particular rotation”.

He does not hide in his story the joy of the first time he won against able-bodied people. If it has to tell a model it is Dr House, symbol of successful disabled people. He himself is an example: brand ambassador for cancer research and quality life ambassador demonstrating how sport can be a means of success and rebirth. With the Aidg association he created «a challenge for Italy for mix Paralympic and able-bodied athletes“. «There are a lot of players who, out of shame or otherwise, do not enter the sport. Through us they can touch how beautiful golf is even if you play in a wheelchair, or without hands or legs ». The motto for everyone is that of Cristiano: “In the morning when I wake up and put on the prosthesis it is mine Hole in One, my hole in one go».