Aurora Volpi

Happy birthday to Italy’s national champion sprinter Aurora Volpi, who won an Italian title for a provincial club against the best young sprinters in the country.

Aurora is the Italian Under-23 100m champion, crowned at Agropoli in a final decided by a photo finish. Coming into that meet she was not the fastest woman in the field on paper, and she beat the athletes who were. National titles in the 100m are the hardest ones in Italy to win right now, in the middle of a genuine golden age for Italian sprinting, and she has one.

This February she ran 7.47 over 60m at Casalmaggiore, a personal best and a mark that put her on the Italian federation’s national indoor lists for 2026, and in late July she took the qualifying standard at the Challenge meeting in Florence. She also holds the Cremona provincial absolute record over 60m indoors, set in a regional final where the top four were separated by four hundredths of a second — the kind of race where the difference between the podium and fourth is a matter of who blinked at the gun.

That provincial record is the detail that says the most about her. She races for Cremona Sportiva Atletica Arvedi, a club from a city of seventy thousand in Lombardy, and she holds her province’s fastest-ever mark while carrying its name onto national start lists. Athletes from the big metropolitan programmes have training partners, facilities and a conveyor belt of competition. Athletes from Cremona have to go and find all of that, and she has. She studies at the Università Cattolica alongside it.

Buon compleanno, Aurora! Tanti auguri di cuore — salute, felicità e un anno pieno di soddisfazioni, sempre più veloce. Cento di questi giorni! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇮🇹