After the fantastic 2022 season, where he dominated the XCE Eliminator World Cup e won the world title, Gaia Tormena (born in 2002) thanks Orbea and passes under the wing of Merida, who will support the Aosta Valley athlete throughout 2023. The brand new Merida BIG.NINE 9000 and NINETY SIX 7000 are delivered Dario Acquaroli, also at ease with rainbow jerseys.
Born in 2002, born and raised in Aosta, Gaia has practiced various sports since she was a child, but only when she got on a mountain bike did she find her dimension.
Source: press release
Today the athlete boasts a palmares with three world titles in the XCE trials or the Eliminator discipline where four bikers for each battery challenge each other in a tennis scoreboard until they compose the final with the quartet of the strongest. And also in the last world championship competition held in Barcelona at the end of 2022, the Aosta Valley was crowned world champion for the third time, after the rainbow jerseys of 2021 (Graz, Austria) and 2019 (Waregem, Belgium), while in 2020 ( Leuven, Belgium) won "only" a silver.
With this palmares, Gaia Tormena enters the Merida Italy stable in 2023, the tricolor headquarters of the well-known Taiwanese company that will support her in the next competitions, which will not be limited to just the XCE tests: «Yes it's true, I also like riding in other off-road disciplines such as enduro and cross country Olympic, because they represent extremely attractive and amusing competition grounds» comments the twenty-year-old from Valle d'Aosta.
Tormena is a multifaceted athlete who has already shown in the off-road trials that she can do quite well last season: in addition to the world, European and Italian title in the XCE races she also conquered the Enduro tricolor.
«We warmly welcome Gaia into our family, we immediately found a great harmony with her and we are extremely proud to be able to give her our mountain bikes for all the disciplines she will want to practice» underlines Dario Acquaroli, marketing manager of Merida Italy.
In fact, Gaia Tormena will have an endowment made up of three Merida models: the BigNine for the Eliminator competitions in which she will try to confirm herself as the world leader, the full-suspension Ninety-Six as an alternative in the cross country Olympic and finally the One Sixty, the flagship model of the Merida proposal in terms of Enduro.
