Giovanni Pettenella

Giovanni Pettenella medal table
Track cyclist
Italy
Olympic Summer Games
gold	1964	sprint
silver	1964	1000 m time trial
World championships
bronze	1968	sprint

Giovanni Pettenella (born March  28, 1943 in Caprino Veronese ; † February 19, 2010 ) was an Italian track cyclist .

His first success was winning the Italian sprint championship in the youth class in 1960. In 1962 Giovanni Pettenella became Italian amateur sprint champion and two years later won the national tandem championships with Giordano Turrini . At the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo , he won the gold medal in the sprint race and the silver medal in the time trial over 1000 meters. He defeated his compatriot Sergio Bianchetto 2-0 in the final . He had previously won the semi-finals against French Pierre Trentin with 2-1 runs. The standing attempt made by both riders of 21 minutes and 57 seconds is considered to be the longest in Olympic cycling history. After the race, the jury ordered a doping test , which, however, was prevented by the Italian President of the Union Cycliste Internationale , Adriano Rodoni .

At the Italian championships in 1968 Pettenella reached a standing time of one hour and five minutes against his final opponent from Tokyo, Sergio Bianchetto. Bianchetto collapsed unconscious after 63 minutes due to heat-induced exhaustion, while Pettenella stood for two more minutes to wait for Bianchetto's medical examination and thus the decision about the outcome of the race. In the same year he won the bronze medal in the sprint at the track cycling world championships for professionals .

After Pettenella, who had originally been a poultry farmer, had ended his active career in 1975, he worked until 1987 as technical director of the Velodromo Maspes-Vigorelli and in the meantime as the Italian national trainer . He later worked as the owner of a bicycle shop in Milan .

The Japanese game developer Shigesato Itoi named a character Penetella Giovanni in the Nintendo game Mother 2 because he was impressed by Pettenella's standing attempt at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pascal Sergent, Guy Crasset, Herve Dauchy: Wereld Encyclopedie Wielrennen . Eecloonaar, Eeklo 2011, p. 1458 (Flemish).
2. ↑ ^{a b} Volker Kluge: Summer Olympic Games. Chronicle II . Berlin 1998, p. 820
3. ↑ earthboundcentral.com

Web links

• Giovanni Pettenella in the database of Radsportseiten.net
• Giovanni Pettenella in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Obituary article (Italian)