One must have charisma and a good character to be a sports director in cycling. You need great courage and a touch of madness to want to be a technician: joys and sufferings are daily bread.

Leone Malaga's love for this sport is professionally concrete, rational, wise, and above all genuine: a difficult job to do, challenging to manage new generations, early morning wake-ups and long trips, race tensions, sacrifices, often far from family affections.

But it's also true, given his intelligent humility, that a single joy from his boys can erase everything: the cycling of this eternal Peter Pan is like this, you love it and hate it, and perhaps that's exactly why Leone will never give it up.

In this case, cycling offers Leone Malaga a splendid reward and honors the technician who has always shown his athletes that being the strongest is not enough to become champions, but heart, sacrifice, willpower, and the ability to give everything are also needed.

The 2024 Elso Frediani award was attributed to Leone Malaga not only for the victories of the F.lli Giorgi Brasilia ISI Service team, but especially for the professionalism demonstrated in a decade of work with the Orobian formation and with all his boys (who already on Sunday, at the start of a new season, gave him the first joy...).