Bringing together teams from all six of the FIM Continental Unions (CONU) of Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania, the inaugural FIM Intercontinental Games (ICG) will take place on 30 November and 1 December 2024 at the world-famous Circuito de Jerez – Ángel Nieto.
A major part of celebrations to mark the FIM’s one-hundred-and-twentieth anniversary year, the first edition of this biennial event, the City of Jerez FIM Intercontinental Games, will be limited to Supersport and Supersport 300 classes – although this will expand to include other disciplines including Motocross and Enduro as it becomes established – with Yamaha Europe, as Official Partner, providing R7 and R3 machines.
In keeping with the spirit of the ICG to provide a gender-neutral platform for young riders to showcase their talents on an international stage, the eight-rider FIM Europe team ranges in age from sixteen to twenty-eight with representatives from five different nations competing in the colours of their CONU.
Team Captain for FIM Europe in the R3 category is seventeen-year-old Alessandro Di Persio from Italy. A talented musician and rapper, Di Persio finished third this year in the Yamaha R3 bLU cRU FIM World Cup. He will be joined by the team’s two youngest members, sixteen-year-olds Gonzalo Sanchez from Spain and Italy’s Josephine ‘Joy’ Bruno. Sanchez competes in the Yamaha R3 bLU cRU FIM World Cup where this year he missed the title by three points while Bruno has impressed in the 2024 FIM Women’s European Championship Supersport 300 class.
The final member of FIM Europe’s R3 effort is twenty-two-year-old multi-time national champion Tomás Alonso from Portugal who this year has competed in the FIM Supersport 300 World Championship.
FIM Europe will be led into battle in the R7 class by twenty-one-year-old Team Captain Elia Bartolini from Italy who finished 2024 placed twelfth in the FIM Supersport 300 World Championship. His back up will come courtesy of twenty-five-year-old Frenchman Enzo De La Vega who was part of the third-placed team in the Superstock class of the 2024 FIM Endurance World Cup and twenty-eight-year-old Maria Herrera from Spain who was second in this year’s FIM Women’s Circuit World Championship and has also competed in the FIM Supersport 300 World Championship as well as Moto3™ and MotoE™.
The team’s R7 quartet is completed by twenty-three-year-old Valentin Folger from Germany who was second in this season’s Yamaha R7 European Cup.
FIM Europe Team Manager Alessandro Sambuco, FIM Europe Secretary General, said: “The new and exciting FIM Intercontinental Games means for me the pride of representing an entire continent – and what a continent! We have the great responsibility of representing the continent that gave birth to the FIM and the great tradition of European Motorcycling obliges us to do our best to be worthy of representing it.”
Organised with the support of la Junta de Andalucía, the City of Jerez FIM Intercontinental Games will bring together forty-eight riders from nineteen countries and takes place on 30 November and 1 December 2024 at the Circuito de Jerez – Ángel Nieto in Southern Spain.
Published by: Isabelle Larivière – FIM Communications Manager
Main Picture Caption: Alessandro Di Persio, Team Captain for FIM Europe in the R3 category © FIM Europe
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