December 2, 2002 – Clusone, in the Seriana Valley in the province of Bergamo, Italy, is once again hosting a World Cup cross-country ski competition, after one year break. The promoters of the event are the same ski clubs – local Sci Club 13 and neighbouring Sci Club Selvino-Toni Morandi – and this year celebrate their 50th anniversary.

The event will be held on December 11 on the Spessa ski track, the same one that, in December 2000, hosted the top athlets of the World Cup in the Men's and Women's Sprint Relay, run on a track of natural snow carried from the surrounding mountains by the tireless organizers, who had to face a sudden and prolonged rise of the temperatures.

The reward for the hard and expensive task, was double. The first one, immediate, was the gathering of thousands of ski-lovers around the track and on the parterre and the overwhelming success of the Italian athlets (Fabio Maj and Fulvio Vabusa first for men relay, Stefania Belmondo and Sabina Valbusa very close to the two russian winners Tchepalova-Savialova in the women's relay).

The second reward for Sci Club 13 Clusone and Sci Club Selvino-Toni Morandi came later from FIS and the whole nordic ski world; it legitimized the success of those efforts allotting another competition for the World Cup.

This time Cusone will host the top specialists in the Sprint competition, the short but spectacular, relentless but satisfying, tremendous but fascinating competition. On a ring of 1.5 kilometers the participants will run first individually in order to obtain the timing that will allow them to be part of the restricted group of 16 that will go to direct elimination. To this second and decisive phase (quarter finals and semifinals) will participate groups of four athletes, with two of them admitted and two of them not, until the final is established. This will be both for men and women.

The track in Clusone is of medium-high difficulty with an interesting and technically challanging development even in the short distance of 1.5 km. The first third of the competition is the hardest because it asks the athlets to overcome the maximum difference in height of 35 m (from an altitude of 573 m on the start line to the 608 m of the highest point), while the rest is an undulating route in which small up and down slopes connected with wide bends lead to the “Stadio del Fondo”.