KARTING TO GET BACK TO LIFE: THE FANTASTIC STORY OF NICCOLÒ “NIKO” TREMOLADA

There are lives in which there is a “before” and an “after”. A year, a day or an event that marks a turning point. Like when you build, with patience and care, a house of cards: apparently solid, perfect, precise, but which, in reality, then perhaps collapses due to a banal gust of wind or a more decisive fist slammed on the table. And in a few moments… “Nothing is the same as before”, they say. Which is not a “cliché”, a bit empty of meaning, if we think about the story of a truly special 32-year-old karter: Niccolò “Niko” Tremolada. A boy - or perhaps it is better to call him a true hero, together with his entire family made up of equally special people - who, in 2011, just two days before his eighteenth birthday, was involved in an accident that left him paraplegic and forced him into a wheelchair. Niko went through a long and difficult period of convalescence, but then, in 2015, he discovered karting and rediscovered that sense of freedom and adrenaline that his new condition, up until that moment, had denied him. It is there that his life changes again. Thanks to what he calls “kart-therapy”, he finds the strength to pick up those cards scattered on the table and rebuild a new castle. In Niko, however, a new need emerges: to share those sensations with those who live the same condition as him, following the motto that has always accompanied him: “Always believe, never give up”. Thus, in 2020, he founded Wheelchair Karting, the association with which he promotes “kart-therapy” for all disabled people. To tell every step of this story, we met him at the association’s headquarters, near Milan. Alongside him, there are also the unpublished video testimonies of his father Luigi and his sister Federica, who have experienced this incredible and emotional journey up close, sharing every stage, between pain, strength and rebirth.