FITNESS TRIBUNE No 1 English

Rimini Report

The 15th Fitness Festival in Rimini is already his tory. This mammoth event took place over

a record duration of 10 days from June 6th to 15th.

Gabriele Brustenghi, who has been organ ising this event since 1989, was once again very satisfied with this year’s sta tistic of over 450,000 visitors. He fields criticism that he in par ticular, as event organiser, and the Rimini hotel sector have profited from his festival: “We have never seen a media pres ence like this year. Practically every big-name newspaper or magazine and all of the big TV stations have reported on the Fitness Festival - and thus on the exhibitors too - over two weekends. The increase in visitor numbers also justifies the extended duration of the event. In comparison to last year this year saw around 100,000 more festival visitors.” Exhibitors were a little more doubtful. For them, the costs involved were large - they had to staff the event for 10 days, and for the first weekend and the fol lowing few days there were not so many visitors to be seen. “It seemed to us that there were as many visitors as in the previous two years, just distributed over more days”.

Brustenghi, a PROGETTI Group company, can look back on a very suc cessful event anyway. 450,000 x 18 Euros entrance fee (on average) plus the exhibitor’s stand charges etc., leave all other fitness exhibition organisers “out in the cold”. From 2004, and for the following 10 years, a “Fitness Festival” will be held for certain at the Olympia Park in Munich. Together with Rimini, Miami and Munich, possibly from 2005 in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro too, the PROGETTI Group will set the tone for fitness events worldwide.

In Germany, only YOU and FIBO would need to take place simultaneously and there would be a “ready-made” fit ness festival already - only the time of year and of course, the location, would need to correspond. For Gabriele Brustenghi exhibitions like FIBO and IHRSA are a relic of the past and condemned to death: “If we want to inspire the masses - old and young - to ‘think fitness’, then we need to inspire potential customers and future gym members and persuade them to visit events like Fitness Festival. The “old” exhibition organisers still depend too

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Fitness Tribune International 1