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Australian champion Jess Gardiner made a convincing return to the EnduroGP World Championship in Italy’s 2023 season-opener, earning 2-3 results over the two days, leaving the first round of the championship in third place in the Women’s category overall standings.

The JGR Yamaha off-road regular impressed in her return to international competition by claiming second on Saturday and then third on Sunday, despite battling sickness across the two-day event.

“More than happy, I achieved my goal, which was to make the podium,” said Gardiner. “I finished second yesterday in the women’s category. Unfortunately, I didn’t sleep too well last night, I’m still struggling with a dry cough that’s lingering from last weekend, so lots of tossing and turning last night and when I woke up it took me a while to get going in the special test this morning, which cost me the day. We had a lot of good battles today and I had a lot of test wins which I was really happy about. I finished third, only five seconds behind second place and 20 seconds behind the winner. I’ve got a lot of good things to take away from this weekend and I’m looking forward to getting back to Australia and training hard.”

After claiming a share of test wins in the Italian round, Gardiner now sits second in the Women’s points-standings ahead of round two at [venue] in [country] on [date].

Of the other Australians in EnduroGP, Wil Ruprecht (Team Sherco Racing) opened his season in Enduro2 with ninth-place results after the two days while Daniel Milner (TM Racing) claimed sixth place in Enduro2 for the weekend.