ROME — Italian Elia Viviani, an Olympic gold medallist and winner of stages on all three Grand Tours, announced his retirement from professional cycling aged 36.
“2010-2025 were 16 fantastic years. They flew by, but I had fun and achieved everything I wanted,” Lotto rider Viviani wrote on social media.
“I announce today the end of my professional career. Thank you to everyone involved during these years,” Viviani added according to AFP.
Viviani, whose previous teams included Ineos and Quick-Step, claimed one stage victory in the Tour de France, five in the Giro d’Italia, including four in 2018 when he won the points classification, and two in the Vuelta a España.
Viviani made his name on the track, where he was crowned Olympic omnium champion in Rio in 2016 and won silver in the madison race in Paris last year.
He also took Olympic omnium bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Games, and won two world championship gold medals and eight European track titles.
Next year’s Giro d’Italia grand tour will begin in Bulgaria — a first for the Balkan country — organisers RCS Sport announced.
It will be the second year running and third time in total that the Giro has begun in the Balkans, having started in Durres, Albania earlier this year and in Athens, Greece in 1996.
“We started last May in Albania, next year it will be from Bulgaria,” RCS owner and president Urbano Cairo said on the sidelines of the Festival of Sport organised by the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper, which is also owned by RCS.
“These Grande Partenze abroad have a positive impact, both in the countries we start from and for Italians who discover new territories,” added Cairo.
“We energise Italian exports; the Giro is an ambassador of sport throughout the world.”
It will be the 16th time that the Giro, which takes place from May 9-31, starts in a foreign country.
Those have become far more frequent since 2010 with seven out of the 16 starts since then taking place abroad, including in Jerusalem in 2018.
Britain’s Simon Yates won the Giro in May after a daring solo attack on the penultimate stage in the high mountains allowed him to overcome Mexico’s Isaac del Toro and Richard Carapaz of Ecuador.
World champion Tadej Pogacar became the first man since Merckx in 1975 to win three of the sport’s five Monument races in the same season, and also bested Italian legend Fausto Coppi in consecutive victories in the “Race of the Falling Leaves”.
The 27-year-old said that after the race he spoke to Merckx thanks to his former mechanic Ernesto Colnago, the founder of the eponymous bike manufacturer which has since 2017 supplied bikes to Pogacar’s team UAE Emirates.
“Ernesto Colnago was here at the finish and Eddy was calling him. We were speaking on the phone and it’s really cool that he calls and we talk like this,” said Pogacar, who is tiring of comparisons with the 80-year-old Belgian.
“It’s been a lot of times I’m hearing this all the time, comparing with Eddie Merckx. But yeah, I don’t like this kind of comparisons.
“I don’t like that all the time you need to compare to somebody. Nobody likes to be compared to somebody all the time.”
His win at Il Lombardia is another record to add to a growing list as Italian great Coppi strung four consecutive wins between 1946 and 1949, with his fifth coming in 1954.
Pogacar capped another stunning season in which he became the first man to win both the Tour de France and world championship two seasons in a row.
And he is now also the first to finish on the podium of all five Monuments in the same season.
