Davide Rebelllin announces retirement from pro cycling - at age 47

Davide Rebellin, the first of only two men to complete the Ardennes Week hat-trick in the same year but also remembered for failing a drugs test after winning silver at the 2008 Olympic Games, has announced that he will retire from professional cycling in June at the age of 47.

The Italian told La Gazzetta dello Sport: “I’ll finish at the national championship at Compiano on 30 June.”

He continued: “I began the season with the Algerian team Sovac, but there were some problems so we decided to rescind the contract by mutual agreement.

“However, I want to arrive at the nationals in decent form so I’ve reached agreement with Meridiana-Kamen [for whom he rode in 2012], a team with a Croatian licence and an interesting project that I could be involved in even after stopping racing,

“I should start racing with the new jersey in May at the Tour of Albania.”  (

He was speaking at the launch of a documentary about him yesterday in Huy in the Belgian Ardennes, scene of the greatest moment of his career when, in 2004, he won Liege-Bastogne-Liege.

It would be the only victory in a Monument of his career, but more significantly, it came in the same week as he had won the Amstel Gold Race and the Fleche Wallonne – something no rider had done before, and which only Philippe Gilbert has emulated since.

Rebellin’s other one-day victories included two earlier editions of the Fleche Wallonne, as well as wins at the Clasica de San Sabastian and, twice apiece, the Tre Valli Varesine and the Giro dell’Emilia, while in stage races he won both Tirreno-Adriatico and Paris-Nice.

He won a stage and spent six days in the leader’s jersey at the 1996 Giro d’Italia where he finished sixth overall, and he was seventh at the Vuelta the same year, but with his primary focus on one-day races only finished two Grand Tours in the rest of his career.

In April 2009, it was announced that Rebellin was among six athletes – and two cyclists, the other being his then Gerolsteiner team mate, the German rider Stefan Schumacher – to have failed drugs tests at the Beijing Olympics the previous year.

Rebellin, who had finished second in the road race to Spain’s Samuel Sanchez, tested positive for EPO and was stripped of his silver medal and banned for two years.

His 65th and final victory came in May last year with a stage of the Algerian race, the Tour International de la Wilaya d’Orun, where he also finished second overall behind his Sovac–Natura4Ev team mate, the Belgian rider Laurent Evrard.

To put the longevity of Rebellin’s career into context, he turned professional after racing for Italy at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona – where Great Britain’s Chris Boardman won gold in the individual pursuit.

He rode his first Monument, the Giro di Lombardia, in October of that year, finishing ninth behind a podium comprised of Switzerland’s Tony Romiger in first place and the Italians Claudio Chiappucci and Davide Cassani in second and third, respectively.

Riders that the then 21-year-old beat that day included some of the biggest names of the 1980s and early 1990s such as Gianni Bugno, Maurizio Fondriest, Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche and Sean Yates.