ROME \u2014 Italian Elia Viviani, an Olympic gold medallist and winner of stages on all three Grand Tours, announced his retirement from professional cycling aged 36.<\/p>\n
\u201c2010-2025 were 16 fantastic years. They flew by, but I had fun and achieved everything I wanted,\u201d Lotto rider Viviani wrote on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cI announce today the end of my professional career. Thank you to everyone involved during these years,\u201d Viviani added according to AFP.<\/p>\n
Viviani, whose previous teams included Ineos and Quick-Step, claimed one stage victory in the Tour de France, five in the Giro d\u2019Italia, including four in 2018 when he won the points classification, and two in the Vuelta a Espa\u00f1a.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He also took Olympic omnium bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Games, and\u00a0won two world championship gold medals and eight European track titles.<\/p>\n
Next year\u2019s Giro d\u2019Italia grand tour will begin in Bulgaria \u2014 a first for the Balkan country \u2014 organisers RCS Sport announced.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started last May in Albania, next year it will be from Bulgaria,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese Grande Partenze abroad have a positive impact, both in the countries we start from and for Italians who discover new territories,\u201d added Cairo.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe energise Italian exports; the Giro is an ambassador of sport throughout the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
It will be the 16th time that the Giro, which takes place from May 9-31, starts in a foreign country.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Britain\u2019s 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\u2019s Isaac del Toro and Richard Carapaz of Ecuador.<\/p>\n
World champion Tadej\u00a0Pogacar became the first man since Merckx in 1975 to win three of the sport\u2019s five Monument races in the same season, and also bested Italian legend Fausto Coppi in consecutive victories in the \u201cRace of the Falling Leaves\u201d.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s team UAE Emirates.<\/p>\n
\u201cErnesto Colnago was here at the finish and Eddy was calling him. We were speaking on the phone and it\u2019s really cool that he calls and we talk like this,\u201d said Pogacar, who is tiring of comparisons with the 80-year-old Belgian.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a lot of times I\u2019m hearing this all the time, comparing with Eddie Merckx. But yeah, I don\u2019t like this kind of comparisons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like that all the time you need to compare to somebody. Nobody likes to be compared to somebody all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And he is now also the first to finish on the podium of all five Monuments in the same season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ROME \u2014 Italian Elia Viviani, an Olympic gold medallist and winner of stages on all three Grand Tours,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-207201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}