Everything passes. 2015 began with Cadel Evans bringing the curtain down on his career on home roads in Australia and with former Tour of Flanders winner Nick Nuyens accepting the inevitable after he failed to secure a new team. As 2015 gives way to 2016, Cyclingnews takes a look at some of the riders who have bid farewell to the professional peloton ahead of the new campaign.
Alessandro Petacchi tended to greet requests for interviews at race starts with a grimace. “Mah, non voglio parlare (I don’t want to talk)” he would invariably say as he slouched on his top tube. Yet almost without fail, Petacchi would – with a little persuasion – eventually come around to the idea of putting his thoughts on the record, and once he started talking, he found it difficult to stop. Indeed, on occasion, the Tuscan would still be softly discussing the issue at hand even as the peloton pedalled out of town.
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Petacchi’s professional career followed a similar pattern. His first four years with Bruno Reverberi’s Scrigno team yielded just one victory – a stage of the Tour de Langkawi in 1998 – but Petacchi was coaxed into dramatically better things on joining Giancarlo Ferretti’s Fassa Bortolo team in 2000. Initially assigned as Fabio Baldato’s lead-out man at that year’s Vuelta a España, Petacchi reluctantly agreed to reverse their roles in the sprints in the second week, and duly claimed the first big wins of his career.
Floodgates duly opened, Petacchi couldn’t stop himself from winning in the years that followed, most famously at the 2004 Giro d’Italia, when he won nine sprint stages. All told, he would claim 22 stages at the Giro, 20 stages at the Vuelta and six at the Tour de France, though his finest hour was surely his 2005 victory at Milan-San Remo. His career was not without controversy. He was stripped of his five stage wins at the 2007 Giro due to a positive test for salbutamol and was later investigated as part of the long-running Padova doping inquiry, though never charged.
Petacchi appeared to have retired when he left Lampre ahead of the 2013 Giro, but again found it hard to stop – he would re-emerge at QuickStep as Mark Cavendish’s lead-out man before season’s end. He claimed victory in the 2014 GP Pino Cerami at 40 years of age, and signed up for one last season in the colours of Southeast in 2015. Fittingly, the Giro was his final race. Cruelly, he abandoned on the road to Sestriere, one day shy of the finish in Milan.
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