Ryder Hesjedal was one of several big name riders to end their professional careers at Il Lombardia on Saturday. The last WorldTour race of the 2016 season marked the end of the road for the 2012 Giro d’Italia winner and also the rider he beat to take the maglia rosa that year, Joaquim Rodriguez.
Hesjedal had been hoping to retire quietly - slip out of the back of the peloton at Lombardia like former teammate David Zabriskie did in 2013. He had already said goodbye on home soil while riding the Canadian WorldTour races in Quebec and Montreal and was just hoping to finish Il Lombardia and say a final symbolic goodbye from Italy, where he won the most important race of his 16-year road racing career.
This final interview almost never happened. Hesjedal initially agreed to sit down on the eve of Il Lombardia but then tried to cancel, perhaps preferring to avoid looking back over his career at the very moment it was about to end. Fortunately he changed his mind.
It is clearly a moment of huge change for Hesjedal. He insists he has no definite plans for the future - for the rest of his life after professional cycling - believing he needs time to decompress, recover and reflect before deciding exactly what he wants to do after sacrificing so much of his own life for his professional career.
Hesjedal will be 36 in December and began his professional career in mountain biking back in 1999 before switching to full-time road racing in 2005. His career spanned 18 seasons professionally and over 20 years including his time as a full-time mountain bike racer at junior level. Hesjedal won silver medals in the junior, under-23 and elite categories at the 1998, 2001 and 2003 World Mountain Bike Championships before turning to road racing and eventually carving out a successful second career.
The 2012 Giro d’Italia is the highlight of his career but he also took stage wins at the Vuelta a Espana in 2009 and 2014, finished second in the 2010 Amstel Gold Race, and was fifth in the 2010 Tour de France.
The highs were combined with several lows, including injury and illness and the moment he was forced to reveal he had doped during his mountain bike career. He confessed and apologised but avoided any kind of sanctions because of the statute of limitations.
“I’m the only one who knows what it was like for me to go through it. It was my burden to bear,” he says emotionally during the interview.
In 2015, Hesjedal finished fifth in the Giro d’Italia, prompting him to make another bid for the Italian Grand Tour with Trek-Segafredo after spending nine seasons with Jonathan Vaughters’ Slipstream squad. His hopes of further success in the Giro were ended by illness and he soon decided to end his professional career and start thinking about a life without the pressures and demands of racing.
His carefully worded and often emotional answers during the interview confirm he is still working through that process.
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Cyclingnews: Ryder, how does it feel to be at the end of your professional career? Relief? Sadness? Happiness?
Ryder Hesjedal: I don’t know if it’s the end. It’s the end of my career racing at WorldTour level but you never know what the future will hold. We’ll see, you create your own destiny. Every ending is also a new beginning.
CN: Are you saying you will perhaps continue to race somehow?
RH: I don’t know. I really haven’t made any decisions with that regard. You don’t know what you will do, until you go to that next place. When you sit around, you get a bit anxious, so there are a lot of ways to push yourself out there and stay active.
CN: So is it perhaps better to call it the end of a chapter?
RH: For sure. It’s pretty defined; I won’t race at WorldTour level again. But for me a lot of my cycling is about riding the bike and that’s not going to stop. That’s what I enjoy and is definitely not over. Now I can ride as long and as hard as I want. I guess they’re the benefits of not having to race anymore.
When you make the decision, you don’t really know what its like till it’s really over. So far things have been the same. The difference will be in January when the training camps roll around I don’t need to pack your bags and travel and you don’t need to suffer so much on the bike.
CN: Is it a difficult moment or an enjoyable moment?
RH: I’ve just been trying to enjoy it. I didn’t really want a big goodbye. I’m not like that. I enjoyed the Canadian races and got a lot of affection from the people there. It would have been to easy to stop in Montreal but I this feels better. I just wanted to finish the season properly. Italy was important for my career and I wanted one last spell in Europe and at my base in Girona, Spain. My race days weren’t that high and I wanted to do as much as I could for the team too.
CN: When did you reach your decision to quit professional cycling? Perhaps after the difficulty of abandoning the Giro d’Italia? Was that a turning point?
RH: I think you naturally get to an age when the decision to quit starts creeping into every rider’s mind. That was a lot of it for me but there are also different circumstances too. It’s not easy to quit but it has to happen at some point, you whack it in your mind and deal with it and see what the outcome is.
There wasn’t really one factor that made up my mind. I just hope I didn’t make a rash decision; I’ve tried to work it through it with myself. There were plenty of days on the bike when I reflected on things but there wasn’t a specific moment when I took the decision. It was over time. It came naturally.
CN: Looking back at your career, your Giro d’Italia victory stands out but other moments too, including your mountain bike career.
RH: I think my career started when I went to my first junior mountain bike world championships in Australia in 1996. It was the first time I really travelled outside of Canada and so that was the starting point for me and it was the moment I decided what I wanted to do the sport. I was only 15 in 1996 but I raced with a special exemption because I was already racing as a junior in Canada and was second at the national championships.
As a last-year junior in 1998 I raced with the elites and finished second in the junior worlds despite only being 17. After that I went professional in 1999 and travelled to all the World Cup races. Racing is the only thing I know. I did six years as a professional and so this is actually my second retirement.
Early MTB career and the best years at Slipstream
Victory at the Giro d’Italia and the suffering to get there
Confessing to doping and waiting for the next chapter
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