Nobody – not even herself – knows 100 per cent whether or not Giorgia Bronzini will choose to make 2018 the final season of her lengthy career as a professional cyclist. Whatever the decision she comes to at the end of the year, it is certain that when she does finally make the call to hang up her racing wheels, she will leave behind a palmarès that most riders – male or female – would give their right arm to achieve.
Bronzini's ability to win has waned in recent years, and she claimed just one victory last season. With retirement on the horizon, she chose to move to the American team Cylance for 2018, to give her the chance to close her career out with a bang.
After five seasons with Rochelle Gilmore's Wiggle-High5 squad, the switch was a surprise, but Bronzini says that it was an amicable split, explaining that she had, almost by accident, become more of a staff member than a rider and she wanted to focus on herself for the last months or years of her career.
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"It wasn't that Wiggle asked me to be more than a rider. For me, it was natural," Bronzini tells Cyclingnews. "I had no obligation from Rochelle that I had to do this or that, not at all. It was my initiative to be a helper. I was the one putting myself in that position. When I realised that it was too much, that took away a lot of energy from my performance, and when it came to being a rider, I thought that I still had more to give to myself in trying to win."
Though Bronzini is not yet sure what she will be doing in 2019, she has begun to make plans for what she will do in the next part of her life. She has already expressed a desire to work as a directeur sportif immediately after her retirement and will take the UCI's DS course at the end of the season. That is just a short-term ambition for now, and she may well leave cycling for good after a year or so.
"I have a lot of passions and hobbies. I could work in other areas," says Bronzini. "I'm not stuck on being involved in cycling. I would like to study at cooking school, and I have a passion for wine, and one of my goals would be to open something about gastronomy. I don’t know what – a restaurant or a bed-and-breakfast – but something around the food world.
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