Vincenzo Nibali, the Shark’s farewell to cycling: the victories in the Tour and the Giro, the biggest regret. What will he do now

It’s the last race: after eighteen seasons as a professional (and ten in the youth categories), Vincenzo Nibali (38 years old in a month) will end his extraordinary career Saturday at the 116th Giro di Lombardia. Vincenzo was – like Felice Gimondi, but in an era where the competition was enormously fiercer – the strongest Italian cyclist of modern times. Like Felice, Nibali was able to win all three great tours and classic monument-monuments very different from each other like Lombardy and Sanremo while the beloved Liege was stolen from him by an athlete who later revealed himself to be doped. He had the courage to leave Messina as a teenager, trained in Tuscany and eventually moved to Switzerland. He illuminated the blue movement after the dark years of doping (always remaining clean) and kept it alive in the very last few seasons, when our cycling was definitely in decline and without protagonists: Nibali on the horizon are not seen at all.