Who was Davide Rebellin, the oldest professional in the world – Corriere.it

Five years later Michele Scarponi, another great of Italian cycling who died in a road accident, run over while training: it happened to Davide Rebellin, killed by a truck in Montebello Vicentino, a few meters from the external lane of the A4 motorway on Wednesday morning .

Rebellin, 51, was the longest-lived professional cyclist in the world and one of the most successful in the history of the Italian movement: his last race before retiring was the Veneto Classic of last October 16th. A tragic ending for the life of a man who was born and unfortunately died on a bicycle: Davide had made his professional debut on August 1, 1994, with the GB-Mg jersey. Hugely talented, Davide had won everything and everywhere since he was a child. As a professional he conquered three Frecce Vallone, a Liège, an Amstel and about sixty other high-level races. Among his successes also (and unfortunately) the first Olympic medal (silver in Beijing 2008) revoked for doping in the history of the blue, for a positivity (at Epo-Cera) sanctioned in sports but not in criminal law, with him having always proudly denied any wrongdoing.

Rebellin had begun his professional career with an eighth place at the Camaiore GP on 5 August 1992, three days after having competed in the Barcelona Games where, since he was 20, shoulder to shoulder with Lance Armstrong. He was an entrepreneur, vegan, coach and much more. Veronese by birth, Paduan and then Vicenza by adoption, Rebellin changed 13 teams in 29 seasons. Block-buster teams like Mg, Polti, Francaise des Jeux, Liquigas or Gerolsteiner, national teams like Polsat and Androni, teams that are difficult to classify and sometimes unclassifiable and ephemeral such as Meridiana, Kuwait, Cambodia (Cambodian team) and Sovac. In recent years he had settled in his native Veneto, with Work Service, a micro team that seeks invitations to small cabotage tenders: Slovenia, Romania, Algeria, Tunisia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia. Dry as a nail, wherever they sent him he went, with or without a flagship. He spoke little and in the three seasons he spent – the only non-Polish – in a Warsaw team he sat in a corner at his teammates’ table and didn’t open his mouth. The last of his 61 victories (by detachment, as he liked) dates back to 11 October 2017, the fifth stage of the Tour of Iran. Rebellin was a workaholic: in his 30-year career he has cycled almost a million kilometres, 150,000 of which in competitions.

Vegan, he drank liters of water in which he dissolved Okinawan coral infusion, ate quinoa, millet and amaranth and made his own energy bars with organic raw materials. To those who asked him why he didn’t stop, he answered because I like racing, he never retired, he never finished beyond half the standings, he never stole anyone’s job or salary. Two questions he did not like to answer: the traumatic separation from wife-manager Selina, with whom he had been an inseparable couple since childhood, and the doping affair which for him was an injustice that I paid dearly for and never want to relive. His defense accused the IOC of having interrupted the urine sample storage chain, the anti-doping laboratory replied that everything had taken place regularly and that the presence of Epo had nothing to do with the storage of the bottles. The old story but to Rebellin thinking back to the silver medal of the Beijing Olympic Games in the road test that he put in a padded envelope and sent to the Coni address. Italian Forum. Rome still shed a tear. He, the altar boy as his colleagues called him as a neo-professional for his systematic refusal of doping, perhaps had just fallen into temptation to be able to compete with drug professionals, who had a quarter of his talent.