Sport doesn’t always do the perfect send-offs – but if the cycling gods are up for a spot of romance and emotion, they’d make sure that the much-respected Romain Bardet takes a stage victory in this month’s Giro d’Italia, his last ever Grand Tour.
The Frenchman, 34, is hanging up his road racing wheels next month after the Critérium du Dauphiné, bringing to an end a 14-year professional career, which has included two GC podium finishes, four stage victories and the King of the Mountains jersey in the Tour de France.
Afterwards he will dip his toe into gravel racing for the remainder of the 2025 season and in 2026 as well.
Bardet, who has been riding for the various iterations of Picnic PostNL since 2021, needs a win at the Giro to complete the Grand Tour trilogy, having already scored a stage victory at the Vuelta a España back in 2021.
His first chance for victory will be Friday's mountain-top finish in the Apennines, and then he’ll get more opportunities once the race heads north into the Italian Alps and Dolomites.
“Every mountain stage can be a possibility, but obviously the ones in the last part of the final week, especially the Queen Stage [on stage 20] that finishes at Sestrière, I’d have to have really good legs because I think it’s going to be a GC day,” Bardet told Cycling Weekly.
Bardet didn’t race a lot before the Giro got underway, the only stage race he completed being the Tour of the Alps. Despite the paucity of competition days, he’s optimistic that he’ll be in stage-winning form during the Corsa Rosa.
“I haven’t done so much racing this year so it’s really the main part of my season,” he said. “It’s not like you’re coming into the last month of the season and you’re starting to think about retirement. Most of the season has been done for me, it’s just starting now in the Giro, so training has been business as usual.
“We tried to change things a bit to be fresher in the third week, so I was not so good in the build-up with Alps and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, so I hope I can progress for the race.
“I hope I’ll get better or at least stay at a really good level. We know most of the action will be in the third week. They’re the stages with more opportunities for me, so this is really where my goal is.”
Will Bardet allow himself to get emotional as the stages tick down and the curtain on his road career draws to a close?
“These are things that you don’t really control,” he said. “I hope that I can have a good race before that, be there in the mountains with Max [Poole] helping him, and also saving myself for my own opportunities so I can call it a successful Grand Tour.”
