Michael Woods starts to chuckle. “He just makes me feel super old,” the Canadian laughs. “When we’re sitting at the dinner table, Daryl [Impey] and I are always telling stories, and he’ll just drop in and be like, ‘oh yeah, I was 10 years old then’, and I’m like, man, that was not long ago.”
The person, or “young kid”, Woods is referring to is American Matthew Riccitello, his new Israel-Premier Tech teammate who only turned 21 at the start of March. He has already caused quite the impression among his colleagues, and not only because he won the youth classification on debut at the Vuelta a San Juan.
“He’s just a great bike rider,” says his team’s sports director Sam Bewley. “His physical abilities are so good that he will be able to do some pretty good results in the not too distant future on some big mountains.”
The son of Jimmy Riccitello, an accomplished triathlete who won the first Xterra Triathlon World Championships – an off-road event – in 1996, Riccitello Junior was also a swimmer and runner in his youth, but committed to cycling aged 13.
Successful years on the American junior circuit earned him a place on the prolific development team of Hagens Berman Axeon, and last August, five months after winning the four-day Istrian Spring Trophy in Croatia, he joined the Israeli team as a stagiaire before penning a three year deal.
A lot is expected of him. “He’s a pure climber,” Bewley adds. “And being a pure climber is one of the very important aspects of becoming a GC rider in the future. There are other things you need to be good at to be a good GC rider and he has the ability to do those things too. But first and foremost he’s just focused on doing really fast climbs and getting up mountains fast, and then the rest of the puzzle will come into place in the next couple of years. He’ll be a GC rider in the future for sure.”
Riccitello was the best-placed young rider at the Vuelta a San Juan in January.
(Image credit: Getty)
Riccitello is a slight, slim 55kg. He looks like he would be blown over by a gust of wind. “Baby-faced,” is Woods’ simple description. A frat party looks more of his natural surroundings, not standing on stage alongside a handful of 30-plus somethings in front of a crowd consisting mostly of retirees at the Volta a Catalunya, his first European WorldTour stage race.
And therein lies part of the challenge for Israel-Premier Tech, now part of the second-tier ProTour ranks, in how they nurture…