Nibali Week: The Rise to Champion

Since the new millennium began, a fair amount of the talk concerning grand tour winners involved riders on a sudden rise to greatness. Some of that, especially early on, was artificial in nature and to be dismissed from the history books, as best we can. More recently, we have seen champions arrive suddenly, not because of EPO but because, well, talent is just harnessed differently now… and there’s a lot of it. Something like that.

But blending in amongst these shooting stars is one rider, highly decorated, rated in many ways among the sport’s greatest champions in recent times, whose ascension was slow and methodical, kind of a refreshing throwback to the way things used to be. The greatest of the great, guys like Merckx and Hinault, rode four seasons before achieving breakthrough success. When they won their first Tour, LeMond was 25, Indurain 27, Anquetil 27. This is how things are supposed to work. Cycling greatness takes time. Vincenzo Nibali is testament to that.

Nibali broke into the pro ranks with Fassa Bortolo in 2005, spent a single season there, and switched to Roberto Amadio’s newly-formed Liquigas-Bianchi squad in 2006. Back then, Italian riders were presumed to prefer riding for Italian teams, as had mostly been the case throughout the sport’s history, but with the demise of Fassa Bortolo after 2005 and the loss of powerhouse Mapei three years earlier, the choices in front of Nibali would have been just Liquigas or Lampre — the country’s longest running project that was mostly known around then as the team where Damiano Cunego and Gilberto Simoni were pretending to be able to work together.

As a Sicilian, Nibali grew up partly inside and partly alien to the Italian cycling world centered around large clubs from Tuscany and further north. He did choose to stay “home” by getting in on the ground floor at Liquigas, and having already delivered some promising performances at the amateur ranks, Nibali could have entered Liquigas as a hot property. When he won the prestigious (now World Tour) GP Ouest-France/Plouay in his debut season for Liquigas, just 21 years old, you could have said then that he was ticketed for big things. But he would not take the fast track.

Liquigas was the team of Stefano…