Retirement class of 2022 - Dumoulin, Brennauer, Gilbert, Nibali and Porte leave the peloton

Tom Dumoulin, Lisa Brennauer, Richie Porte to retire in 2022 (Image credit: Getty Images)

The end of the cycling year is always marked by a number of retirements, but few seasons in recent memory have seen quite so many high-profile riders exit the stage at the same time.

The retirements of Vincenzo Nibali and Alejandro Valverde heralded the end of an era, but the changing of the guard was not limited to Italy and Spain. In Belgium, Philippe Gilbert called time on his glittering career, while Richie Porte, Tom Dumoulin and Lisa Brennauer were also among the grandees of the men’s and women’s pelotons who have opted to retire this winter.

The ever more onerous mental demands of top-level sport were taking a toll, however, and Dumoulin opted to take a sabbatical at the beginning of 2021, citing burnout. He returned sooner than anyone anticipated and took silver in the time trial at the Tokyo Olympics, prompting him to return to targeting Grand Tours in 2022. The Giro, unsurprisingly, was the chosen venue, but a nagging back injury forced him to abandon at the end of the second week.

He ended that season with a time trial world title, but his athletic achievements in 2018 were perhaps even greater as he placed second overall at both the Giro and the Tour de France, singling himself out as the man most likely to break Team Sky’s long-standing dominance in July. That never quite materialised – that crash in Frascati on stage 4 of the Giro d'Italia in 2019 perhaps proved to be a sliding doors moment – but Dumoulin’s graceful style on the bike and his thoughtful interventions off it made him one of the defining stars of his era.

Dumoulin has had an offer to work with the management of Intermarché-Wanty, but he is in no hurry to return to the sport for time being. He attended the Wollongong Worlds as a fan before travelling alone through Fiji and Costa Rica for six weeks. “I’m starting with a completely blank canvas, and I have no idea the direction that I'm going,” Dumoulin said. “And I'd like to leave it that way. Because it feels good.”

Gilbert’s years of plenty came in his first tenure at Lotto. He caught fire in late 2009 with an Autumn sequence of wins that included Paris-Tours, Gran Piemonte and Il Lombardia. In 2010, he scored the first of four Amstel Gold Race wins and added another at Il Lombardia, but the annus mirabilius came in 2011, when he scored some 18 victories, including an Ardennes hat-trick and the opening stage of the Tour de France.

From those heights, Gilbert plumbed the depths for much of his opening season at BMC only to hit form right at the death, bounding up his personal fiefdom of the Cauberg to win the World Championships at Valkenburg. His year in the rainbow jersey was largely subdued, but Gilbert still enjoyed his moments at BMC, including another Cauberg burst in 2014 and a sparkling brace of stage wins at the 2015 Giro.

At QuickStep, Gilbert returned to the hellingen with a vengeance, winning the 2017 Tour of Flanders with a remarkable 56km solo effort. The supposed individualist would go on to form an integral part of QuickStep’s self-styled ‘Wolfpack,’ helping Niki Terpstra to win the 2018 Ronde before helping himself to victory at the 2019 Paris-Roubaix. Gilbert’s raw strength had carried him to that startling haul in 2011, but his cunning was now making much of the difference in his late 30s.

In the final phase of his career, Gilbert returned to Lotto and attempted to complete the full set of Monuments by winning Milan-San Remo. That last heist never came off, but Gilbert remained a point of reference in the peloton as one of its most vocal advocates for improved rider safety. On hanging up his wheels, he was even approached by Lotto Soudal to take over as team manager. “It’s maybe a job I could take on later on in my life when I have what’s needed for it, but I like doing things well and I don’t yet feel ready,” Gilbert said after rejecting the offer.

The 38-year-old Shark of Messina won all three Grand Tours during his career, often carrying the nation on his shoulders. Now Italy no longer has a Grand Tour contender, a men’s WorldTour team and there is an ever-smaller presence in the men’s peloton. The Italian women are perhaps taking over from the Dutch, but among the men there is no sign of a new Nibali who can win the biggest races and enthuse the tifosi.

The Dutchman hangs up the road wheels as a winner of both the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix and, is therefore, one of the top Classics riders of the 21st Century. Starting his career with Milram back in 2007, Terpstra took time to get going by the standards of modern-day stars but started making an impact in the major Classics once at QuickStep in 2012 before slipping clear to win Roubaix with a canny late solo move in 2014.

Terpstra's legacy is a complex one, as he developed a reputation as something of an individualist. "Whoever says that doesn't know anything about cycling," he retorted in 2018. A mixture of Dutch directness and smirking self-confidence perhaps didn't win him so many fans in a Belgian team that featured home stars like Boonen and Gilbert, but QuickStep boss Patrick Lefevere agreed that this characterisation was "completely wrong".

Dowsett achieved a lot over the course of a 12-year career, although the perspective is perhaps skewed by an early pinnacle. At the 2013 Giro d'Italia, a 24-year-old Dowsett stunned the world with a storming victory in the 55km stage 8 time trial, beating none other than Olympic champion and Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins. Dowsett struggled to meet the expectations, which went through the roof that day. He didn't win another Grand Tour time trial, and his only other WorldTour TT scalp came at the 2016 Tour de Pologne. Still, there was plenty to write home about, not least breaking the UCI Hour Record in 2015, even if it didn't stand for long. He won the British national time trial title six times, and there were regular reminders of his class - 5th and 6th in the 2018 Giro TTs, then 5th at the World Championships in 2019.

The moment when it finally sinks in for most Spanish fans that Alejandro Valverde has retired will likely not happen this season or even this year. Rather the penny will probably drop on the evening of January 10th, when the 2023 Vuelta a España route is published and after two decades, Valverde is no longer a potential candidate for at least a stage win and, very often, the outright victory in his home race.

Few riders have established such a close connection with a single race as Valverde and the Vuelta. Being Spanish and racing for Spanish teams, first Kelme for three years and then Movistar in its various guises for the remainder, combined with the sheer length of his career, 21 years in total, were obviously major factors in maintaining that relationship. But the results he carved out in that time in the Spanish Grand Tour, including the overall victory in 2009, three second places, three third places, and 12 stages combined to place him in a Vuelta league of his own.

But for all his identification and consistently high performances in the Vuelta – comparable to that of Raymond Poulidor in the Tour or Felice Gimondi in the Giro d’Italia – Valverde’s versatility and ambition in other races were never lacking, either. Among his 133 victories, the World Championships in 2018 and four wins in Liège-Bastogne-Liège are undoubtedly among the most famous. But his five wins in Flèche Wallonne – an all-time record – and victories in mountainous or hilly week-long stage races ranging from Vuelta al País Vasco to the Criterium du Dauphiné and Volta a Catalunya represented other major landmarks.

Spain’s obsession with the Tour de France and Grand Tours in general arguably pushed Valverde to focus too hard on July at times when the Vuelta clearly lent itself better to his talents. But for all that, Valverde still took no less than four Tour de France stages, in the Alps, the Pyrenees and on two tricky uphill finishes, and that ability to switch targets and stay in the game was what gave Valverde an even greater edge on his rivals, time and time again.

Nobody could ever question Valverde’s dedication to his sport, eking out his career all the way through to 42 and still able to do battle with the favourites in his final week of racing this autumn in the Italian Classics. “I feel like crying, but the time has come,” he told Spanish sports daily AS in his last ever interview as a pro. He is now going to stay with the Movistar team, his squad since 2005, for the foreseeable future, but as part of the overall management, acting as a link between the riders and management level.

Porte, in imperfect fashion, brings the curtain down on a career that made him one of the top week-long stage race specialists. He won Paris-Nice and the Tour Down Under twice, along with titles at the Critérium du Dauphiné, Tour de Romandie, Tour de Suisse, Volta a Catalunya, and Volta ao Algarve. His success raised expectations for the Grand Tours, but for years he never seemed to be able to stretch that form over three weeks.

At Sky, he was one of the world's top mountain domestiques, helping the team win three Tour de France titles between 2012-2015. He left for BMC Racing and sole leadership in 2016 but his Tour hopes were ended by heavy crashes in 2017 and 2018. Moving to Trek-Segafredo in 2019, he set the record straight and put his demons to bed by finishing on the podium of the Tour in 2020, a result he and his nation celebrated like a victory.

While retirees Vincenzo Nibali (Astana-Qazaqstan) and Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) were soaking up the limelight for one last time this autumn at Il Lombardia, reputed climber Mikel Nieve (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) quietly exited from the sport in the same Italian Monument. And unlike Nibali and Valverde, the rider once voted World’s Best Domestique by Cyclingnews readers never saw the finish of his final race, either.

For a rider whose role for years consisted essentially of guiding his leaders as far as possible in the mountains and then making it to the finish with as little fuss as possible, that kind of low-key departure and unsentimental approach to his last race was, in some ways, appropriate. After all, Nieve was a rider both widely praised for his dedication and spirit of self-sacrifice in the sport, with a steadfast refusal to grab the limelight.

Yet crashing out of Il Lombardia on a day he’d have been fully justified in racing for himself also highlighted the injustice of a sport where the winner grabs nine-tenths of the attention despite having to rely on his teammates for laying so many of the foundations of his or her success. It was telling that Chris Froome, who depended heavily on Nieve in the 2016 and 2017 Tours de France as well as when he took the 2017 Vuelta, was quick to thank Nieve after he announced his retirement from the sport, calling him on Twitter his “best teammate ever”. But there were plenty of other team leaders who could have done the same.

A pro since 2008, Nieve’s earliest years in Euskaltel-Euskadi saw him briefly flirt with the possibility of a bigger GC role. Even before the Basque team had folded in spectacular style mid-way through the 2013 Vuelta, over the summer, Nieve had already been snapped up by Sky for the following season, where his role as a top domestique would be all but set in stone. He remained with the British team until 2017 before moving on to a similar role at Mitchelton-Scott, where he worked principally for the Yates brothers and Esteban Chaves.

He had no regrets; he told Cyclingnews a few years back about choosing to head for a more specialist role: “Okay, I won a stage or two in a Grand Tour. But the big objectives in the teams are the Monuments and the Grand Tour GCs, or podiums at least, and I don’t have the talent to do that. My time trialling isn’t good enough, and I can’t beat the top guys on the climbs. But as my strong point is in the mountains, that’s where I’ve ended up being a specialist.”

Patrick is a freelance sports writer and editor. He’s an NCTJ-accredited journalist with a bachelor’s degree in modern languages (French and Spanish). Patrick worked full-time at Cyclingnews for eight years between 2015 and 2023, latterly as Deputy Editor.