He was once touted as one of the most promising up-and-coming racers in cycling. But instead, Ukraine allrounder Mark Padun, the winner of two Criterium du Dauphiné mountain stages in 2021, has opted to end his career at 28.
The decision was seemingly not taken abruptly. Padun's last season, 2024, barely saw him in competitive action, abandoning the three stage races he took part in, then finishing outside the time limit in the team time trial of the Tour of Slovakia in mid-June. After that, he did not race again.
The Ukrainian has not made any public indication on social media regarding what plans he now has after terminating his short-lived career, although he has family links to both Andorra and Italy, where he raced as a U23 rider, as well as his home nation.
A pro since 2017 who claimed his first victory on a stage of the Tour of the Alps in 2018, Padun became well-known to many fans after his spectacular summer of 2021.
That was when he surprisingly claimed back-to-back Alpine stages of the Critérium du Dauphiné, as well as the mountains classification, ahead of some of the biggest Tour de France favourites. Despite not subsequently being picked for the Tour, Padun followed that up with third overall in the Vuelta a Burgos and concluded his breakthrough season with some blistering team domestique performances in the last week of the Vuelta a España for Bahrain Victorious GC leader Jack Haig, who eventually finished third overall.
Padun signed a two-year deal with EF Education in 2022, but despite initial optimism from manager Jonathan Vaughters that he could guide the Ukrainian towards a more stable series of performances, Padun quit the American WorldTour squad at the end of 2023.
"I first noticed him there too [in the Dauphiné] and the way he won was incredibly dominant," Vaughters told Cyclingnews at the time of signing Padun. , also saying that Padun's "gross VO2 Max was much higher than anything I’ve encountered in my career as a manager or rider.
"Our head of sports science, Peter Schep, models out every stage [in advance], especially days where we intend to try to put guys in the breakaway, to try to determine if you can make it to the finish and, say, how much time you need at the bottom of a last climb to win.
"So the first thing I knew about Mark Padun was Peter calls me and says ‘God, this guy’s totally screwed up my mathematical models. They don’t apply any more because he went so fast up the hills.
"I started following him after that, dug into his junior and U23 years as a rider and found a pretty interesting character. He was an excellent junior and won quite a few races at U23. He was very close to winning the World Championships in that category ahead of [Tadej] Pogačar.
"But he was also very inconsistent and that carried on into his pro years. He’s not able to hold it together all year long. So it piqued my interest."
Suspicions had inevitably surrounded Padun following his sudden rise up the cycling hierarchy in the summer of 2021. But Vaughters, having looked in detail at his biological passport and carried out other checks, told Cyclingnews in 2022 that he felt they were unjustified.
Padun certainly got off to a very promising start at EF, with a victory - his last of five in his career - in O Gran Camiño in February and a third place on the podium alongside riders of the calibre of Alejandro Valverde and Mike Woods.
However, the inconsistency Vaughters had wanted to iron out, principally through correcting Padun's erratic nutrition schedules, did not disappear: So after a very uneven 2023, Padun moved down a level to ProTeam Corratec-Vini Fantini.
However, after another year, 2024, in which Padun failed to reignite his career, this December he officially moved out of the sport completely.
