Alessandro Fancellu

One of the great promises of Italian cycling, he is called to redemption after a 2021 marred by a bad crash in training and some physical problems, and a 2022 in which he showed off at the Tour de l’Avenir with sixth place in the general classification. His palmarès depicts him as one of the most promising youngsters: a great victory at the 2019 Vuelta a León, where he triumphed in the queen stage with a climbing finish at Puerto de Ancares, and above all the splendid bronze medal he won at the Junior World Championships in Innsbruck, behind Remco Evenepoel. Cycling was not the first major sport in Fancellu’s life: for eight years he played as a forward on the Oratorio Solbiate team. At the age of twelve he decided to quit, and his parents forced him to choose a sport to continue some physical activity: at that point he started cycling. And it was on the hairpin bends of the Mortirolo, over a challenge with his father and an old bicycle, that his early cycling dreams began to take shape, thanks in part to his mother’s origins in nearby Aprica. He loves spaghetti with pesto sauce, got into cycling by seeing footage of Marco pantani’s exploits, and his role models are his parents. His hobby is farming (he has a degree in agriculture) and he loves cars and motors: until a few years ago he also had a motocross bike that he then had to sell because it was incompatible with his life as a cyclist.