Alessandro De Marchi is one of the last of the survivors of the previous generation. The cyclists who prefer to fill their bowls and plates to the brim without weighing it, train based on feel, and are blessed by the places bike races take them. The act of cycling liberates the mind and the soul, and racing should be no different.
“Anytime I travel and see a mountain, I’m always thinking: ‘hmm, there’s a road there, could you get there?’ Or: ‘I’ve been there in the Giro from that side, but never the other side’,” the 38-year-old Jayco-Alula rider tells Rouleur. “If I think about the many Giros I’ve done, the places in Italy I would never have been without the Giro. I have a to-do list with my wife, places to visit and things to do from where races have started.”
De Marchi is a romantic and organic cyclist, the type who doesn’t want technology to dictate his mood, to alter his intuition. “I’d like to be even more pure,” the veteran of the peloton since 2010 goes on. “I remember in the past I used to train with a heart rate monitor only, and now if we ride without a power meter it looks like you’ve not ridden. We’ve lost a bit of this capacity.
“Now we are really overrun by the numbers, by the data. The ring [on the finger] and the Garmin [watch] tells you how the previous night was, how you should feel. I tried [to use them] but I said immediately I didn't need it.” Does he sleep with his smartwatch? “Absolutely not. I did and then it turned out I was really missing the feeling of understanding and reading my feelings. Slowly you go towards it deciding how you feel, how you should improve, what you should do that day. Honestly I don’t need this. All these tools are helping you to do your job better than in the past, but you also have to think less. They are not going to help you to keep this ability to know and listen to yourself, to understand your body, your reaction to training, to nutrition, to everything that happens in a race.”
If anyone understands how a race works, it’s De Marchi. Even as one of the sport’s oldest figures, in 2024 he raced 80 days and two Grand Tours. But the Italian’s time as a professional is reaching its conclusion: 2025 could feasibly be his last. “Everyone is asking this. It could be, but I still didn’t make a decision. It’s something I am asking myself, trying to find an answer, still processing,” he says.
Being able to choose when, where and how he hangs up his wheels matters to him. “I’d like to retire doing a normal last season, enjoying racing, and having a special race. The Giro for sure is one of those,” he says, a reference to having competed in eight of his home Grand Tours. “I wouldn’t do one more year just have another contract, a place in a team, to do another season to do 16 years instead of 15, but then remember, ‘f**k, I struggled for 10 months’. Absolutely not. It’s important to me to close my career by having a good memory of the last part. Right now we haven’t made a decision, it will probably happen during the spring, and if I am going to do the Giro or another Grand Tour, I’d like to be aware that it will be my last one.”
A winner of seven races, including three stages at the Vuelta a España, De Marchi’s career has mostly been spent as a hard-working and valuable domestique. He’s represented five teams, competed in 19 Grand Tours, 29 Monuments, and been teammates with champions such as Peter Sagan, Greg Van Avermaet, and Chris Froome. “Regrets? Of course there are some, but I don’t feel big regrets,” he says.
For now, all De Marchi wants to do is enjoy what’s left of his time in the sport. “If you do this job first for passion, it’s because it’s something you really feel,” he says. “Saying stop after 15 years is not an easy thing. It’s normal for the body because it remembers you are 39, even if the mind and soul wants to keep going as you are enjoying it. But there is a point when you have to say that it’s not enough to find a certain level of performance, the kind of level that you enjoy the job. It’s something you’ve done for 15 years, and you also see yourself as a cyclist. Now I need to start to swap and say, ‘OK, Alessandro is also a normal person’. It’s a process, and at least for me it’s not easy at this point to do, but it’s something I am thinking about.”
Whether or not 2025 is his swansong year, he’ll continue riding how he’s always done. “You see now how pros are approaching gravel, you can feel that there is the need to keep that essential love of riding, to go places you’ve never been or seen before,” he says. “We cannot avoid that. As pure bike riders, we need that. If the moment arrives and you miss that, that would be scary.”
