Gerald Ciolek

Gerald Ciolek
	Gerald Ciolek (2015)
To person
Date of birth	September 19, 1986
nation	Germany
discipline	Street
Driver type	sprinter
To the team
Current team	Dauner ACCOUNT
function	Sports director
Team (s)
2005–2006 ; 2007–2008 ; 2009–2010 ; 2011 ; 2012 ; 2013–2015 ; 2016	Wiesenhof-Akud ; T-Mobile Team / Columbia ; Team Milram ; Quickstep Cycling Team ; Omega Pharma-Quick Step ; MTN-Qhubeka ; Stölting Service Group
Most important successes
	Milan – Sanremo 2013; one stage Vuelta a España 2009; five stages Germany Tour 2005 , 2007 , 2008 U23 road world champion 2006 German road champion 2005 ; ;
	Last updated: February 8, 2019

Ciolek at the night of Hanover 2005

Ciolek at the Tour de Romandie 2011

Gerald Ciolek (born September 19, 1986 in Cologne ) is a former German cyclist . He was considered a strong sprinter. His greatest success was winning the “Monument of Cycling” Milan-Sanremo . After his active career, he became a sports director .

career

Ciolek joined the Professional Continental Team Wiesenhof-Akud in 2005 and competed with this team a. a. the Pro Tour races Vattenfall Cyclassics and Germany Tour . His first big success was winning the German Road Championship in 2005 . He surprisingly defeated Robert Förster and Erik Zabel in the sprint final and was able to secure the title.

In 2006 he achieved further good results. At first he was beaten by Stefano Garzelli in the semi-classic Rund um den Henninger-Turm . At the Vattenfall Cyclassics, he finished fifth. On August 4, 2006, he won his first ProTour race when he won the third stage of the 2006 Deutschland Tour in a mass sprint ahead of Erik Zabel . At the end of the season, Ciolek was U23 world champion in a sprint of a six-man top group.

For the years 2007 and 2008 Ciolek signed a contract with the German ProTeam T-Mobile . For this team he was able to win a stage in the mass sprint during the 2007 Lower Saxony Tour . In May he then won the overall ranking of the Rhineland-Palatinate Tour . He also won the points classification and took the jersey of the best young driver. At the Tour of Austria he was able to decide two stages in his favor and won the sprint classification. At his season highlight, the 2007 Germany Tour , he won three stages. The day after, he was able to improve his fifth place from the previous year by two places and was third in the Vattenfall Cyclassics . While preparing for the World Cycling Championships in Stuttgart at the end of September , he won the first stage of the 3-country tour on his 21st birthday .

After Deutsche Telekom left cycling sponsorship, the team named itself in 2008 after the American operating company Team High Road . It took Ciolek a long time to achieve the first success that year. In the Bayern Tour he was able to win two stages. In July he was allowed to drive his first Tour de France , in which his teammate Mark Cavendish dominated the sprints. Nevertheless, he took two second and third places. In the 2008 Germany Tour , Ciolek, who had achieved most of his previous successes in the mass sprint, won the fifth stage , which ended with a mountain finish in Winterberg.

In 2009 and 2010 he drove for the German team Milram , where he was to take on the captain role alongside Linus Gerdemann . His greatest success during this time was the sprint victory in the second stage of the Vuelta a España 2009 . During this time he was also victorious in the Trofeo Calvia and a stage of the Bayern Tour , but like the team as a whole, which disbanded at the end of the 2010 season, could not set any significant accents.

In 2011 he switched to the Belgian Quick Step Cycling Team . In his first season at Quick Step, he failed to win a cycle race on the UCI calendar. However, he finished second in the mass sprints of the German road championship and the Vattenfall Cyclassics World Tour race . He demonstrated his versatility in the hilly World Tour races in Canada in September: at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal , he helped to determine the race in a breakaway group and finished ninth. In the sprint of the chasing field he was twelfth in the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal. Ciolek ended his winless period in February 2012 on the fourth stage of the Algarve Tour , which he won in the mass sprint.

In 2013 Ciolek switched to the South African team MTN Qhubeka , which started this year for the first time as a Professional Continental Team . He should both ensure victories and pass on his experience to the young African drivers. During the Three Days of West Flanders , with the support of his team, he was able to win the final stage in the sprint and thus secure the team's first victory in the new category. On March 17th, 2013 Ciolek won the spring classic Milan – Sanremo as the third German after Rudi Altig and Erik Zabel .

Ciolek switched to the German team Stölting in 2016 . At the beginning of 2017 he announced his retirement from competitive cycling because he had not found a new team after the end of the Stölting team.

In the 2019 season Ciolek became the sports director of the Dauner-AKKON team .