Giuseppe Saronni

Giuseppe Saronni (born September 22, 1957 in Novara , Italy ) is a former Italian cyclist and current manager of a cycling team .

Career

Saronni was an amateur member of the Italian national rail team. With this he started in January 1976 on the track of the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in Berlin and won the matadors' lesson in a thoughtful manner. He was twice the Italian sprint junior champion . In 1975 he won the team pursuit in Algiers at the Mediterranean Games with the Italian team .

He turned pro in 1977. The all-rounder with sprint qualities won almost all of Italy's major cycling races between 1979 and 1983 . So he won twice at the Giro d'Italia (1979, 1983), in which he also won the points assessment four times (1979-1981, 1983) and brought a total of 25 stage wins. In 1982 Saronni won the Tour of Lombardy and in 1983 Milan-San Remo . In 1982 he won the road cycling world championship in England, two more times he reached the podium. Although Saronni did not end his racing career until 1990, the Lombard could not add any more big wins to his Palmares after 1983.

Saronni's rivalry with his compatriot Francesco Moser is legendary . The two world-class drivers split the Italian Tifosi into two competing fan groups, comparable only to the competition between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi over thirty years earlier.

After his career as a racing cyclist, Saronni became the sporting director and team manager of cycling teams. As General Manager of Lampre-ISD , he came under fire in 2011 because several drivers and supervisors of the team were investigated for doping in the course of an investigation by the public prosecutor in Mantova . The allegations against Saronni, the team as such and some drivers were dropped in November 2015, while other drivers on the team were given prison sentences.

Familiar

His father Roman was a cyclist and competed in the Italian amateur class. His brothers Alberto Saronni (* 1961) and Antonio Saronni (* 1956) were also active as racing cyclists.