Michele Scarponi (25 September 1979 – 22 April 2017) was an Italian road bicycle racer who rode professionally for the , Domina Vacanze–Elitron, , , , and teams from 2002 until his death in 2017. During his career, Scarponi had 21 professional victories.
He began cycling at age eight with a local team in the Marche region. Scarponi spent almost a decade with them, and won the junior Italian National Road Race Championships in 1997. He then spent four years at the amateur level with (1998–2000) and Site–Frezza (2001) before turning professional in 2002 with . For the next decade, Scarponi rode mainly for Italian teams with the exception of two-year spell with Spanish team in 2005 and 2006 (where he was a domestique during Roberto Heras' 2005 Vuelta a España success). After a doping ban, he had his first major victories in 2009 with : stage and general-classification wins in the Tirreno–Adriatico and two stage wins – both from breakaways – in the Giro d'Italia, where he was a domestique for Gilberto Simoni. He led the team in a Grand Tour race for the first time at the 2010 Giro d'Italia, where he finished fourth overall and won a stage for the second successive year.
Scarponi spent three years with the team, from 2011 to 2013. In his first season, he won the Giro del Trentino and finished second to Alberto Contador in the Volta a Catalunya and the Giro d'Italia. Contador was stripped of those results in February 2012 after a positive test for clenbuterol at the 2010 Tour de France, and Scarponi was promoted to both victories; he also won the points classification in the Giro d'Italia. He finished fourth overall in the 2012 Giro d'Italia (losing a podium finish in the final-stage individual time trial) and the 2013 race, with no further stage wins. Scarponi joined the team in 2014, initially as a team leader for that year's Giro d'Italia, before becoming a domestique for the remainder of his career for compatriots Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru. In his final professional race, the 2017 Tour of the Alps, Scarponi had his first individual victory in three-and-a-half years.
During his professional career, he had two doping-related suspensions. Scarponi was implicated in 2006 in the Operación Puerto doping case conducted by the Guardia Civil in connection with Eufemiano Fuentes, Scarponi's team doctor when he rode for in 2005 and 2006. He admitted his involvement in May 2007 after meetings with the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), and was suspended from racing until August 2008. Scarponi received a three-month ban in late 2012 after he admitted performing medical tests with Michele Ferrari, an Italian doctor linked to a number of doping cases in cycling who had received a lifetime ban from the sport by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) earlier that year.
Early life and amateur career
Scarponi was born on 25 September 1979 in the town of Jesi, in the central Italian region of Marche, to Giacomo and Flavia. He spent his childhood in Filottrano, Marche, with his brother Marco and sister Silvia. Scarponi received his first bicycle as a First Communion gift. He joined the local cycling club Pieralisi at age eight, and began to win races. In 1997, at age seventeen, Scarponi became junior national road race champion with a winning move on the climb to in the northern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. On the national team for the 1997 UCI Road World Championships in San Sebastián, Spain, he finished 104th in the junior road race.
In April 2001, riding for the Site–Frezza amateur team, Scarponi finished second to Yaroslav Popovych in the one-day Giro del Belvedere. In April and May, he won the fifth stage and finished second overall (again to Popovych) in the Giro delle Regioni. Scarponi finished eighth in the under-23 time trial at the UCI Road World Championships in Lisbon that October, one minute and 32.4 seconds behind winner Danny Pate of the United States.
Professional career 2002–2004: Turning professional
Scarponi turned professional in 2002 with the team, which folded at the end of the season. He had his first victory with that team, winning a stage of the Settimana Ciclistica Lombarda, en route to a second-place finish overall, and made his Grand Tour debut with an eighteenth-place finish in the 2002 Giro d'Italia. Scarponi moved to the Domina Vacanze–Elitron team for the 2003 season, winning a stage of the Giro d'Abruzzo and finishing third overall, and finishing in the top ten of the Amstel Gold Race (seventh) and Liège–Bastogne–Liège (fourth); the latter two were UCI Road World Cup races. He finished sixteenth in the Giro d'Italia, and thirteenth in the Vuelta a España.
Beginning the 2004 season with strong performances in the spring Italian stage races, Scarponi finished third overall and won a stage of the Settimana Internazionale di Coppi e Bartali and won the Settimana Ciclistica Lombarda two weeks later with two stage wins and victories in the points and mountain competitions. He again competed in all three Ardennes classics, finishing fourth in La Flèche Wallonne, and seventh in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Forgoing the Giro d'Italia, Scarponi won the fourth stage of the Peace Race in Germany after joining a late-stage move and a sprint finish in Grünhain-Beierfeld. He maintained the overall lead for the remainder of the race until its finish in Prague. After a second-place finish in the June Tour of Austria, he rode in the Tour de France for the first time and finished 32nd overall.
2005–2006: Liberty Seguros–Würth
Scarponi moved to the Spanish team for 2005, a quieter season than his previous ones; he did not win any races, despite his ambitions for the Giro d'Italia. He finished seventh in the Vuelta a Burgos and had his best Grand Tour finish to that point, finishing twelfth in the Vuelta a España as a domestique for Roberto Heras; Heras was disqualified after a positive test for erythropoietin (EPO), but was later reinstated. In 2006, Scarponi was implicated in the Operación Puerto doping case. His best result that year was a fifth-place finish in the thirteenth stage of the Giro d'Italia, a race he failed to finish for the first time; he did not start the seventeenth stage the day after team manager Manolo Saiz was arrested in connection with the investigation. The team folded at the end of the season, but Scarponi signed a contract with in February 2007.
2007: Acqua & Sapone–Caffè Mokambo
Scarponi began his 2007 racing season with the March Clásica de Almería, where he exceeded the time limit. He finished fifth in the Vuelta a Murcia and ninth at Tirreno–Adriatico before moving on to the Settimana Internazionale di Coppi e Bartali. Scarponi won the race's second stage, to Faenza, after attacking from the peloton with remaining. He entered the final day two seconds behind race leader Luca Pierfelici, who then was dropped, and finished second to Riccardo Riccò in Sassuolo. Scarponi won the overall race by eight seconds over Riccò, who also passed Pierfelici in the general classification. After a fourth-place finish at the Giro d'Oro, Scarponi was second to former teammate Damiano Cunego in the Giro del Trentino; it was his final race of the season.
Scarponi was again implicated in the Operación Puerto case, meeting with the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) in Rome on 1 May about his apparent involvement in the investigation. A week later, one day after compatriot Ivan Basso admitted his involvement in Operación Puerto as the rider code-named "Birillo", Scarponi confirmed at another meeting with CONI that he was "Zapatero" and "Il Presidente". On 15 May, CONI requested suspensions for both riders; the request was granted the following day. Scarponi received an 18-month ban in July (effective on 15 May, the day of the CONI ban request), reduced from the normal two-year suspension due to his cooperation. In March 2008, after an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), his ban was lengthened to 21 months; allowing for Scarponi's periods of inactivity, however, he was eligible to race again on 1 August.
2008–2010: Diquigiovanni–Androni
With Scarponi completing his ban, announced in June 2008 that they had signed him for the next two seasons. He returned to racing in the Giro dell'Appennino on 3 August, and recorded his best result of the 2008 season (seventh place) in the October Giro dell'Emilia.
2009 Scarponi began his 2009 season with a fifth-place finish in the Vuelta Andalucía, supporting Davide Rebellin's unsuccessful bid to win the race. After the Italian Trofeo Laigueglia and Giro di Sardegna races in February, he moved on to the Tirreno−Adriatico. Scarponi finished fourth in the fifth-stage time trial, and won the sixth stage in Camerino. Attacking on the climb to the Sassotetto ski resort and brought back to a small group, he outlasted Stefano Garzelli and Ivan Basso on the final climb into Camerino; some gradients were 12 percent. Scarponi avoided trouble in the final stage for his first UCI World Ranking victory, 25 seconds ahead of Garzelli.
He took aim at the Giro d'Italia, where he was a main domestique for team leader Gilberto Simoni, after the Ardennes classics. After pre-race encouragement from team manager Gianni Savio, Scarponi joined the sixth-stage breakaway over the Italian–Austrian border in Mayrhofen. Dropping his final breakaway companion Vasil Kiryienka about from the finish, he soloed to his first Grand Tour stage victory. Scarponi also joined the breakaway on the eighteenth stage as one of a septet of riders who broke clear of a larger group of twenty-five with left to race; they contested a final sprint for Scarponi's stage win, his second of the Giro. He finished 31st in the final general-classification standings. After the Giro d'Italia, Scarponi signed a one-year contract extension with the team until the end of 2010. He rode a series of one-day races during the second half of the season, with top-ten finishes in the Prueba Villafranca de Ordizia (ninth), the Coppa Ugo Agostoni (sixth), and the Gran Premio Industria e Commercio di Prato (seventh). Scarponi was selected for the UCI Road World Championships in Mendrisio, Switzerland, but did not finish the road race.
2010
Scarponi began 2010 with top-ten finishes in the Giro di Sardegna (seventh), and the Classica Sarda (ninth) in February, before attempting to retain his Tirreno−Adriatico title. He took the race lead with a fourth-stage victory, attacking with Vincenzo Nibali before dropping Nibali on the run-in to Chieti. Scarponi then lost time to Stefano Garzelli on each of the next two stages, and went into the final day just two seconds ahead. Garzelli's team were able to lead their captain out to gain a second in each of the stage's two intermediate sprints; with the stage suited to sprinters, Garzelli took the race overall. Scarponi won the opening-stage prologue of the Settimana Ciclistica Lombarda, where he, a time trial up the . Finishing second in two other stages, he won the overall race by 22 seconds over Riccardo Riccò. In his last warm-up race before the Giro d'Italia, Scarponi finished fourth overall in the Giro del Trentino. He missed a podium position by two seconds after Domenico Pozzovivo achieved enough of a gap to win the final stage.