Simon Yates' quiet, surprising farewell was true to his story

Simon Yates was one of the best riders of his generation, and a broiling day in the Massif Central on last year’s Tour de France illustrated the point as well any other.

His primary role in July was to help Visma | Lease a Bike leader Jonas Vingegaard, but it was proving a struggle. The race was going badly for Yates, who was still carrying the heavy physical and emotional residue of his victory at the Giro d’Italia.

Yet despite that burden, Yates still found himself in the decisive break on the explosive Bastille Day trek to Le Mont-Dore. And despite the presence of men like Thymen Arensman, Ben O’Connor and Ben Healy in that high-octane move, Yates still found a way to win, pressing clear at the base of the final climb to claim the third Tour stage victory of his career.

Winning a stage of the Tour is the apotheosis for most riders, but Yates was part of that rare cadre of riders capable of winning at the biggest race of them even when some way short of his best form. “I was a bit rusty,” Yates admitted afterwards, almost apologetically.

Yates’ surprise retirement announcement on Wednesday was in keeping with the low-key way he carried himself throughout his career. He may have hailed from a sporting family from Bury, but that’s where the comparisons with the loquacious Gary Neville began and ended. Yates, himself a Manchester United fan, always had far more in common with Paul Scholes’ unfussy way of being, and that continued here.

There was no grand send-off, no round of farewell interviews, no performative emotion. Instead, Yates announced the news quietly via a letter published on social media. “Thanks for the ride,” he wrote by way of introduction.

There had been whispers last summer that Yates was contemplating retirement, but they were quickly dismissed by those close to him. And with good reason, we assumed. He had just won the Giro, he still only 33 years of age, and he wasn’t even a full season into his new adventure with Visma | Lease a Bike.

Yates had trained with his team this winter and he had posed for photographs in their 2026 kit. It was expected that he would forgo a Giro title defence in May in order to be fresh enough to help Vingegaard take on Pogačar at the Tour. There was certainly no inkling of imminent thoughts of retirement when he was the guest of honour at the Giro route presentation in December.

Wednesday’s surprise news carried obvious echoes of Tom Dumoulin’s unexpected decision to take a sabbatical in January 2021, but it would be unwise to extrapolate too much about Yates’ motives from his statement, which simply noted that he had been thinking about retirement “for a long time,” adding “it now feels like the right moment to step away from the sport.”

In the 2020s, there has been a trend of riders – Dumoulin and Fabio Aru, for example – retiring at a relatively young age, citing the ever-increasing demands the sport places upon its riders, but it’s not entirely clear if that is the case here. 

Throughout his twelve years as a pro, Yates rarely revealed more about himself than was strictly necessary, and he stayed true to that principle to the very end. 

Although Yates spent time in British Cycling’s track academy programme as a youngster, he bucked expectations by opting against signing with Team Sky. Instead, he turned professional in 2014 at Orica-GreenEdge alongside his twin brother Adam.

They would both enjoy fast starts in the WorldTour, though Simon’s third year as a pro was interrupted by a four-month doping ban for using the asthma medication Terbutaline without a therapeutic use exemption. He would return in time to win a stage of the 2016 Vuelta a España, and a year later, he would win the white jersey at the Tour de France.

The Giro d’Italia, however, would prove to be the defining race of his career, a relationship that began in 2018 with his all-action debut at the corsa rosa. For two and a half weeks, Yates’ default setting was all-out attack, and he became the first man since Gilberto Simoni in 2003 to win three stages while wearing the pink jersey.

The final days of the race looked set to be a coronation, but instead Yates had flown too close to the sun. The wax on his wings melted on the Colle delle Finestre on stage 18, when he slipped out the back of the GC group even before Chris Froome launched his astonishing, race-melting attack.

Yates would reach Bardonecchia almost 40 minutes down. On crossing the line, he was ushered into a tent to change. His eyes were red when he re-emerged a quarter of an hour or so later. Asking him to put words on his trauma felt like an intrusion, but it was our job, so a fellow reporter and I stepped into his path.

He would have been within his rights to drift past in silence, but though Yates was usually a very reluctant interviewee, he was always courteous. That remained the case even at his lowest ebb. 

As ever, his account of the day’s events was matter of fact and unvarnished. “I was just really tired and extremely exhausted,” Yates told us. “That’s bike racing unfortunately. That’s it. I tried to manage it, but then it was blowing out really quickly, and I had nothing to give. I’m just really, really exhausted and that’s how it is.”

Later that year, Yates would apply the lessons of that Giro defeat to the Vuelta a España, where he delivered a clinical display to claim overall victory. Still, the Giro remained an itch that he could never quite scratch.

In 2019, Yates’ scintillating early-season form inexplicably abandoned him in May and he had to settle for eighth. In the pandemic-delayed edition of 2020, he set out as the obvious favourite only to contract COVID-19 in the opening week.

In 2021, Yates’ best form arrived too late and he had to settle for third behind Egan Bernal. In 2022, an early time trial win in Budapest augured well but his challenge collapsed on the Blockhaus.

In his final two years at GreenEdge, Yates was diverted towards the Tour, where he placed fourth in 2023 and 12th in 2024. By then, cycling was in the throes of Tadej Pogačar’s era of dominance, and Yates’ window of opportunity seemed to have slammed shut.

While he remained a doggedly consistent performer in stage races of all shapes and sizes, the game had moved on from his halcyon days in 2018. It wasn’t like Yates had regressed or even stood still, it was just that men like Pogačar and Vingegaard had taken cycling to places few could reach.

That realisation surely factored into his decision to leave GreenEdge and sign for Visma | Lease a Bike last winter, but Yates would still have faced into the 2025 Giro more in hope than in expectation. 

Come the final weekend, the race looked destined to be won by Isaac del Toro and a podium finish looked the summit of Yates’ ambition. But the presence of the Finestre on the penultimate day stirred something inside of him, and he attacked the pink jersey before the gravel section even began.

To his surprise, a gap opened. Yates didn’t question it. He just kept on pushing to the summit and over the other side to Sestriere. Seven years on, the Giro was his. In public at least, Yates tried to keep a lid on the emotional resonance of the occasion. “I knew I had strong legs, so if I was on my own, I could concentrate on my own performance,” he said simply.

Privately, Yates must have known he had closed the circle. Perhaps that informed his thinking in the months since. There was no world left to conquer.