'We might seem like madmen...' - Pozzovivo on coaching an Olympic champion and coming back at 43

Two decades, three university degrees and what must feel like several lifetimes later, Domenico Pozzovivo is still here, back on the same roads he travelled as a young man. 

The race was still called the Giro del Trentino when Pozzovivo first raced it as a neo-pro in 2005, putting the finishing touches to preparations for the first of his record 18 Giro d’Italia participations. This week, the Tour of Alps marks the beginning of a most unexpected coda to Pozzovivo’s career, as he returns to the peloton at the age of 43 in the colours of Solution Tech-Nippo Rali.

Since Pozzovivo retired at the end of 2024, he has had plenty to occupy his time. His first daughter Diana was born that December, and he has been working as a pundit for Swiss television. He enrolled in a master’s degree in nutrition, and he was picking up his first clients as a coach.

But while Pozzovivo had left cycling, he found that cycling hadn’t quite left him. Although his time was limited, he continued to train whenever he could, quietly enjoying the private challenge of maintaining as much of his old conditioning as his new circumstances would allow.

At first, the thought of returning to racing was a fanciful one, but when the calendar flipped into 2026, he found he couldn’t quite shake it off. His initial thought was to ride the Italian championships in June, but he needed a team to do it. Solution Tech, for their part, needed to add some experience. A contract was agreed in April and now here he is, taking the start at the Tour of the Alps.

“I’ve kept training all the while, and my performance levels have remained very high,” Pozzovivo tells Domestique. “In some respects, my numbers were surpassing what they were when I was still racing, so I said to myself, why not?”

Before his final two seasons, Pozzovivo had to endure a fretful wait before securing contracts to make his 17th and 18th Giro appearances with Israel-Premier Tech and Bardiani, respectively. He is quietly adamant that this latest return to the gruppo is firmly on his own terms. Above all, he is eager to race at a decent level while maintaining a work-life balance that simply wasn’t possible during his time in the WorldTour.

“I want to strike a balance between family life and the experiences I’m gaining in things like race commentary,” says Pozzovivo. “I’m curious to see if the fitness levels I have now can get me back in the game at a high level despite my age, which would normally be a factor working against that.”

The return has been inspired in part by Pozzovivo’s latest round of studies – he already holds economics and sports science degrees – and his foray into the world of coaching. The knowledge gleaned in the 18 months since he left the pro peloton left him curious about what he might achieve were he to return.

“What I’ve studied over the last year-and-a-half has certainly contributed,” Pozzovivo says. “I’ve got my weight management under control, because before that was maybe a bit of an obsession that led me to make errors that ultimately hindered my performance in training and racing.

“On top of that, I’m managing to do less quantity but more quality in training. Before I did too much altitude and too many training camps, so I was always away from home. Now, because I’m understandably at home more with my family, I found that it wasn’t necessary to do all those altitude camps. After stopping, I realised that there was maybe a middle ground.”

Pozzovivo’s comeback has also been inspired by his sideline as a coach. As well as guiding two cyclists, he has been working with race walker Alex Schwazer since the beginning of 2025. Schwazer is one of the most compelling and divisive figures in Italian sport, winning gold at the Beijing 2008 Olympics before testing positive for EPO on the eve of the London Games, when he also confessed that he had been client of Michele Ferrari for the previous two years. 

Schwazer later took aim at the Rio Games, training under the tutelage of staunch anti-doping advocate Sandro Donati, but another positive test in January 2016, this time for testosterone, brought that comeback to a traumatic halt.

The story didn’t end there. Unlike in 2012, when he made an immediate, tearful confession, Schwazer vehemently protested his innocence. Donati believes his athlete was the victim of foul play in revenge for his own whistleblowing against doping and cheating in Italian sport across the decades. Although Schwazer’s eight-year sporting ban was upheld by WADA, he was cleared of the criminal charge of doping by an Italian court, and his plight was the subject of a Netflix documentary in 2023.

When Schwazer’s ban eventually ended, he reached out to the newly retired Pozzovivo to be his coach, a call that took the cyclist by surprise. “He asked me very discreetly if I felt up to coaching him,” Pozzovivo says. “I took a week to think it over because I felt I was taking on something very big, given that he is an athlete of an exceptional calibre.”

Although race walking was a new world for Pozzovivo, he found that plenty of his thinking about fitness could be applied to the discipline. It helped, too, that Schwazer’s training schedule mirrored his own, given that he returned to competition last year at the age of 41 while holding down work as a coach. Pozzovivo smiles when it’s put to him that Schwazer’s influence surely played a part in his own decision to race again too.

“Even before I’d announced my comeback, I’d often show him my training sessions to help motivate him,” Pozzovivo says. “And he was the one who actually said to me: ‘Since I’ve tried to make a comeback, why don’t you give it a go too?’ We might seem like a couple of madmen, but in the end, something interesting might come of it…”

Pozzovivo showed no signs of rustiness on his first day back in the saddle on Monday, coming home in the front group on the opening stage day of the Tour of the Alps that took in some decidedly rugged terrain in the hinterland of Innsbruck. 

On Tuesday, the Tour of the Alps takes Pozzovivo back to Val Martello, where he placed fifth on an indelible, snowbound day of the Giro back in 2014. But this is no mere nostalgia trip for the polymath Pozzovivo, whose eclectic range of hobbies include the piano and meteorology. His primary interest in racing the Tour of the Alps, he says, is scientific.

“Above all, I want to test myself,” he says. “I certainly have some doubts about my ability to stand up to five hard days immediately because I haven’t raced yet this year while the others are a bit more hardened. But we’ll go day by day, who knows, maybe we’ll start to do well when there’s a summit finish on the second day.”

Between its old format as the Giro del Trentino and its current guise as the Tour of Alps, Pozzovivo has now lined out in this race 17 times. He won the overall title in 2012, but above all, it served as the final refinement of his condition before so many of those tilts at the Giro.

The corsa rosa isn’t on his radar in 2026, nor is it on Solution Tech’s programme, but the Tour of the Alps is only the beginning of the experiment, with the Giro dell’Appennino and Tour of Hellas next on the agenda. The season is still long and Pozzovivo’s unexpected final act is still unwritten.

“We’ll see in June, but maybe I’ll do a stage race to prepare for the Italian championships,” he says. “And August and September will certainly be intense in terms of races.”

And what about July?

“Ah, I’ll have to back off a bit there, because I’ll be at the Tour de France as a commentator. But I’ll be doing recons of the stages, so I’ll still be able to train…”