Nairo Quintana will race for the last time on Saturday 3 October, in the hills around Bologna. The 36-year-old Colombian has told his Movistar team-mates that the 109th Giro dell’Emilia will be his final professional outing.

It is the same race he won in 2012. As a 22-year-old in his first World Tour season, Quintana attacked with 600 metres to go on the San Luca climb to beat Fredrik Kessiakoff and Franco Pellizotti, his first victory in Italy and the result that announced him to the European peloton.

Confirmation came after the World Championships in Montréal, where Quintana rode for Colombia in the elite road race.

“Yes, next week I’ll be doing my final race with my team, and that will be my last professional race,” he said after the Worlds.

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“In Italy. I’ll talk more about it later, but yes, I’ll be in Italy next week.”

The farewell he did not plan

Emilia was not his first choice. Quintana had hoped to end his career at the Vuelta a España, but Movistar left him out of its roster for the three-week race, which the team went on to win with Enric Mas.

“I would have liked to be there, to offer some experience, participate a bit, and see the race settings firsthand,” he told cyclinguptodate.com.

“Those were technical decisions, ones I had no say in.”

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A planned send-off at the World Championships was then quietly dropped: Quintana abandoned the elite road race in Montréal with 96 kilometres remaining, pulling the plug on his home-nation ride before the finish.

A Grand Tour winner and a disqualified one

Quintana leaves the sport as one of the defining climbers of the 2010s. He won the Giro d’Italia in 2014 and the Vuelta a España in 2016. He finished second at the Tour de France in 2013 and 2015, chasing a yellow jersey that in the end always stayed just out of reach.

The darker chapter came in August 2022. The UCI disqualified him from that year’s Tour de France, where he had finished sixth for Arkea-Samsic, after two dried blood samples returned traces of tramadol. The painkiller has been banned in competition under the UCI Medical Rules since 2019; a positive test is not formally classified as a doping violation, but the sanction cost Quintana his result and his place on the sport’s biggest stage. The Court of Arbitration for Sport later upheld the ruling.

He never recovered his previous level after that, and spent the 2023 season without a WorldTour contract before returning to Movistar.

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What happens on Saturday

The 109th Giro dell’Emilia runs over 198 kilometres through Emilia-Romagna, finishing with the climb up to the Santuario della Madonna di San Luca above Bologna, the same wall where Quintana made his name as a 22-year-old.

After the race, the celebrations shift to Colombia. The Gran Fondo Nairo Quintana in Cartagena, confirmed for later in October, will mark the formal homecoming.

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