At first glance and without thinking about it too much, Elisa Longo Borghini's decision to leave a team like Lidl-Trek, where she has shone so brightly for the last six years, feels borderline incomprehensible.
But while that's exactly what she has now done, and with a respectably long new contract as well, switching to UAE Team ADQ for the next three seasons, it turns out Longo Borghini only needs the briefest of explanations for her imminent departure to a new team to make complete sense.
When it comes to results, the reasons why it nonetheless remains such a major, career-defining, break for Longo-Borghini to leave Lidl-Trek all but speak for themselves. In 2024 alone the Italian veteran's victories with her squad included the Tour of Flanders for the second time, the National Championships road title for the fifth time, and the Giro d'Italia Women for the first, leading the latter from beginning to end. A win in the 2022 Paris-Roubaix was another major highlight of many.
But it's not only that she's enjoyed so much success on a sporting level that makes Lidl-Trek so important for Longo Borghini. As Longo Borghini puts it in an interview with Cyclingnews late in the season about her current Lidl-Trek squad, "I became the rider I am today because of them."
It may be true that the phrase she then uses, "at Lidl-Trek it feels like I'm in a family", is one that is regularly trotted out by bike riders to describe their squads. However, in Longo Borghini's case the fact her husband, Jacopo Mosca, currently rides for Lidl-Trek's men's squad, gives the tired old grande famiglia cliché a much more authentic ring than usual.
Put the emotional, sporting and professional links all together, anyway, and you'd think that for Longo Borghini that the idea of leaving Lidl-Trek is all but inconceivable. But then it turns out, it's not only logical she is leaving, but you almost can't help but cheer her on for wanting to do so.
"First of all I want to thank Lidl-Trek for what they did for me, all the help they gave to me," she tells Cyclingnews in an interview shortly before taking part in her last race of the season, the Reinas de la Alhambra criterium in Granada.
"I became the rider I am now because of them and I felt like I was in a family.
"But on the other side of things, I kind of needed a change, like a new challenge or a new adventure. Also, I wanted to face the unknown a little bit, because now I'm 32 and I would like to experience that in what could be the last three, four years of my life as a racer: maybe, who knows?"
Outside the comfort zone
Longo Borghini is sitting in the same hotel lobby as Mavi García (Liv AIUIa Jayco), also taking part in the Reina de la Alhambra criterium, when she discusses her short-to-mid-term future with Cyclingnews. Given the former Spanish National Champion is about to start another year of racing aged 40, the Italian star could also hardly ask for a clearer source of first-hand inspiration for longevity in the sport. But it turns out Longo Borghini's determination not to get caught in a rut before she does finally quit - at whatever age - is super-strong already.
"I'm not going to be a cyclist forever and I wanted extra experience outside my comfort zone," she explains.
"I'm an ambitious person, I like challenges, I like to go where I wouldn't say - I wouldn't say nobody would go because it's not true - I would rather say I like to go where there is stuff to discover.
"And I saw in that team [UAE] there would be a good way to discover a new environment, a new kind of world in general. So I just wanted to do that."
Longo Borghini isn't heading into a completely unfamiliar territory at UAE, though. Her trainer Paolo Slongo - to whom she dedicated her 2024 Flanders win, given his support in her comeback from a difficult 2023 season - is coming with her as well. Then two Lidl-Trek teammates are also jumping across, Brodie Chapman and Elynor Bäckstedt.
"There will be many other people I know there, a lot of Italians, too, so it's going to be familiar - a new challenge but on the other hand I know where I'm going," Longo Borghini says.
"It's going to be new but I really hope we can create a good group of people working together."
Settling scores at the Giro d'Italia
Yet whatever the future holds and even in a career with numerous high points, she recognizes that capturing the Giro this year was a landmark success. With participations stretching back to 2011 and podium finishes in 2020 and 2017, her home Grand Tour was certainly a win she'd been longing for a long time.
But the fact that she was lying second overall in 2023 in the Giro when she crashed and then had to DNS as a result of her injuries surely makes this win even sweeter. Particularly as she then managed to lead the 2024 race from beginning to end, in the process becoming the first Italian Giro champion since - remarkably - Fabiana Luperini way back in 2008.
"If I was looking for a highlight in 2024, I would start with the Giro, it's been a goal I've chasing for so long and it was also a thrilling finale," she says.
"We did focus on the Giro from the beginning of the year, we knew the route was good for me. The Tour de France was more for the youngsters in the team, like Gaia [Realini] and Shirin [van Anrooij]. I would have gone there to support them and maybe hunt for some stage wins.
"So we had a full focus on in the Giro. I went there with the ambition of being in the top five in the opening TT, and I ended up winning the TT and it was for me it was a great honour to wear the maglia rosa from the beginning to the end."
Another major highlight of 2024, of course, was taking the Tour of Flanders for the second time in her career. Usually for a rider, winning a bike race the first time remains the most special of them all. But as Longo Borghini says, the impact of her victory this time around was far greater.
"Back then when I won it in 2015 I was a kind of a kid and I was not really thinking about what it was," she explains.
"I sensed it but I was not fully aware of the importance of a victory like Flanders. Now I'm a more mature woman and I grew up a lot in the last few years" - "Luckily" she adds with a laugh - "so I have a full appreciation of what Flanders itself means for cycling.
"It's that I did not have it in the past, but now I feel it more, it's a victory that has real significance."
What victories in races as different as Flanders and the Giro showed, too, was that at 32, Longo Borghini is far from losing her versatility with age. Rather, the opposite is proving true, and again that renders what she may be able to achieve with UAE Team ADQ an even more intriguing prospect.
"Absolutely," the Italian agrees. "I mean, going from winning Flanders to winning the Giro is quite special and I recognise that, I'm quite proud of that, but I'm sure I could not have done it unassisted," she says with her typically humble air.
"I had a team that was at full strength for the Giro and Paolo [Slongo] was my trainer and he was fully dedicated to me and I really have to thank Lidl-Trek for all the help they gave to me."
Unfinished business: the Tour and the Worlds
The next step for Longo Borghini at UAE Team ADQ will likely be to see how her ambitions match with those of the squad. But there is already one major race where she clearly has a sense of unfinished business for 2025 and beyond. That would be the Tour de France Femmes, of course, where a promising sixth place in the first edition of the revived race, in 2022, was followed by two brutal series of misfortunes in the following years.
In 2023, after crashing and withdrawing from the Giro d’Italia Women, she returned to compete in the Tour de France Femmes but was once again forced to abandon before stage 7 due to a skin infection, capping off a challenging year. Then in 2024, she didn't even make it to the startline due to a training crash shortly beforehand. As Longo Borghini agrees with a wry laugh, life has 'not been fair to her' in the Tour de France so far.
"It definitely hasn't," she says. "I don't want to snub the Tour de France at all, it's just that life keeps on giving me lemons when I have to go there!
"I would have loved to finish it [in 2023] and I would have loved to have raced it this year. To be honest, when I was watching the stages afterwards I felt pretty silly because when you crash on a training day, you really feel silly. And especially if the crash makes you skip one of the most prestigious events on the calendar.
"I don't know how to explain the feeling in English. But I felt like 'out' of what I belonged to [laughs] and really stupid. Well, kind of, a bit. Certainly having to skip the Tour de France was frustrating, I would say."
It's almost shocking to hear a rider being this harsh on themselves - and being so willing to admit it, too. But it's also testament to how top names like Longo Borghini can overcome or maybe use these hard feelings to drive themselves on. Certainly, the Italian is determined to set the record straight in the years to come. Maybe as soon as next July.
"Last year I have to miss the last stages which were the most iconic ones and this year I didn't even start because I was a 'mummy' [wrapped in bandages from the injuries - Ed].
"So I'm like, let's hope that next year [2025] everything falls into place and at least I can get there. For the moment my biggest ambition is to start the Tour de France and to finish it."
Longo Borghini does have her eyes on other targets as well, though, starting in April, where too many near-misses in Liège-Bastogne-Liège - she's finished second both in 2024 and in 2023 and six times in the top ten - is an issue she'd like very to resolve in 2025. Then at the other end of the calendar, there's another race that for Longo Borghini in 2025 will gain an extra layer of significance to its already considerable prestige - and that's all thanks to its location next September.
"I would really love to try and win Liège because it's a race I feel in my heart. But I'm going to try to do well again in the World Championships, too, specially because it's in Rwanda," she says, "because it's in Africa, which is where life started, and that makes it kind of extra special."
Quite apart from the connections with the beginnings of humanity itself, looking at the Worlds on a strictly personal level, Longo Borghini's own performances in the Worlds are hardly to be sneezed at - and again, it's testament to her remarkable consistency.
Her first of three bronze medals was secured in her second year as a pro, way back in 2012 and her latest came just this year behind Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) and Chloé Dygert (USA). Given her evident refusal simply to sleep on her laurels or stay in her comfort zone, no matter the context, it's hard to believe that's as good as it will ever get for the Italian star, though. And it turns out there's yet another reason for Longo Borghini to be extra motivated about the Rwanda Worlds, too.
As her comments about appreciating the importance of the Tour of Flanders to the Belgians or her reasons for leaving Lidl-Trek already showed too, Longo Borghini has a strong sense of perspective. So it's perhaps no surprise that one thing boosting her enthusiasm for a rainbow jersey in 2025 is she also thinks that the World Championships in Rwanda will remind people how much the sport is gaining an increasingly international texture.
As she puts it, professional cycling has been stretching increasingly far beyond its traditional European and - to a lesser extent - American strongholds for some time now. Rwanda is the latest place to reflect that, and perhaps one of the most important milestones in that process, too.
"I'm very excited every time I see more people from Africa in the peloton," she says. "I get the feeling that cycling is getting more inclusive, and it's getting more affordable. I love to see the way we're seeing Eritreans, and and even a Nigerian rider [Ese Lovina Ukpeseray with the Canyon-SRAM Generation team - Ed.] now in the peloton.
"I think that's how sport should be, sport should be democratic and open to everybody. So it's nice that the World Championships are there, maybe we can inspire some people and maybe we can bring something [of our sport] to a different place, too."
