Former Tour de France winner Cadel Evans will call it a day next February
Friday 26 September 2014 12:42, UK
The 2011 Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans, has announced that he will retire from the sport next February.
The 37-year-old, who is the only Australian to win the race, will end his professional career after he has competed in the Tour Down Under and the first ever Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road one-day race on 1 February.
As well as winning the Tour once, Evans was also runner-up in 2007 and 2008, and he won the world championships road race in 2009.
He skipped the Tour this year in order to focus on the Giro d’Italia but could only manage eighth place overall there and he was not a factor in the Tour of Spain earlier this month
Evans said: "All along, I had no intention to race professionally at 40 years of age. I never looked at age as a factor but I just had a thing that I never wanted to be a high level racer at 40 years of age. Inevitably, the stop is going to come.
"Now, I've come to a period in my life where I have my family at home waiting for me and sad to see me go when I come to the airport. And, at the Giro, I had a fantastic team around me but I wasn't close enough to the level I wanted to be at and the level the team hoped I'd be at.
"That at least shows that the chance of winning another Grand Tour is probably past me. These things are not easy to accept, but you have to. These factors lead you to think 'maybe now is a good time to say thank you and I'll watch from the sidelines'."
After his retirement, Evans will become a global ambassador for his current BMC team.
