Shock: Italian cycling champion killed by truck

The 51-year-old died on Wednesday morning in the northern Italian town of Montebello Vicentino (Vicenza province), as the Carabinieri confirmed. According to media reports, the athlete collided with a truck as it turned onto the road. The truck then moved away from the scene of the accident - the driver may not have noticed the collision, it was said. The authorities initially did not provide any further details.

The experienced cyclist had just ended his long active career this season and had ridden a charity invitational race in the Principality of Monaco at the weekend. Rebellin was a specialist in one-day races and won the classics Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège within a week in 2004 for the German team Gerolsteiner. In 1996 he also won a stage of the Giro d'Italia.

Doping past However, he later made negative headlines when he was stripped of his Olympic silver medal in Beijing in 2008 because of doping. Follow-up checks in April 2009 found him taking the blood doping drug Cera. He was banned for two years, but always denied doping offenses and cheating until the end.

After his doping ban, Rebellin remained active for smaller teams, most recently for the third-class racing team Work Service-Vitalcare-Dynatek. “Please tell me this isn’t true,” tweeted Italian national team coach and former professional Daniele Bennati.

Rebellin was not the first Italian professional cyclist to die in an accident with a truck. The former Giro d'Italia winner Michele Scarponi was also run over and killed by a van during a training trip in April 2017 at the age of 37.

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Shock: Italian cycling champion killed by truck

Italian cyclist Davide Rebellin died in a training accident.

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