In men's and women's pro cycling, the pay gap between the top and bottom of the ladder is colossal. From minimum wages of €44,150 for men and €38,000 for women, those at the top take home basic salaries in the millions; top male pro Tadej Pogacar, for example, is thought to be on €8m a year.
It’s a level of remuneration that means – barring catastrophic investments, financial mismanagement or sheer boredom – he won’t need to do a day’s work in retirement to keep the wolf from the door.
That’s certainly not the case for those further down the payment pyramid. With short careers and a small window of high-earning opportunity in a racing career, many ex-pros must decide what to do for a living in the years following retirement – a far longer period than when they raced bikes.
For some it’s a means to an end, for others a vocation that in some cases might have been their original profession had bike racing not come calling.
For those who stick around, the move is a seamless transition to behind the scenes – often within the same team that they raced on – to work as sports directors, managers or in some sort of technical role.
Some head into the media, others to race organising, while many will pick up work on the industry side, linking up with the bike and equipment sponsors that they forged close links with while racing.
But this isn’t what this feature is about – this is about the pros who took a clean (or cleanish) break with the past and jumped into a whole different career (or even returned to the job they were doing before their big break in cycling).
While some keep one foot in the sport, occasionally reemerging as guests of races that they’d previously won, these former pros have still gone off to do something quite different, away from the cut-and-thrust of pro cycling.
Nicole Cooke: insurance
One of the stars of her generation, the Welsh road racer won many of the biggest races available to her, during a time when the women’s side of the sport was in the doldrums.
Two wins at the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale – the Tour de France Femmes of its day – in 2006 and 2007 were a prelude to her blockbuster 2008 season, in which she won Olympic gold in Beijing and the Worlds road race.
She retired in 2013, still a few months shy of her 30th birthday, and published an explosive autobiography, The Breakaway, in which she lamented the doping and sexism she’d come up against.
It was nominated for the Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year in 2014. Since that time she’s withdrawn from the pro side of the sport; first she headed to Cardiff University to study for an MBA, and latterly works in finance in Switzerland for Swiss Re, an insurance firm, as an investor relations manager.
Tyler Farrar: firefighter
The American sprinter was never a prolific winner, but individual stage wins in all three grand tours puts him in a select group of 114 riders through history to have done so.
These wins, plus others at Spring Classic Scheldeprijs and Vattenfall Cyclassics in Hamburg, came during his 2009-2011 purple patch, where Eurosport viewers may remember him as the face of Transitions lenses during ad breaks of the 2010 Tour de France.
His career ran until 2017, at which point he moved back to the US. He fulfilled a childhood dream by retraining as a firefighter and took a job in his home state, Washington.
"When I stopped cycling I just went straight into trying to be a firefighter and I gave it the same level of dedication,” he told journalist Daniel Benson in 2020.
Firefighting is a job Australian track sprinter Matthew Glaetzer jumped into this year; announcing his retirement from racing, he revealed that he’d already started working with the South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service.
Freddy Maertens: museum curator
Legendary Belgian all-rounder Freddy Maertens won every big race suited to his talents, often many times over, including 15 Tour de France stages and two World Championships, during a 13-year career that ended in 1986.
In retirement he drifted away from the sport, working as a salesman. Then, in 2000 he began working at the Belgian National Cycling Museum in his hometown of Roeselare, and later became curator of the Tour of Flanders Centre in Oudenaarde, before retiring in 2017.
Visiting fans unaware of Maertens’ career would be surprised to learn they were in the presence of cycling royalty, while those who recognised him were privileged to a rare treat indeed.
Floyd Landis: CBD purveyor
The winner of the 2006 Tour de France that, in short order, wasn’t, the American’s career went to pot (so to speak) when he tested positive for testosterone after his impossible solo ride on stage 17.
The positive was revealed after the race had finished, and he was stripped on the win in September. His career never recovered, in part because of his age on his return (33) but also because of the major hip surgery he needed following that 2026 Tour.
A 2002 training crash had led to degeneration and pain in the hip joint and meant he needed his hip resurfaced – what you might call a partial hip replacement.
The pain caused before and after the surgery saw Landis rely on powerful and addictive opioids, but he discovered CBD, or cannabidiol (a compound of cannabis), and credits it with helping his own pain issues.
From personal use, his dalliance with CBD has expanded his own business, Floyd’s of Leadville, a purveyor of CBD creams, gels and tonics.
Elise Chabbey: doctor
Not a post-cycling career change but a mid-career one, 33-year-old Swiss rider Elise Chabbey has charted a singular path to date.
She was a late starter in pro cycling, signing her first pro deal in 2018 as a 24-year-old. This was because she began her career as a slalom canoer, and already had an Olympic Games under her belt (London 2012) when she signed with Cogeas in 2018.
In 2014 she’d quit canoeing and enrolled on a medical degree, finishing in 2019, by which time she’d already become a cycling pro (having got on the bike to deal with running injuries).
When the Covid-19 pandemic blew up and racing ceased, she became a practicing doctor in hospitals in Geneva, and still found time to do the requisite training that would power her to the Swiss road race title later in 2020.
Ever since she’s gone from strength to strength on the road, with big wins at the Tour of Romandie (2025) and Strade Bianche (2026) and rides as part of FDJ-Suez, one of the best teams in the world. Whenever the time comes to retire from cycling, a ready-made alternative awaits.
Simon Gerrans: banking
As a double Monument winner (Milan-Sanremo, Liege-Bastogne-Liege), not to mention four Tour de France stages, Simon Gerrans is one of Australia’s most successful riders.
His retirement in 2018 brought about that familiar ‘what next?’ question and for Gerrans it was to enrol on investment bank Goldman Sach’s internship for retired athletes embarking on a new career.
Even without any financial or office experience, the bank sees retired athletes as having the skillset for the cut-and-thrust world of banking.
He did this for a year and though he’s not stuck with it, his return to the cycling world no doubt came with some newly burnished transferable skills for the wider business world.
As well as media work in Australia commentating on the Tour de France, in 2024 he took over management of venerated bike shop Hendry’s in Victoria.
Clément Chevrier: sommelier
It was a relatively short professional career for this Frenchman, who announced his retirement at the end of 2020 at the age of 28 while riding for WorldTour team AG2R La Mondiale.
As his love of racing diminished, his passion for wine overtook it, and he studied for professional qualifications while still in the saddle.
He began working as a sommelier in a restaurant around this time, and has since set up restaurants, called HC, with business partner Anthony Gachet.
By 2026 they’d expanded, with restaurants in Geneva, Chamonix and Chambery, in which Chevrier still runs the wine operation. They’ve also got an online cellar, epi-curieux.com.
And those who arrived from another job…
It’s relatively common for athletes to arrive in pro cycling from another sport. Primoz Roglic famously transferred from ski jumping, having competed internationally for Slovenia.
Germany’s Anton Palzer rode for Red Bull–Bora–hansgrohe between 2021 and the end of 2025, having previously been a ski mountaineer.
The transfer suits best those with an endurance background. But from civilian life, the switch is less common.
Visma-Lease a Bike’s Bart Lemmen is one of the best recent examples, turning pro at the age of 26 having previously been a captain in the Netherlands air force. Not quite a 'civilian', then, but you know what we mean.
18 months on from still being in that job, he was making his Tour de France in 2024 on the team of defending champion Jonas Vingegaard.
