Selle Italia-Ghezzi is the sort of team that exposes a problem with the way women’s cycling history is usually remembered. The biggest riders and races survive, but the teams between them can disappear behind a sequence of sponsor names. Follow only the final 2009 identity and the project looks short-lived. Follow the people, riders and results backwards and a much more important Italian team emerges.
The line ran through Nobili Rubinetterie-Menikini-Cogeas in the middle of the 2000s, then Menikini-Selle Italia and finally Selle Italia-Ghezzi. Walter Zini was the key sporting figure through much of that period, while the roster moved from Edita Pucinskaite to Fabiana Luperini and Susanne Ljungskog without losing its ambition. Between them, those riders delivered two Giro d’Italia Femminile victories for the project and a Tour de l’Aude, with major World Cup wins around them.
That makes this more than a footnote about an Italian sponsor. In the years before the Women’s WorldTour, when even elite teams could change identity quickly or disappear altogether, this was a squad capable of giving established champions the platform to win the hardest races on the calendar.
The team existed before the Selle Italia-Ghezzi name
The story is easiest to start in 2005, when Nobili Rubinetterie-Menikini-Cogeas was presented as a UCI-registered Italian women’s team directed by Walter Zini. It was not a tiny domestic operation. Contemporary reports listed 18 elite riders and four juniors, with a programme that included the Geelong World Cup, racing in New Zealand, the Giro d’Italia and La Route de France Féminine.
The roster was international from the beginning. Riders from Italy sat alongside names from Lithuania, Russia, New Zealand and elsewhere. That mattered in an era when the strongest women’s teams were increasingly international but did not have the commercial stability or guaranteed calendars associated with modern WorldTour structures.
The changing sponsor title can make the project look fragmented from a distance. It was not. Zini’s management, recurring riders such as Sigrid Corneo and Silvia Valsecchi, and the team’s stage-race ambitions provide a much clearer thread than the jersey name alone.
Edita Pucinskaite gave the project its first Giro
The breakthrough came in 2006 with Edita Pucinskaite. The Lithuanian had already been world road champion in 1999 and runner-up at the Giro in 2003, so she arrived as a proven leader rather than a developing prospect. Nobili Rubinetterie built much of its season around giving her another run at the Giro.
The race came down to a dramatic final stage over the Madonna del Ghisallo. Pucinskaite started the day behind Nicole Brändli but attacked the finish, won the stage alone and overturned the general classification. She finished the Giro as overall winner, with Brändli second and Susanne Ljungskog third.
It was the sort of result that changes how a team is perceived. Winning a World Cup race brought prestige, but the Giro was the central stage race in women’s cycling. There was no modern Tour de France Femmes providing a second obvious Grand Tour-style target. For more on the race’s place in the sport, ProCyclingUK’s history of the Giro d’Italia Women traces how its role changed across different eras.
Pucinskaite left for Nürnberger after that season, which could easily have pushed a less secure team backwards. Instead, Nobili went directly after another of the defining stage racers of the period.
Fabiana Luperini was signed to keep winning the Giro
Fabiana Luperini joined for 2007 with one job sitting above everything else. Walter Zini said publicly that the Giro remained the objective, reasoning that the team had won it with Pucinskaite and could try again with Luperini. It was an unusually direct statement of intent and showed the level at which the team believed it belonged.
Luperini was already one of the great riders in women’s stage-racing history. She had won four consecutive Giri between 1995 and 1998 and three editions of La Grande Boucle Féminine. By 2007, however, those victories belonged to an earlier part of her career. Signing her was not the same as signing the obvious dominant rider of the moment.
The team strengthened elsewhere too. Rochelle Gilmore added sprint speed and experience, while Eneritz Iturriaga brought time-trial ability. The project was trying to build depth around Luperini rather than relying on one climber to solve every race.
The 2008 roster turned the team into one of the strongest in the sport
The sponsor identity shifted to Menikini-Selle Italia-Gysko for 2008, later also appearing with Master Colors, but the sporting direction became stronger rather than weaker. Sixteen riders from seven countries were announced, representing four continents. Luperini, Corneo, Valsecchi, Gilmore, Miho Oki and Oxana Kozonchuk remained, while the incoming group included Susanne Ljungskog, Nathalie Bates, Kori Seehafer, Olga Slyusareva and Trine Schmidt.
That roster tells you a lot about the team’s ambition. Luperini could target mountainous stage races, Ljungskog was a two-time world champion who could win one-day races and stage races, Gilmore offered sprinting, and riders such as Oki and Slyusareva brought national and international pedigree. This was not a roster assembled to make up numbers around one star.
Walter Zini and Fortunato Lacquaniti directed the team, while Walter Ricci Petitoni was listed as president. The structure had enough continuity to carry knowledge from the Nobili years into a substantially stronger international roster.
Susanne Ljungskog won the Tour de l’Aude
Ljungskog arrived having won the 2007 Tour de l’Aude with Flexpoint and immediately gave her new team a major result. In May 2008 she successfully defended the title, taking yellow early and holding it through a race that included Judith Arndt, Nicole Cooke, Trixi Worrack and other leading riders of the era.
The Tour de l’Aude deserves more weight in retrospect than it sometimes receives. It was a long, prestigious stage race with a deep field and, for years, one of the hardest tests outside the Giro. Winning it gave Menikini-Selle Italia a second major stage-race leader rather than simply a support rider for Luperini.
Ljungskog had also won the Tour de Berne World Cup round earlier that month. ProCyclingUK’s Susanne Ljungskog rider history looks at the wider career of a rider whose consistency is easy to understate when the world titles dominate the headline.
Luperini’s fifth Giro was the defining team performance
The result that fixed the 2008 team in history came in July. Ten years after her fourth Giro victory, Luperini won the race for a fifth time. It was not a ceremonial return by an ageing champion. She attacked decisively in the mountains, won stages and took control of the general classification on merit.
On the stage to Montevecchia, she attacked Amber Neben with around two kilometres of the final climb remaining and finished alone. By then the fifth Giro was effectively secured barring accident. She completed the race as overall winner, a decade after the run of four consecutive victories that had first made her the dominant stage racer of the 1990s.
For the team, the victory completed an unusual cycle. Pucinskaite had won the Giro for Nobili in 2006. Luperini was brought in after Pucinskaite left specifically to keep the team in contention for the same race, and two seasons later she delivered. ProCyclingUK’s Fabiana Luperini rider history covers why that 2008 comeback sits among the most remarkable parts of her career.
The team could win well beyond the Giro
It would be easy to reduce the team to those two Giro victories, but 2008 showed much more range. Luperini won the GP de Plouay World Cup in August after escaping with Luise Keller and beating her in a two-up sprint. Kori Seehafer won the previous World Cup round in Vårgårda. Ljungskog had the Tour de l’Aude and Tour de Berne, while the team’s North American programme produced another demonstration of depth at the Tour of Prince Edward Island.
Rochelle Gilmore later described a dominant Prince Edward Island performance in which Menikini-Selle Italia won four of five stages, filled the top three places overall and collected the mountains and sprint classifications. It was not the biggest race on the calendar, but it showed a squad able to race collectively rather than simply protecting its famous leaders.
That breadth is important when judging teams from the pre-WorldTour era. Modern fans are used to ranking squads through season-long WorldTour results and points. In 2008, a top women’s team had to move between World Cups, national calendars, major stage races and international invitations. Menikini-Selle Italia was competitive across all of them.
Why the constant name changes matter
The move from Nobili Rubinetterie to Menikini-Selle Italia and then Selle Italia-Ghezzi was normal for the period, but it creates historical blind spots. A modern team can keep the same licence and institutional identity through sponsor changes that are widely documented. Women’s teams in the 2000s were often harder to follow, and sponsor turnover could make a continuous sporting project look like several unrelated squads.
That matters because it changes how results are understood. Pucinskaite’s 2006 Giro and Luperini’s 2008 Giro can look like victories for separate teams if you only read the sponsor name beside the result. In reality, Walter Zini’s project connected the two. The team replaced one Grand Tour leader with another and retained enough structure to return to the top of the Giro.
The same applies to riders such as Corneo and Valsecchi, who provide continuity across the sponsor eras. The famous names changed around them, but the team was not rebuilt from zero every winter.
Selle Italia-Ghezzi in 2009
By 2009 the final Selle Italia-Ghezzi identity was in place. Luperini remained the headline stage racer, with riders including Martine Bras, Sigrid Corneo, Silvia Valsecchi and New Zealand track rider Kaytee Boyd appearing on the roster. Walter Zini was still directing the team.
The season did not reproduce the extraordinary run of 2008. Luperini remained competitive, including a top-ten finish on a Giro stage late in the race, but the project was no longer setting the rhythm of the biggest events in the same way. That is part of why the final sponsor name is less memorable than Menikini-Selle Italia despite being the identity under which the story is often catalogued.
The change also came as women’s cycling itself was moving. Cervélo TestTeam and Team Columbia were bringing a more recognisably modern level of international backing and organisation to the peloton, while Marianne Vos’s generation was reshaping the competitive hierarchy. A team that had looked formidable in 2008 was operating in a sport that was beginning another transition.
What happened after Selle Italia-Ghezzi?
The Selle Italia-Ghezzi identity disappeared after 2009. There was no neat continuation under one new sponsor that allows the entire project to be followed forward. Instead, the threads separated.
Ghezzi’s name appeared alongside Top Girls Fassa Bortolo in 2010, while several riders moved elsewhere in the Italian peloton. Walter Zini later launched BePink, another ambitious Italian women’s project. It would be too simple to call BePink the direct successor to Selle Italia-Ghezzi, but Zini’s return shows how the expertise built in these earlier teams remained part of the sport even when the sponsor name disappeared.
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Photo Credit: Getty
The riders tell the story better than the jersey
Look at the riders who passed through the project and its place becomes clearer. Edita Pucinskaite brought a world champion’s intelligence and delivered the first Giro. Luperini added one of the great late-career victories in women’s cycling. Ljungskog arrived as a two-time world champion and immediately won the Tour de l’Aude. Gilmore, Oki, Corneo, Valsecchi, Slyusareva, Seehafer and others gave the team different ways to win.
It also connected several generations. Luperini’s first Giro victory had come in 1995. By 2008 she was racing alongside riders who would carry women’s professional cycling into the next decade. The team sat between eras, old enough to reflect the commercial insecurity of the 1990s and 2000s but strong enough to hint at the international super-teams that would follow.
Why Selle Italia-Ghezzi deserves to be remembered
The headline palmarès is strong enough on its own: Giro victories in 2006 and 2008 across the wider team lineage, the 2008 Tour de l’Aude, World Cup wins and a roster packed with champions. The more interesting point is how those results were achieved.
This was an elite team operating before the Women’s WorldTour gave the calendar a consistent top tier and before long-term sponsorship became more common. Its identity changed repeatedly, yet the sporting ambition survived. When Pucinskaite left, the team signed Luperini. When it wanted more range, it added Ljungskog. When the Giro arrived, it had the structure to win it again.
Women’s cycling history becomes distorted if only the teams whose names survived are treated as important. Selle Italia-Ghezzi did not survive, but for several seasons the project behind that final name was one of the places where the biggest races could genuinely be won. That is a stronger legacy than the short life of the sponsor title suggests.
