"Most of the time I ended up ill in a hotel room or in my house" - Alessandro Covi rues illness that wrecked 2023 season

Third at the Trofeo Laigueglia was the highlight of Alessandro Covi's season. The UAE Team Emirates rider completes the season with 66 race days, however he never found his form as a mononucleosis kept him under the weather throughout most of the year.

“This year my season ended early, I've already been out of competition for two weeks and I'm resting. It wasn't the season of my dreams but certainly a season where I learned a lot," Covi shared in a social media message. “In March I found out about a reactivation of the mononucleosis virus which knocked me out for the rest of the season. I tried in every way to get back to good levels without ever succeeding, in fact most of the time I ended up ill in a hotel room or in my house."

After quite a lot of success in 2022, where he inclusively took a stage win at the Giro d'Italia, Covi looked to find his own space with the UAE team but ended up as a domestique. The team's growing quality is definitely a factor, but multiple bouts of illness saw him unable to train with consistency and quality. He ends his season prematurely after the Trofeo Matteoti in mid-September, thinking about recovering and better luck for next year. "We and the team preferred that it would be better to stop and rest for my health and obviously to rearrange everything to best prepare for the next season," he tells.

"I expect luck to give me back a lot of good things for next year, so now we recover, we recover and then we project ourselves into 2024. I'm sorry not to be able to help the team fight until the last race for the world ranking but I am convinced that they can do it and I will always support them”