Italian Road Championships: Club-level Filippo Conca shocks WorldTour riders by sprinting to road race title

It was surprise in the Italian road championships as a non-UCI rider took the title, with Swatt Club's Filippo Conca beating two WorldTour riders and one WorldTour development rider to the win in a small sprint in Gorizia.

Club-level team Swatt Club were all over the race in north east Italy, and ended up with two riders in the final five-rider group that went to the finish, with Conca remarkably outsprinting Alessandro Covi (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and Thomas Pesenti (Soudal-QuickStep Devo Team) to take the win. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's Giovanni Aleotti was also in the group, and finished fourth.

The twenty-six-year old has spent time in the pro UCI ranks, spending time with Lotto and then Q36.5 for the last two years, but dropped down to club level for 2025 – though clearly his form and strength didn't drop.

After an aggressive finale, a big group of attackers was whittled down – mainly by crashes – to just five in the final 10km, and it was a scrappy sprint to the line with the rider in all white grabbing the win in front of Covi, the favourite on paper.

The day's main breakaway was made up of Samuele Zoccarato (Polti VisitMalta) and the Swatt Club duo of Francesco Carollo and Lorenzo Ginestra, and they built up a gap of two minutes, but things were never truly settled behind with attacks throughout the day, especially going into the final 50km of racing.

In the final 40km, the attacks and splits in the bunch intensified, with two chasers setting off in pursuit of the leaders, and a group of around 10 behind them, before what remained of the peloton, which included Jonathan Milan and his Lidl-Trek teammates.

Going into the final 30km, the break had shrunk to two as Carollo fell away, but the pair only had 30 seconds on some motivated chasers, and the chasers and leaders all came together into one big group at the start of the final lap.

With 19km to go, Milan, seemingly unsatisfied with the pace in the peloton, put in a small attack of his own, though he was soon brought back. This spurred XDS-Astana to join the chase, but the bunch was still 45 seconds behind the leaders.

Milan kept trying to chase on his own accord behind, and did make it close enough to take seventh on the day – just 11 seconds down on the winner – but ultimately missed out of victory and the attackers survived to the line.

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