Philippe Gilbert

Philippe Gilbert (born 5 July 1982) is a Belgian former professional road bicycle racer, who is best known for winning the World Road Race Championships in 2012, and for being one of two riders, along with Davide Rebellin, to have won the three Ardennes classics – the Amstel Gold Race, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège–Bastogne–Liège – in a single season, which he accomplished in 2011. Gilbert also finished the 2011 season as the overall winner of the UCI World Tour.

A Classics specialist, Gilbert has won several classic cycle races, including Paris–Tours twice (2008, 2009), the Giro di Lombardia twice (2009, 2010), the Amstel Gold Race four times (2010, 2011, 2014, 2017), La Flèche Wallonne (2011), Liège–Bastogne–Liège (2011), the Clásica de San Sebastián (2011), the Tour of Flanders (2017), and Paris–Roubaix (2019). He is the second person (and first Belgian) in history to win all three Ardennes classics in a single year. In 2017, Gilbert became the third rider after Eddy Merckx (1975) and Jan Raas (1979) to win both the Tour of Flanders and the Amstel Gold Race in the same year.

He has also won stages at each of the three cycling Grand Tours: three stages at the Giro d'Italia (one in 2009 and two in 2015), one stage at the Tour de France (in 2011), and seven stages at the Vuelta a España (two in both 2010 and 2012, one in 2013 and two in 2019).

Gilbert retired as a professional, after the 2022 Paris–Tours. He celebrated his retirement in Valkenburg aan de Geul where he became world champion and won four Amstel Gold Races. He was honoured with a mural in the caves of the Cauberg.