When an opportunity comes your way, take it because you never know what will happen.
That’s the philosophy that led Maria Vittoria Sperotto from professional racer to soigneur and then WorldTour chef. The Italian has never shied away from challenges and catering for two top-tier teams is no small undertaking.
“I had the feeling that year I could be happy with whatever I did. I said to myself, this is the year. Things happened and I took the opportunity,” Sperotto says of 2022, the year after she quit racing and started a new adventure.
Sperotto was never afraid to try something new and carve her own path. As a child, she was energetic, and didn’t like to follow the rules.
In her hometown of Schio, Sperotto’s father ran a charcuterie shop, while her mother ran a café. It meant they were busy most of her time was split between a babysitter and her aunt. School holidays were often spent at camps, where she would disappear to do her own thing.
“I never stayed at home or sat down, I was always climbing the trees outside. I didn’t spend so much time with my parents because they were working 13 hours per day so they sent me to summer camps. I didn’t really follow the rules there, I was escaping and everything. I wasn’t manageable,” she laughs.
Sperotto tried several sports before she settled on cycling. Swimming came first, but she lasted one lesson before deciding it wasn’t for her. Archery, one of her mother’s favourites, came next but there were no local clubs, so she didn’t see a future in it. Basketball lasted the longest and she spent four years playing.
Choosing cycling
After noticing some people riding around the road that circled the basketball court she’d been playing on, Sperotto decided to give cycling a go.
At first, she enjoyed the social side but she soon found success, winning a national title on the road and in mountain bike aged eight. She enjoyed that feeling and kept seeking it out, eventually leading her to choose not to go to university and pursue a career in cycling.
“I really wanted to do something in a lab. I was studying microbiology, chemistry, and I was really into it, but the national team asked me to join and do races with them and then I lost a bit of interest in this,” she says.
Sperotto’s racing career was brief but yielded some strong results, including victory at the Tour of Guangxi in 2017. It was her second year as a professional and she was just 20 years old.
The following season, she rode her first Giro d’Italia Donne and notched up top-10 finishes in stages of the Tour Down Under and the Tour of California. She was getting attention from the top teams in the peloton, and she was snapped up by Bigla for 2018.
Still just 22, she had growing ambitions and saw an opportunity to progress as a rider. However, a big crash at Brabantse Pijl resulted in a long hospital stay and spelled the beginning of the end for her racing career.
“I was growing as a rider but then I crashed badly, and I spent two months in the hospital. The doctor said maybe I wouldn’t come back on the bike. But I knew in myself I could heal and come back but it was not like that when I came back,” Sperotto says.
“I lost drive, I didn’t have any goals, and the feeling that I wanted to grow and get better disappeared a little bit. Then, Covid came and there were fewer races and fewer challenges for me. In my mind, I was racing for no reason.”
Grabbing opportunities
When Bigla – then named Equipe Paule Ka – folded during the 2020 season Sperotto was left with a choice to make. She didn’t stop immediately and prepared herself for the next phase of her life alongside her racing.
“When Bigla closed, I said to myself, ‘I will do one year with a small team in Italy, I do what I want and then I stop.’ During this year I can do classes about things I like. I like wine so I do a sommelier class, and I did a masseur class, because you never know what will happen and I also liked it.”
She quit after the 2021 season despite having a contract for the following year. She initially considered working in her mum’s café, but circumstances with the Covid pandemic meant it didn’t work out. Sperotto spent a brief period working in a patisserie, but it wasn’t long before she delved back into the cycling world.
A coach at the Italian national federation had seen that she had a masseur qualification and asked if she’d be interested in attending a junior race as a soigneur for them. That then led to another role with a trade team for 50 days in 2022, but her path to becoming a WorldTour chef had already started.
“I was doing the post-race food for the riders and then the first edition of the Tour de France Femmes came. It was not on my calendar, but some of the girls said but you can come and only cook, you don’t have to do massage just cook. I said, ok, ‘I come, and I cook’,” she explains.
A love of food
Sperotto’s love of cooking is a lifelong one that goes back a long way to when she was spending her days with her babysitter as a child.
“She was like a grandmother for me. She made everything from scratch and she always changed the menu for me. She really treated me like a princess,” Sperotto says. “She was cooking, and I said I wanted to cook also, so she prepared a small table next to her, with small tools. I was doing what I wanted but it wasn’t her recipe. I think I was five when we did this.”
Sperotto has never been officially trained, but she has set about learning as much as she can from other chefs, as well as books and the odd YouTube video.
“I was really nerdy about my cooking. I loved watching MasterChef, I wanted to watch everything about cooking. If I saw someone do something, I wanted to know how they do it,” she explains. “I had never cleaned or cut a fish so I would look at something on YouTube to see how to do it.
“When I was in the kitchen with other chefs, I liked to see how they work, and the day after, I remember how they did it and I replicate it in my way.”
Much like when she was racing, Sperotto soon gained the attention of other teams. Through a friend, she got a job with a WorldTour team at the men’s Vuelta a España in 2022 and it was there that she first started speaking with GreenEDGE Cycling.
“In the last three days of the Vuelta we were sharing a hotel with Team Jayco AlUla,” she says. “They were looking for a chef because one was leaving. Laura Martinelli [GreenEDGE Cycling’s lead performance nutritionist] was there and she started to talk with me. She asked me if I would like to try one year with the team. I said ‘ok, why not’.”
Sperotto is still with the team and, three years on from quitting racing, she doesn’t miss the peloton. Trying to be the best chef she can be is her drive now.
“I like taking care of the riders. I don’t feel like I want to be with them, I don’t want to be in the peloton anymore, I just want to take care of them,” Sperotto says. “I want to keep improving. It’s still challenging.”
