Marco Melandri

Marco Melandri is an Italian former motorcycle road racer, born on 7 August 1982 in Ravenna, who won the 2002 250cc World Championship and was runner-up in the 125cc, MotoGP and Superbike World Championships. He won the Italian 125cc championship in 1997 and made his world championship debut as a wild card rider at Brno that year. He competed in MotoGP from 2003 to 2010, finishing second to Valentino Rossi in 2005 with two wins and 24 points behind champion Nicky Hayden in 2006 with three wins, and returned briefly with Aprilia in 2015. In the Superbike World Championship from 2011 he took 22 wins in his first six seasons, and he retired after 2019, with a brief return in 2020.