[1] The high point of his career was his overall win in the 2000 Giro d'Italia, after a close three-way competition with Gilberto Simoni and Francesco Casagrande.

Many believe that the circumstances of his suspension prompted the Mapei boss Giorgio Squinzi to terminate his sponsorship of the team at the end of the year.

[citation needed] In a 2011 interview the Belgian double world champion Freddy Maertens cast doubt on whether Garzelli had deliberately used the steroid masking agent concerned, the diuretic Probenecid, likening it to an incident to the 1974 world championships in which he claimed that his water bottle had been deliberately sabotaged by the soigneur of his rival Eddy Merckx.

In 2006, for the first time since he was a professional, he decided not to race the Giro d'Italia, but instead to prepare for the Classics, training with some of his Liquigas-Bianchi teammates (including Danilo Di Luca, Patrick Calcagni and Stefano Zanini) at high altitude in the region around Toluca, Mexico.

[1] He now works for RAI the Italian national broadcaster as a summariser on the Cycling programmes covered by RAIsport such as the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France.