Damiano Cunego is a former Giro d'Italia winner and has three wins in Il Lombardia on his palmares but his best results all belong to the distant past. After a terrible 2013 season where he was often seen working for his teammates, he hopes to find back to his winning ways in 2014.

In 2014 will mark the 10th anniversary of Damiano Cunego's surprising win at the Giro d'Italia. In 2004 the Italian tifosi celebrated that a new grand tour star had been born and Cunego was seen as the next big Italian rider.

Those 10 years have not gone as predicted. Cunego has never been able to repeat the feat in the grand tours and he has only managed to finish in the top 10 four times since his big win 10 years ago. He was 4th in the 2006 Giro, 5th one year later and 6th in 2012 and managed to finish 6th in the 2011 Tour de France.

Instead, Cunego developed into one of the best classics riders in the world. None of the active riders have won Il Lombardia as many times as Il Piccolo Principe who has triumphed in the race of the falling leaves on three occasions. He is a past winner of the Amstel Gold Race and is a silver medalist from the 2008 Worlds.

However, those results along belong to the past. In fact, Cunego's last classics win came in 2008 and since then he has only won three races on the WorldTour: two stages in the 2009 Vuelta a Espana and a stage in the 2011 Tour de Romandie. In 2012 and 2013 he only managed to win two races.

The 2013 season was probably his worst ever. He won a stage in the Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali at the beginning of the year but didn't post a single top 10 result after that win in March until his 3rd place at the Japan Cup at the end of the season.

Cunego is now trying to find the reason for his failures. He was plagued a bit by illness a couple of times and his decision to move to Switzerland didn't work as planned.

Now back in Italy, he hopes to find back to his former strength in 2014 when he will once again be one of the Lampre-Merida leaders.

"I tried to stay calm but the reality was different," he told La Gazzetta dello Sport. "Sometimes you try to prove something that you can't. In short, everything went wrong. There was only one day when I felt good in the peloton. I finished 3rd in the Japan Cup, a result that will ceertianly not change my life but it can be a new beginning. In some races at the end of the year, I helped my teammates. I was comfortable and happy, but my role is to be a captain, to win races.

"Switzerland was not a place for me, we did not feel comfortable," he added. "We insisted a bit before moving back and this took away a bit of my serenity. The physical preparation started to go wrong and there also was the bad weather. So I started to chase a condition that never came."

Cunego has been criticized in the Italian press for his lack of results and there have been rumours that he has had a tainted relationship with some of his team managers.

"It is true that I am not good at handling the public relations," he said. "But I have other talents. It is not true that I have a bad relationship with many people. With Damiani there were no particular problems with me but with the team in general. I have also been criticized for my decision to stay with Lampre for so long [since 2005]. But I still feel very good here and I have absolutely no regret. In cycling it is not easy to find the perfect team. I really like this team."

Another point of criticism has been Cunego's amount of training. It has been suggested that he is simply not doing enough to compete at the top level. "I train hard and I have witnesses," he said, thus refusing the suggestions.

While Cunego is now busy preparing himself for the coming season, he has another issue to deal with. Next Tuesday he will go on trial in the Mantova case that is centered around pharmacist Guido Nigrelli and involves a number of former or current Lampre employees.

Nothing is known about Cunego's role yet and the Italian is convinced that he will be acquitted of any wrongdoing.

"It makes no sense," he said. "For years I have hoped that this story will become clearer. It annoys me, I feel imprisoned. But I also have hope because in the end honesty will pay off. And I am honest."

In 2013 Cunego skipped the Giro to focus on the Tour but with new signing Rui Costa being the designated Tour captain in 2014, Cunego has expressed his intention to go back to his home race. As always, he will focus on the Ardennes classics but Costa has stated his intention to do so too. At the same time, Diego Ulissi dominated the Italian one-day races at the end of the season and has also red-circled the hilly one-day races.

Cunego may have to come out with all guns blazing if he wants to have a protected role on his team.