Vincenzo Nibali has suspended his Twitter account after abuse following his disqualification from the Vuelta. He has, however, kept his Facebook account activated.

"I remembered that Bradley Wiggins suspended his account after getting a lot of abuse on Twitter and I've decided to do the same," Nibali told Cyclingnews.

"There are some crazy people out there who think they can abuse people via social media and the abuse made me angry. I've decided to take a break and suspend my account until things calm down." 

Nibali says all the criticism is unfair and that he hopes things will soon calm down and people will no longer view him in a bad way.

“I don’t like being treated like a monster because I’m not,” Nibali said in the interview in La Gazzetta dello Sport. “A lot of bad things have been said about me. I don’t know if it's because of jealousy or something… On the internet someone has even described what I did as one of the five worst things ever seen in cycling.”