by Peter Sagan
I’d got used to wearing that jersey myself over the past 24 months and realised that I was now without the life and energy that it brings to a rider. I was another cyclist in unfamiliar national colours in the middle of a big pack as it surged past, neither Peter Sagan nor the UCI World Champion, just another feather in the eagle’s flapping wings. I didn’t hear the ‘Peter!’ or ‘Sagan!’ shouts that the rainbow stripes bring, especially being this far from the head of the race. It suited me to be anonymous, but if I thought that perception of anonymity stretched from the crowd to my rivals, then I was kidding myself. They knew I was still there and not warming my toes in the pits or in a nice hot bath at the hotel.
Two climbs of Salmon Hill remained. As we hit it for the penultimate time, the Netherlands injected an acceleration in the race as Tom Dumoulin smashed it up the road in true long-levered Dutch time-triallist style. The bunch was suddenly in a long line and halved in size. That was the last bus stop on the route for many and they coasted in, their races run. But I was still there against all my expectations. With a lap to go. That guy started clanging that bell to tell us what we already knew. I’m wearing No. 1, but my last half hour as World Champion was at hand.
Before the race, a lot of people had been talking about Julian Alaphilippe. This young French guy had already made a big mark on the sport with some daring attacks – precociously confident race-changing efforts – and had quickly obtained the respect of his more garlanded and experienced Quick-Step teammates. His breakthrough season was 2015, when he was second to me at the Tour of California and also second at both La Flèche Wallonne, and (most eyebrow raising) Liège–Bastogne–Liège. For somebody to come so close to winning a Monument as long and as difficult as the world’s oldest bike race at the age of 22 is incredible. His career looked a bit like mine at first glance, but a proper look would show that he was a more accomplished climber than me with a lightning uphill jump in his locker.
It was Alaphilippe who showed us a clean pair of carbon-fibre-soled shoes on the slopes of Salmon Hill the last time. The French were going mad. I was about 20 wheels back, trying to figure out what was going on. I could see a couple of favourites, maybe Philippe Gilbert or Niki Terpstra, trying to bridge but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know if we’d caught all the breakaways either. Confusion reigned, and there were just ten kilometres left.
I can’t tell you how difficult it is to react to changes of pace after 250 kilometres compared to 150 kilometres, which is closer to the distance of, say, your average Grand Tour sprinters’ stage. It’s like a different sport. I looked around, still flabbergasted that I wasn’t one of those hopping off the bus, and saw plenty of fast guys left in with me. Matteo Trentin, Fernando Gaviria, Michael Matthews, Alexander Kristoff, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Ben Swift … these were all genuine bunch gallopers. That wasn’t good. At this stage of a long hard race, I’d be really desperate for a breakaway group to be caught as I’d expect to be one of the fastest left. But I couldn’t guarantee an edge over these guys at my best, let alone when I’d been crouched over the hotel toilet a few hours earlier. Sure, I felt surprisingly OK now, but I had zero idea what would happen when I tried to sprint.
I tested my legs by showing my face at the front of the bunch for the first time since the start line six hours ago. The received wisdom with cornering on a bike is that you brake first, cut across the apex then accelerate out. Trial and error – quite a few errors – have taught me that if you take it wide, you don’t need to brake, you get a sort of slingshot effect and come out quicker than the others. With Ben Swift trying to close the gap to however many riders were up the road, I used the technique to get up to him and try to affect the chase. Instantly, I remembered what it was like to be Peter Sagan as the race rode up to my wheel … and stayed there. Didn’t they want to catch these guys? There were about four kilometres to go now. Five minutes left as World Champion.
I reckon there must have been about 15 guys left in my group. Later, we discovered that the TV coverage dropped out at this point, causing confusion and desperation at the finish and leading to fingernail destruction on an epic scale among the crowds and support staff.
With no visual evidence, I could probably spin you a yarn at this point about how I moved up alongside the bunch pulling a one-handed wheelie and launched a devastating attack that left everybody miles behind. I stopped on the penultimate corner to drink a beer and let them all catch up as I felt so bad at ruining everybody’s day.
The truth was that there was almost as much confusion in the bunch as there was in front of the blank television screen. As the finish sucked us nearer, we passed Vasil Kiryienka and my BORA - hansgrohe teammate Lukas Pöstlberger, representing Austria. Was that it? No. I hadn’t seen Alaphilippe. And I’m sure that I’d seen at least one Colombian further up the road, either Rigoberto Urán or Fernando Gaviria or even both of them. Oh! Who’s that Danish guy? Who is actually leading this race? And will we catch them?
Just bury it, Peter, I told myself. You sprint for the line and worry about the position after. We were rocketing along the harbour now and there was a left-hander then a right-hander, then a straight shot of about 300 metres to the finish line. My heart was in my mouth, I could taste blood. You’re this close, Peter. Don’t die wondering.
Alberto Bettiol was flat out on the front and it was clear that this was the beginning of the sprint. Nothing cagey here. Everybody was on their own personal limit after six and a half hours, it still wasn’t clear if anybody was left out in front, and the earpiece that linked me to Ján Valach in the following Slovakia team car wasn’t helping as the dropout in live coverage had left the support caravan just as confused as those of us racing. There was no possibility of slowing down to look at my rivals. Bettiol was doing an amazing job for his fastest remaining Italy teammate, Matteo Trentin, but it was working for all of us who wanted to sprint. Shit, I don’t think I’ve ever been travelling so fast on a bike after 267 kilometres. I’ve hardly ever ridden 267 kilometres in my life, let alone felt like sprinting at the end of it.
I couldn’t hear myself think. The noise was insane. Prime reason was the man I’d positioned myself directly behind: Alexander Kristoff. This could be a career-defining moment for the local guy. He was seriously fast, especially when he could wind his powerful sprint up from a distance and he had a great knack of holding his top speed. I’d looked at him, Trentin, Matthews and all the others and decided that if I’d been betting on the winner it would be Kristoff all the way. Really, he had been my favourite ever since the venue was announced years ago – I wasn’t going to change my mind with 500 metres to go.
We swung left. The way the yelling went up a notch, the way all those Viking screams spilled on to the circuit as Kristoff began his long acceleration, left me in no doubt that all the breakaways and attacks had come to nothing. We were sprinting for the right to wear that UCI rainbow jersey for a whole year to come. My UCI rainbow jersey. I like you, Alexander, you’re one of the good guys, but that is my jersey.
He judged the last 90-degree right-hander perfectly, already sprinting flat out. Bettiol was spent. My slingshot cornering technique was negated by Kristoff’s speed but behind me I could sense a gap opening to Matthews, Trentin and the others. They’d expected the sprint to open after the corner and Kristoff’s clever acceleration had caught everybody out. It was me and him now. I just had to get past this big Norwegian guy. I’d done it before. But he’d done me before, too.
Three hundred metres is a hell of a long way to ride flat out. If it had been Mark Cavendish leading I would have been confident of winning if only I could hold his wheel through his initial explosive acceleration. If there had been 20 of us fighting for space I might have fancied my ability to find a hole to push my nose through. But this was a big wide road with just the two of us going mano a mano for gold, and this guy was the fastest there was on a long, straight road.
If it wasn’t possible for the volume to increase, then the pitch went up. It s
eemed the whole nation was screaming in Kristoff’s ears, blowing him over the line. After pushing myself to breaking point to hold his wheel in that opening 100 metres, I tried to use his slipstream to fire past. Oh Jesus, he was just too fast. My absolute final tank-emptying effort brought me up alongside him, but that barrel-of-a-gun bang that fires you around the last guy in a sprint just wasn’t happening. I was alongside him but the slipstream effect was spent and he still had his nose in front. With two metres to go, he must be World Champion.
At the Tour de France in 2016 in Bern in Switzerland I had beaten Kristoff by the width of a tyre, purely because I’d managed to ‘throw’ my bike at the line at the right moment while he was still concentrating on sprinting. Remembering Switzerland, with all my might I thrust my arms forward, my backside hung out behind the saddle. My legs were straight, my arms were straight, Kristoff was a mirror image on my left.
I waited beyond the finish line, gulping in lungfuls of air and searching for any sign of a result. Had I given enough? Had I left it too late? Every second felt impossibly drawn out as I frantically looked around for any indication of a decision. Finally the finish line photo came through and it it was clear: his front wheel was a sliver of racing rubber short of mine as we hit the line.
A huge swelling of Slovak fans burst the security line and rushed towards me, screaming, hugging, cheering. They were so thrilled for me and I was for them. We’d achieved the impossible, me, Juraj, my national teammates, these incredible fans, everyone back home. World Champion three times in a row. One UCI rainbow jersey and gold medal in the Americas, one in the Middle East, one in Scandinavia. Nobody had ever done those things before. And here was a supposedly crazy, supposedly feral kid from an ice-hockey-playing country that had only been independent of its bigger neighbours for 25 years. How the hell did that happen?
Part One
Richmond
2015
WINTER
If there are a hundred riders on the start line of a race, there will be a hundred stories to be told at the end. A hundred careers could yield a hundred different books. Everybody is remarkable but nobody is special.
I tell you this at the beginning of my story because it’s important to remember that everybody has a story. Mine isn’t more important than anybody else’s, but it is different. Just like everybody else’s story is different from mine, and different from each other’s.
My story has changed since the start of my career. It’s changed over the last three years and it will change over the next. It will change before I get to the end of this book, as will yours. Let’s face it, some of our stories will have changed while I’ve been writing this sentence.
What I’m trying to say is that I can’t tell you my life story because my life is happening and changing every day, just like yours, just like everybody’s. I’m only 28, so I’m hoping to be sat in a big leather armchair, smoking a smelly pipe and stroking what’s left of my wispy white hair by the time I tell my life story. One thing I can certainly tell you is what it has been like to be UCI World Road Race Champion for three years, and that’s something that you can only hear from me, I suppose. Nobody else has been champion for three years in a row.
Life can change in the blink of an eye. Doors close, doors open. You can win or you can crash. You can fall in love or you can lose somebody close in an instant.
Even with that undeniable truth in mind, January of 2015 saw me standing at a significant crossroads.
I was 24 years old. I was from Žilina in Slovakia, but now I lived in Monte Carlo. I’d been a professional cyclist for five years, in which time I’d won 65 bike races, been champion of my country four times and won three green jerseys in the Tour de France.
But now, for the first time in my career, I was changing teams.
I suppose I ought to go back a bit further to explain how I got to this moment. Back to the beginning.
As a kid, I loved riding my bike and winning races. People love the stories about me turning up to races on bikes borrowed from my sister, or bought for a few koruna from a supermarket, wearing trainers and T-shirts, and beating everybody. I’m not saying those stories aren’t true, but really, they weren’t such a big deal. Slovakia was an emerging country, booming after decades dozing behind the Iron Curtain, and now let loose from our awkward embrace with the Czechs thanks to the universally popular ‘Velvet Divorce’. All of us kids were living the high life and screaming at the tops of our voices. I had two older brothers, Milan and Juraj, and there was my sister, Daniela. My dad would drive me all over the place to race bikes. Way beyond Žilina and beyond Slovakia, too: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Italy … we’d just go. Mountain bikes, road bikes, cyclocross bikes – it didn’t matter. I just wanted to race. Because I was winning, and I liked it.
I was winning enough races that the professional teams started to take notice. In my last year as a junior I went for testing with Quick-Step at their academy, which had nurtured so much young talent over the years. I stayed at the anonymous building that could easily be mistaken for a factory or the regional office of a nondescript company, knowing that the corridors of this place had echoed to the young voices of many champions over the past 20 years or so. In the end, it was those huge numbers of young cyclists that became an obstacle in my progress. They process literally hundreds of kids through there every year and keep tabs on thousands more juniors across the globe, hoping to unearth the next Merckx, Kelly or Indurain. Neither my race results nor the numbers I produced in their tests were enough to lift me clear of the other hopeful juniors. They told me to work hard in the Under-23 category for the next couple of seasons and they would continue to monitor my progress.
It wasn’t meant to be negative, but it felt like it. Which is why, when the Liquigas team came along and said they’d take me on board straight away, I couldn’t wait to say yes. They didn’t need to wait for me, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait for a call from Quick-Step that might never come.
There were quotas on Under-23 teams in Italy regarding foreign riders, so I carried on riding in the Slovakian national set up, mountain bike and road races from Slovakia to Italy to Germany to Croatia. I might not be riding the Tour de France in a Liquigas jersey, but I was 19 and I was a pro-continental cyclist earning 1000 euros a month. It was pretty cool.
In July 2009, Liquigas called me up to come and meet the main squad at the Tour of Poland. Led by Ivan Basso, there were some guys there who I would become close to over the years, guys like Maciej Bodnar, Daniel Oss who is back with me at BORA - hansgrohe now, but most of all Sylwester Szmyd, who has been a good friend for many years and is now my coach.
The introduction was Liquigas’s way of telling me: ‘You’re in.’ Even though I was still only 19, there were to be no more Under-23 races, no more barrelling round Europe in a Slovakia jersey, no more mountain-bike racing. I was to be a full-time professional on the Pro Tour circuit.
Liquigas got me an apartment in San Donà di Piave near Venice. It was small, but it was mine. My brother Juraj came to stay, and so did Maroš Hlad, my soigneur from back home. This was the beginning of Team Peter, a little unit of friends who could all rely on each other in any situation. I now had an agent too: Giovanni Lombardi, a classy ex-rider who’d led out Erik Zabel to many of his green jersey victories. Giovanni, or Lomba as we affectionately call him, was the first to see the potential of Team Peter and the one man who has done more than anybody else to make it a reality. The first real appointment of Team Peter was to bring Juraj on board as a pro at Liquigas and that was thanks to Giovanni. He knew my brother was good enough to hold a pro contract in his own right, but he also knew he would fight like crazy to protect me on the bike and off it, too. Juraj, Maroš and me stayed together in Veneto, moving closer to the mountains so we could vary our training more. They were great days, and we were there for two years until I moved to Monaco on Giovanni’s advice.
My first race as a professional was the Tour Down Un
der in 2010. I’d never been to Adelaide before, but I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with Australia. Six months earlier I had raced at the 2009 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the nation’s capital, Canberra, where I took fourth in the U23 men category. I loved the heat of Adelaide in January, riding out every day in shorts and a jersey without having to worry about arm warmers or the like. It’s another country with its own distinctive smell. Eucalyptus, or gum trees, as the locals say. If I catch a scent of that anywhere in the world I’m transported back to sunny days in the Southern Hemisphere, those hot days where the earth seems to be flattened by the heat from above.
It’s a gentle race to do, too. As well as the weather, there are no long transfers between stages, no packing your bag every day, and a nice hotel that the whole race is staying at. As with any career, there are tedious parts to life as a pro cyclist. Somehow, during the Tour Down Under, those elements are less apparent. As I’ve grown older I’ve appreciated the laid-back nature of Australians in general, too. Nothing is too much of a problem. They have a look in their eyes that seems to say: why so serious?