My World
Page 3
There was a bit of rough and tumble down under. I raced, sprinted, fell off, but overall thought: well, if I’m only 20 and never raced before and these guys are all 30-odd and been doing it for years, I reckon I might be able to win a few of these one day.
I thought that day had come as soon as we got back to Europe. I wasn’t meant to be riding a big race like Paris–Nice this soon, but Bodnar was sick and the team decided to throw me in for the experience with no expectation on me. Central France was freezing, but on just the second stage into Limoges, there was a crash 500 metres from the line as the different sprint trains got in each other’s way. As ever, I was sprinting on my own, watching the wheels, and the crash left me with a gap. I smashed straight through it, heading for the line, but just as I thought I was going to be a winner for the first time, I realised that I’d gone too soon, and the quick Frenchman William Bonnet came over me with the line in sight.
I was disappointed for about two minutes, but then I realised that I had nearly won in my first European race, and a big race at that. The wins would surely come.
And they did. The first one the following day when I won from a small group after our attacks had whittled down the peloton over some hilly country. It was like being back in Žilina: a flat grey sky that seemed to merge with the horizon and snow flurries that caused the stage start to be brought forward 50 kilometres into the race.
Three days later I was at it again, this time attacking three kilometres out when everybody was waiting for the sprint and arriving in Aix-en-Provence two seconds before everybody else. The question that I would hear from the press most days in my pro career was asked for the first time that afternoon: was I a sprinter or not?
That Paris–Nice gave me my first points jersey too. As I stood on the podium next to Alberto Contador, who had won the race with his usual attacking panache, I thought: You could get used to this, Peter.
I picked up another points jersey at the Tour of California and the season flew by. A year later and I was picking up that Californian green jersey again, then taking three stages in my first Grand Tour, the Vuelta, where I managed to complete the whole three weeks. In all, I won 15 races in 2011, and 16 more in 2012.
The spring of 2012 was when I was really able to make my presence felt at the Classics, where I was unable to get a win but finished in the top ten at Milan–San Remo, Gent–Wevelgem and Flanders and even managed to get on the podium at a hilly race like Amstel Gold. I was being asked if becoming a Classics specialist was blunting my sprint, but that was just daft. Sprinting to win a stage of a race where most of the combatants’ first priority is to get through to the next day unscathed is an entirely different proposition to taking a Monument like Flanders or Roubaix home with you. For a start, it’s a case of ‘shit or bust’. You win or you go home, there’s no second chance waiting tomorrow, meaning that crazy do-or-die efforts are the order of the day. Add to that the distance of each race. Milan–San Remo can be 300 kilometres long, and the bunch smashes it out of Milan and over the Turchino Pass like greyhounds out of the traps. The stamina that’s needed to be strong after seven hours of racing is not the same as the stamina a track cyclist needs to blast past somebody on the Olympic Velodrome after a couple of laps. Suddenly ‘sprinter’ is a much more complicated term than it would originally appear.
The last tool in the locker that you need for Classics success is experience. The Classics are steeped in history, with every berg, corner or stretch of cobbles known like the streets around their homes by the men like Cancellara or Boonen who have been winning them for many years. In contrast, most stage races are a moveable feast. When you come to a finish in the Tour de France, you’ll be trying to remember the roadbook from when you looked at it in the team bus for the first and last time that morning. Is there a bend? Was that corner a left- or a right-hander? How far from there to the line? Is it uphill? Will there be a headwind?
Put all that together and you just need one thing: all the luck in the world.
I got an opportunity to show the world that I could sprint in July when I went to the Tour de France for the first time.
On a night out in Žilina with Milan and all my old friends, for some reason – and that reason is probably beer – we were all doing a chicken dance: elbows out, knees out, waddling round the bar like the overgrown teenagers we were. Now, as Gabriele Uboldi, my road manager, will be the first to tell you, seeing as he is so often on the wrong end of them, I am always motivated by a wager. When the first stage of the Tour hit the Côte de Seraing, one of the steep ramps that Liège–Bastogne–Liège goes over each year, all I could think of was that if I hit the top first I could do the chicken dance over the finish line like I’d promised the guys at home.
Fabian Cancellara went for broke on the lower slopes and I nearly popped my eyeballs out to get on his wheel. He was wearing the yellow jersey by virtue of winning the prologue the previous day and was determined to make it two wins out of two. As I got up to him on the steepest bit of the climb I looked back and saw that only Edvald Boasson Hagen had made it with us. The rest of the Tour was stuck to the lower slopes. As we reached the top, with a few hundred metres left, Cancellara tried hard to get me to do a turn, but I kept my head down on his wheel, knowing that if I could get him to lead out, I fancied my chances of coming round him. Boasson Hagen was similarly glued to my wheel, probably thinking the same thing, and the bunch was closing in. Just when I thought I might lose my nerve and attack, fearing we would be caught with 200 metres to go, thankfully Cancellara opened up the sprint.
He did so at the perfect moment for me, just before the pace dropped off and I soared round him to take my first Tour de France stage win, freewheeling enough to be able to do the chicken dance all the way over the line. Cancellara wasn’t happy with me, initially because he felt I had ridden his coat-tails to the win, which was true, but he was a superstar and I was a rookie. Then that celebration really got up his nose, taking it as a personal snub and a sign of disrespect.
By the time we reached Paris, I had my first Tour de France green jersey and I’d been able to add the Incredible Hulk and the Running Man to my celebrations. I’d have won more, but I’d run out of ideas for victory salutes. At least Cancellara knew by then it was nothing personal.
2013 was my best year to date, picking up 22 wins in all sorts of races on all sorts of terrain, making me the most successful cyclist on the Pro Tour circuit that year. Or should I say the ‘winningest’, like the Americans? It’s a horrible word, but it’s more accurate. Who is to say that winning 22 races is more successful than winning one Tour de France and 17 other races, like Chris Froome did that year?
I’d initially thought it was going to be the year of the second place, when I went through March with second at Strade Bianche, Milan–San Remo, E3 Harelbeke and the Tour of Flanders. Planted in the middle of that run was my first Classics win. At last. Belgium was bitterly cold and apparently Gent–Wevelgem was nearly cancelled, but instead it was shortened by 50 kilometres. That obviously suited me, what with stamina (in my opinion) being the older riders’ strength, and I found myself at the sharp end of the race all day. With four kilometres to go and my breakaway rivals wondering how they were going to beat me in the sprint, I attacked instead and won on my own, popping some wheelies to please the crowd who’d been risking hypothermia to see me win.
I suppose in retrospect, 2014 wasn’t so bad, with a third Tour de France points jersey in a row to show for my troubles and seven wins along the way, but in truth it was hellish. I was realistic enough to know that my upwards trajectory to this point had been such that I might need to take stock. I was well known now and heavily marked whenever I raced, which was bound to bring my win numbers down a bit. I was focusing more and more on the big titles like Flanders and Roubaix, which are always going to be harder to win – that’s the whole point – and everyone needs a bit of luck. I could even deal with treading water for a season if that’s what it was going to take to mov
e on in the longer term.
But this wasn’t treading water. This was shit. I was rubbish. I was exhausted all the time. I had won that Tour green jersey again, but 2014 was the first time I’d ridden a Tour de France and not won a stage. No silly celebrations. Shit, no normal celebrations. I felt I was letting everybody down: my friends, my family, Team Peter, my teammates, Cannondale (as Liquigas had become), everybody.
It was time for a change. Either that or go home to Žilina and give up.
On Slovakia
I love Slovakia. There’s something exciting about coming from such a young and proud country, like you’re always doing things for the first time. It’s a crazy way to think, really. Slovak people have been here for the thick end of 2000 years and we’ve got our own language and our own distinct style of medieval architecture that you’d recognise immediately.
But living memory is a bit different. We spent most of the twentieth century being pulled between the competing might of Germany and the Soviet Union, and more often than not we were paired up with our Czech neighbours. We were finally parted from them without the need for much more than a handshake and a wave in 1993, a process so without acrimony that it’s popularly known as the Velvet Divorce. We still share a lot of stuff with the Czechs. After all, they make the beer, so there’s absolutely nothing to be gained in falling out with them. Oh, and we’re in the EU too. I’m looking forward to one of my British friends effectively explaining to me why leaving it is such a good idea. I’ve been waiting a little while now.
There are about five million of us Slovaks, which puts us in the same ballpark as Norway, Finland and Ireland by population – yes, I can use Google and Wikipedia, thank you – but we’re short on national heroes either in history, art or sport, so it’s a very cool thing for us to have a world champion in anything. I do feel a certain mixture of pressure and pride. You can’t avoid it, not when everybody in the street wants to shake your hand or take a selfie with you, and I’m not going to be the misery who denies them. I’d want one. And as there’s only five million of us, I’m working my way through everyone who wants one quite systematically. It’s not so much that I’m super famous or anything like that, but more to do with us not having too many famous people, if you see what I mean. We don’t, as a rule, go in for celebrity culture much in Slovakia. It’s not like you get people throwing themselves at your feet or silly stuff like that, we’re all just people getting on with our lives.
Would I be the rider I am today if I hadn’t grown up in Slovakia? That’s a really interesting question. I’m always being asked about my antics on a bike. I mean, the way I ride my bike, tricks, wheelies, stunts, avoid crashes, that sort of thing. In fact, I’m usually being told, ‘Peto, no wonder you can do wheelies, it’s because you used to do BMX. Hey Peter, you can park your bike in a roof rack on top of a car because you were a mountain biker.’
These things are true to a certain extent. You need a whole new set of skills to ride mountain bikes and BMX. But I had a lot of those skills before I even started doing those things. In my opinion, the most useful education for being a professional sports person, pretty much any sport, is an outdoor childhood, and as a youngster I was given free rein to explore and play in the Slovakian countryside. Other families probably thought I was wild … climbing trees, hiking out through the forests, swimming in the lakes and rivers and building dens and camps in summer. Then in winter we would be skiing, sledging and organising the world’s biggest snowball fights.
While you think you’re just having fun and being a tearaway, you’re learning crafts and skills. Coordination is probably the most obvious one, but you’re building your strength, finding out what your body can do, discovering your limits and then trying to reset them to a higher level. You’re training, really, whether you want to be a footballer, an ice hockey player or a cyclist. Often, when I’m hurtling down a mountainside or testing my nerves in a fiercely contested bunch sprint, I’m drawing on childhood experiences with my big brothers in the Slovakian countryside.
I’m not Slovakia’s first cycling champion. That accolade belongs to Ján Valach. He was a Slovak guy riding on international teams and competing in big races up until 2010, and was the only guy we had to look up to when we were coming through the ranks. But more than that, Ján always had the ability to see the bigger picture, which made him the perfect man to drag Slovakian cycling up by its bootstraps and really make something of the national set-up. He has been behind the wheel of the car at each of my World Championship victories, and now I’m lucky enough to have him with us in the BORA - hansgrohe set-up too.
Unfortunately, those perceptive DS roles at Richmond, Doha and Bergen are only part of the story, and the other half is sadly the narrative of my Slovakia as I see it today.
Ján started getting involved in the cycling administration well before he stopped riding. He could see that there was little vision involved in Slovakian cycling, and what organisation there was resembled a village fete. Internationally, we were a joke, with Juraj and I and the others like us relying on the dedication of our parents to pull things together and to drive us to races all over central Europe. My contemporary Michal Kwiato remembers getting to junior races in, say, Croatia with the Polish squad and their matching bikes and kit etc., then I’d be getting out of the back seat of my dad’s car with my bike wheels tucked under my feet and my cycling shoes wedged under the passenger seat.
Ján was determined to put a stop to that and demanded that the money received by the federation went into the grass roots of the sport. You can imagine that the blazers holding the purse strings weren’t so keen on diverting funds away from their own little clubs and races. There were other scandals too – the national velodrome was sold off to a developer on the understanding that the cash would go into a new state-of-the-art facility. Needless to say, we’re still waiting. In the end, a man can only bang his head against a brick wall so many times and Ján withdrew from the sharp end, and put all his energy into being the DS for the national squad, but that is the role where he has been able to have the most impact on my career, even if his vision for Slovakian cycling continues to gather dust.
The thing I am most proud of here is the Peter Sagan Academy. I set it up after talking with Ján Valach and hearing about how the national cycling programme ought to be improved, and that he met resistance at every turn.
Three years ago, I took on the junior cycling team that I’d grown up with to say thank you and to try and give a chance to other kids coming through. We rebranded it the Peter Sagan Academy to give it a bit of weight and I invested some money. With my name on it, it was easier for them to bring in some other sponsors too. The national federation was still expecting parents to pay for their kids to race or drive their kids across Europe themselves. These days, thanks to crucial sponsorship from Robert Spinazzè, CEO of the Spinazzè Group – they make the concrete poles and structures used to protect orchards and vineyards – we’re able to run a programme to take boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 18 to the same races that the Germans, Italians and Poles national structures are targeting. Robert is passionate about the sport and his involvement is essential as we continue our quest for future champions. Sportful, the clothing manufacturer, has joined us to supply all the clothing for the Academy and the team, and without their support our ambitions would be impeded. We’ve added an Under-23 layer now too so that we can continue their development further and keep the teams together. The ultimate aim is to have many more Slovakian riders in the professional peloton and maybe one day a Pro Tour team based in Slovakia. We are now supporting 85 riders at the academy and I believe it will stand on its own soon when the top teams start benefitting from the talent it is beginning to supply. There is no pressing need for the big cycling teams to invest in youth in the same way that football clubs across Europe do. Those are short-lived commercial enterprises with short-term goals. A grass-roots programme like this could make a real difference. Any number of factors can take
promising kids away from the game: the need to earn money, to study for better paid careers, other sports with better investment creaming off the talent.
Then there’s the Peter Sagan Kids Tour which has been running in earnest since 2014. Now these are awesome events and every time I’m able to attend I have an absolute blast. The Tour is run by my first- ever coach, Peter Zánický. When I was just nine years old, Peter used to drive Juraj and I to events all over the country and it is so reassuring to know that my old coach now has nearly 5,000 enthusiastic children turning up to compete and have a fun day out. These days the Kids Tour consists of nine events from March to September, each taking place in a beautiful Slovak town. It’s so heartwarming to see kids as young as toddlers scooting along on their balance bikes at an organised occasion like this. There’s a competitive element to every event, but the main focus is on creating a family-friendly day out with the emphasis on having fun! So far thousands of kids have taken part and, whilst I’m positive there are a number of future stars amongst them, it’s the smiles on their faces which make the whole enterprise particularly gratifying.
I’d like to think that any Slovak youngster looking to take up cycling as a career would have an easier time of it than we did. And who knows, perhaps one day I’ll be the guy in the car urging on the next Slovak World Champion. History has this funny way of repeating itself.
2015
SPRING
Oleg Tinkov is a funny bastard in so many ways. Funny in that he’s always playing the fool, or telling stories or goofing around. Funny because he just can’t stop himself from saying the things that really shouldn’t be said. But also funny in that he’s just not wired up like other people.
It wasn’t Oleg Tinkov that brought me to the Tinkoff team, like you might think. The prime mover behind my decision to change teams for the first time in my career was Bjarne Riis.