My World

by Peter Sagan

  Looking at the video footage now, two things strike me: the first is that it doesn’t look like a hill. My God, it felt like the Mur de Grammont to me. Secondly, they look miles behind. Let me tell you, I was convinced I could feel Edvald Boasson Hagen’s cold Scandinavian breath on the back of my neck all the way up that final horrific 600 metres of Governor’s Hill.

  Needing to find some speed from somewhere, I abandoned my attempt to stay zen and calm, and stood on the pedals and dropped it down a cog. At this point, I suffered one of the most heart-attack-inducing moments of a career littered with scary moments, when my dumb ugly riding style and twisted hip contrived to yank my foot out of the pedal. I could have easily lost all momentum, swerved across the road and been passed within sight of the line and finished 30th. I could have face-planted and become the subject of the most watched clip on YouTube of all time. I could have slowed momentarily and lost the sprint due to the interruption in speed. Fortunately, my shoe plates stayed true and I slotted straight back in.

  In retrospect, it was the perfect nudge I needed to see me over the line. Exploding now with rage and adrenalin, I found reserves that had been hiding. Peter, you idiot! They’re coming! They’re coming!

  In actual fact, when I finally accepted with 50 metres to go that it might well be that I was going to win, the chasers were probably no closer than when I’d looked back after the mental downhill plunge into that sketchy left-hander a couple of minutes earlier.

  They’d closed the gap slightly by the time I rolled over the line, but by then I’d had a few seconds to sit up, shake my head in delighted wonderment, and acknowledge those people on the other side of the barriers who had done so much to make this the moment that changed my life for ever.

  Part Two

  Doha

  2016

  WINTER

  Understanding that I was going to win in those last few yards shaped the next few minutes significantly. It’s a big deal to know you are the new UCI World Champion without having to hurl your bike at the line in a desperate lunge or wait for the finish-line journalists to tell you if you got first, or wait for your soigneurs to hug you, or even wait for the official photograph to declare you victorious. To be able to grin and hold your hands aloft rather than crumpling in a heap of exhaustion is pretty special too.

  I stood in the middle of the road, rolled my bike off on its own, not caring if anybody caught it (there’s gratitude for you!) and lobbed my helmet into the air. Tom Boonen caught my eye as he came over the line a few moments later and, to the credit of the great man, instead of thumping his bars in frustration at an opportunity missed, he gave me a big grin and a high five, as did Elia Viviani and Zdenek Stybar.

  There was a little bit of fuss when I felt some of the congratulations were getting a bit over the top. Around the podium, press hyperbole began to spin out of control and I turned the conversation to the refugee crisis in Europe. I don’t know if you remember what it was like in the summer of 2015, but there were stories every day about desperate people dying as they tried to flee places that they once called home. I wasn’t declaring myself to be a self-appointed ambassador or anything, I just felt a bit uncomfortable that folk were lining up to kiss my feet while there was more important stuff going on in the world.

  But in my world? Yeah, it was a big deal. 2015 had been the backdrop for both the lowest moments of my career and the highest.

  OK, I ought to admit at this point that I had decided that I definitely didn’t want to retire any more. It had been serious: the overtraining, the firing of Bjarne Riis, the disagreements with Bobby Julich, the total lack of form, the hip problem, the pressure from the team, the supposed contract renegotiations, the disillusion that had settled on me; all these issues had taken their toll.

  But California, Patxi, Team Peter and bike riding had brought me back. All those things, yes. But one thing in particular. Having a woman as amazing as Katarina beside me had given me reserves of strength that I didn’t know I had, and I was going to make damn sure of two things: one, that she knew how much I loved her, and two, that I wasn’t going to let her get away from me easily.

  And so it was in Slovakia, in the bosom of our families and friends, that we were married less than two months after I’d become UCI World Champion.

  There are a few things that I need to clear up about our wedding, as people seem to ask me about it all the time.

  One of the reasons for such interest is that we didn’t want a celebrity wedding. We had lots of people trying to get access, pay us money, or even just get an invitation, but as far as we were concerned, that was not in the spirit of such an occasion. So if you can’t find much on YouTube, it’s because of that. Our wedding day was a mixture of Slovak traditions, more specialist traditions from Katarina’s home town, and some fun stuff that we dreamt up between us.

  We got married in Katarina’s home town, Dolný Kubín. In preparation, I bought us a white Cadillac to deliver us to the service, but the thing rather inauspiciously broke down the day before. Not to be thwarted in my desire to arrive at my wedding in a really special car, I went out and got my hands on the next best thing: an old green Trabant.

  My friend Martin was driving, and we coughed and spluttered through all of the friends and locals who had turned out to wish us well. The first stop we had to make was not at the church, but outside Katarina’s family home to complete an important tradition. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is a Slovakian ritual or maybe just something they do in Dolný Kubín as I’ve never seen it before, but I was confronted by a slender tree trunk laid across her driveway and presented with a rusty old hacksaw. It is the groom’s job to cut clean through the wood before he can proceed, so I set to it. After a few minutes of me huffing and puffing with the blunted blade, the crowd was beginning to get restless. As I started to build up a bit of heat and get a bead of sweat on under the heavy Slovakian wedding suit I was wearing, I began to wonder if we should have arrived the day before to get started, but then, thankfully, the cavalry arrived. Or rather Martin, appearing at my shoulder with a petrol chainsaw that a sympathetic local had rustled up. Much more my style, and the gold brocade that adorned my traditional outfit was now more at risk from sawdust than perspiration.

  Vroom. Crunch. Thank God for that chainsaw. I might still be there now, ploughing my lonely little groove in the wood with that ancient blade while Katerina frowned at her watch on the church steps and her hair turned as white as her dress. I love a tradition as much as the next man, but I was planning on getting married that day.

  Job done, and we were back in the Trabant like Batman and Robin, and racing off down the street at a speed very nearly quicker than walking pace, the engine roaring at a pitch nowhere near as impressive as the chainsaw.

  Religion and the whole way of life within the Catholic church is a rock to most of us Slovakians. Seeing the beautiful woman who I was going to spend the rest of my life with in her wedding dress walk up the historic steps of St Catherine’s was an emotional moment for me, to the extent that I can barely bring to mind the service that followed. All I can picture when I try to think about it now is Katarina, radiant in that incredible white dress and veil.

  A little way out of Dolný Kubín, a sheer cliff face of limestone hulks above a bend in the river Orava. The narrow platform of rock that sits on top of the impressive formation has been home for at least a thousand years to the incredible Castle Orava. This is where the notoriously spooky silent film Nosferatu was shot in the 1920s, and we picked it as a dramatic backdrop for our celebrations.

  We’d spent many an enjoyable evening chatting over dinner about doing something that people would remember. You only get married once, so it seemed to us that pictures of us standing on a lawn, or in front of a hotel, would be … well, they’d be nice, but we could dress up and go into the garden any time. This was going to be a one-off, and we wanted the pictures to be unique too. We had Nosferatu’s castle: what next? In the end, we called in our photogr
apher friend Jakub Klimo to design something, and he came up with another stunt that people often ask me about. I had to wriggle out of that suit, get rigged up with a stuntman’s harness, then put the suit back on over the top. Then, I was hoisted into the air and lowered on to a narrow bar about six metres above the ground. Awaiting me there was a sort of tiny Victorian trick cycle that looked as if it had been whisked through time from a nineteenth-century sideshow carnival. Below me, continuing the sort of H.G. Wells steampunk theme, people gathered in Dickensian hats and bonnets, just as huge clouds of smoke began to billow around them. Through their midst, resplendent in her stunning wedding dress, strode Katarina, pulling at strings that appeared to operate me and my stunt bike in the sky like an inverse puppet show. To be honest, I have no real explanation for this one, you’ll have to ask Jakub, but it was certainly a lot of fun.

  Mr and Mrs Sagan. It felt good.

  Giovanni was ahead of the game that winter. I thought I was pretty much on top of my life, managing to meet the commercial responsibilities that the team expected of me and the growing list of personal endorsements and arrangements that we’d picked up, as well as finding time for friends, family and kicking back, but still training hard enough to win more races and honour the UCI rainbow jersey.

  I was wrong.

  It was like a switch clicked on somewhere in the ether the second I crossed that finish line in Richmond and a whole globe full of people who had been blissfully unaware of my existence until that moment suddenly wanted, no, needed to talk to me. The attention you receive for being a sportsperson at a certain level has always been a curious but not unpleasant side effect of success for me. I’ve always enjoyed it up to a point; that point is when I close my front door and shut the world out, or climb on to the team bus with my teammates, or, best of all, when I’m on my bike in the company of the professional peloton. Now, there was no let up.

  In those months after Richmond, my time wasn’t my own and it was difficult to make out the light at the end of the tunnel. How can I describe it? Imagine you’re swimming in a warm, blue sea, with clear water below you and the sun tickling your shoulders. Nice, eh? Now imagine that you can’t see land any more. Not so good. Actually, the experience hasn’t changed, but the fear that you may go under before it relents has shifted the perspective drastically.

  I began to have an insight into the so-called ‘curse of the rainbow jersey’, where former World Champions had followed up the best day of their lives with a harrowing season of poor results. Curses were nothing to do with it: the slump in form was surely much more likely to have been caused by the interruption to their carefully crafted training programmes and lives beyond the bike.

  This is where having an agent who is a shrewd businessman, a trusted friend and also a former top rider is a crucial advantage. Instead of instantly cashing in on the opportunities beating a path to the Team Peter front door, Giovanni knew that this was precisely the moment where we had to take most care of my career.

  He and I talked at length about what we should do to help me stay focused. Focused and happy: we both knew I win nothing when I’m miserable.

  This is the point where I shine a little more light on the second-most important adult in my life, my constant companion, my sidekick, the incomparable and long-suffering Gabriele Uboldi.

  Gabriele was already in the Tinkoff set-up, looking after all of us riders as a press officer. In a big cycling team, you tend to get quite close to your PR guys, more so than in other sports, because the nature of being on the road and so close to the public means they are key components in keeping the team functioning. After all, the whole point of funding a professional cycling team is to generate publicity, so you can’t just pull the blinds down. You have to find a balance between giving something of yourself to the followers of the sport, preparing and racing to the best of your abilities and keeping a sliver of yourself for those closest to you. People like Gabriele become part of the squad, just like riders, directors, coaches, soigneurs and mechanics.

  Foreseeing the issues that the extra attention of being World Champion would bring, Giovanni approached Stefano Feltrin at Tinkoff to propose moving Gabriele into a role where he would be looking after me more, but would still be able to keep up with his team duties and could do both jobs for the same money. We’d already approached Gabri to see if he’d be up for the switch, and he’d given us the nod after some consideration. He obviously hadn’t given it enough thought, but that’s Gabri.

  However, things didn’t go to plan. Feltrin believed there was no way Gabriele could be spared from his team duties and that we’d all just have to dig in, work hard and embrace the extra attention coming my way.

  Now, something you may not know about me, and I don’t think it’s come up before now, is that I love a fire extinguisher. Some people are crazy about setting things on fire. I’m mad about putting them out. Come on, who among us can put hand on heart and say they have never ever thought: ‘Ooh, look at that. Shiny and red. Fun, surely?’

  Take that house that I got built in Žilina, for example. The one with the garage, the bedroom, the gym and not much else that ended up becoming the Centro Sportive. Well, when it was finished, I had some friends round to celebrate, as you do, and of course, there had to be a fire-extinguisher moment. It took a gang of professional cleaners three visits to get rid of it all. The white stuff floats in the air, waiting for the cleaners to do their job and leave, then gently sinks down to the floor and leaves a new fine layer over everything.

  Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for the fire extinguisher, so I spend most days reining in my natural urges to snuff out non-existent conflagrations, but every now and then, it feels like the right thing to do.

  Like, for instance, when the Tinkoff team were in Poreč on the Istrian coast for a winter training camp, the day after Stefano Feltrin had turned down Giovanni’s request to move Gabriele to become my full-time manager, assistant and minder. There, in the crowded hotel lobby, with teammates, staff, hotel staff and other guests milling around, it was clear to me that everybody would get a real lift if I were to drench them all with a fire extinguisher.

  The next morning, Feltrin was on the phone to Gabriele, telling him that he’d had an idea: how would he like to become Peter Sagan’s full-time assistant? At least I think he said ‘assistant’. It might have been ‘fire-extinguisher banisher’.

  From that point on, where I go, Gabri goes. It’s been a huge step-change for me and positive in every way. Now I can concentrate on riding, racing, relaxing and spending maximum time with my family, instead of rushing around and worrying if I’ve forgotten something: passport, kit, senses. He does all the worrying, fields as much as possible himself, and gets me to where I need to be. Now, if Gabri says I need to do something, I know that thing has already been tested and prodded to see if it really needs me to do it, so I accept it without question.

  It doesn’t feel like he keeps me out of trouble, but I suppose he does in that we fill the time with other stuff. As well as the constant bets, dares and challenges, all that dead time between training, racing and commercial stuff is now filled with PS4 rather than fire extinguishers. There are long hours in hotels when there’s not enough time to go home, but still time to fill. That’s when Gabri comes into his own. He is the perfect FIFA18 opponent: willing, enthusiastic, not useless, but not as good as me. He will tell you that he lets me win, because it’s good for my morale before races. If that was true, then he’d still win the odd game now and then, just to keep it realistic. This is sadly beyond him. I am Barcelona and he is Juventus, which is a great window on our characters: I get a wild joy out of simply playing the game, he takes pleasure in trying to stop others enjoying themselves. And fails.

  On Tinkov

  Cycling has always been the most commercial of commercial sports – what other sport can you think of where the name of the team is the name of their sponsor? Cristiano Ronaldo plays for Juventus, but if he was a cyclist, he’d ride
for Samsung. The people with the money play more obvious and less altruistic roles than in other professional sports. In cycling, we are told about the appeal of sponsor airtime and exposure for their brand.

  Bike companies like Scott or Trek continue as headline sponsors because the link to their customers is easy to understand, and pro riders emblazoned with their names and logos, using their gear is the best possible showcase for their excellence.

  Apart from that, pretty much every top cycling team is sponsored by a company run by individuals who are passionate about the sport and want to be involved. Even Sky, a team held up as being the logical conclusion for all things commercial, is reportedly run as the personal project of cycling-mad James Murdoch. He is in good company, as most teams have a driving influence pushing them along, somebody who does it because they can afford it and they love it.

  There is no finer example than Oleg Tinkov.

  As it happens, he is a friend of Chelsea’s Roman Abramovich, the man he most resembles from other sports. Both fiercely competitive businessmen who saw their chances after the collapse of the Soviet Union to build empires of their own, they get a tremendous kick out of assembling the team of their own choice then cheering it to victory. Who wouldn’t?

  As characters though, they are very different. I don’t know Abramovich, but he seems like a very quiet guy, completely impervious to requests for interviews, keeping his opinions to himself and happy to bask in the reflective glory of his club’s successes.

  That doesn’t sound much like Oleg.

  There isn’t a subject that Oleg doesn’t have an opinion on. And if you’re talking to him about something he wasn’t aware of beforehand, he’ll have formed a view on it before you’ve finished asking the question.