by Peter Sagan
Do you remember me telling you about those last few hundred metres in Richmond when I was convinced that I would be caught? ‘They’re coming, they’re coming,’ was all I could think as I gasped towards the line then. Well, this was nothing like that. If I’d had a jinx at Flanders, it was reinforced by the memory of being handed a hiding by Fabian at the top of the Paterberg. I had broken the jinx by passing that shoeing on to somebody else. Two hundred and fifty-five kilometres? No problem. Show me the way.
I relaxed as much as I could. Despite being on the rivet for 150 kilometres, I felt OK. The gap went out to over 20 seconds and stayed there. Everything was going to be OK.
With three kilometres to go, ahead of me on the cycle path off to the left, a guy in full Molteni team kit from about 1970 was rolling along like a vision of Eddy Merckx. It’s probably the most Belgian thing I’ve ever seen. ‘Eddy!’ I shouted. He looked round, but it wasn’t him.
A few minutes later and I was a Monument winner. I pulled a one-handed wheelie for the cameras at the finish line. It felt good.
On Sprinting
If there is one question I’ve been asked most often in my career, it’s probably: are you a sprinter? Or maybe it’s: why are you such a nutcase? But no, probably still, are you a sprinter?
The answer is no. I am an all-rounder. I can sprint as well or as badly as I can climb or time trial, it’s just that sprinting comes a bit easier to me.
I’ve still got the jump I had when I first turned pro. When we do the various tests and studies that we have to do for the team, for the UCI, for the anti-doping guys, on a good day my watts-per-kilo ratio is still as good as it’s ever been, so I can still pump out a bit of power. However, I turned pro very young. I’m still only 28, so it could go at any moment. Cycling history is littered with sprinters who had one or two stellar seasons before they seemed to lose their edge. These days, it’s less common. Guys like Andre Greipel and Mark Cavendish have been among the fastest year in, year out for many seasons. They say that Mario Cipollini was like that too: good every year, despite the passing of time. You can’t be quick for a year or two and retire with 57 – 57! – Grand Tour stage wins to your name, as Cipollini did. Maybe the decrease in doping has changed things? It could well be that. There aren’t as many mystifying performances as there used to be.
The thing to remember is that every sprint is different: one hundred riders with one hundred different stories is one thing, but the variables in the sprint are huge. Most big bunch sprints come in Grand Tours, so by their very nature they vary, as they have a different route every year, every day. Even if a stage finishes in a town the race has visited before, there is no guarantee the line will be in the same place, or the route will cover the same corners, or rises and falls. There’s also the unpredictable element of the weather: rain is the most obvious hazard with corners offering the terrifying jolt of sketchy terrain and a slipping tyre, but every sprint is also affected by wind strength and direction, something you might not be able to appreciate from television pictures.
Crashes, or just fear of crashes, play a huge part in sprinting, of course, and you have to live by your wits a little bit. Being nervous about crashing often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so it is key to stay relaxed. After all, you don’t need to be sprinting to fall off. Chris Froome once crashed into a race organiser seconds into a time trial, and we’ve all had an embarrassing tumble trying to clip out of the pedals at one time or another. It’ll just hurt more and look more spectacular if you do it 100 metres from the finish line at the Tour de France.
I don’t like sprinting from a lead-out train. It stresses me out, which is the last thing I need. Everybody is relying on you and you have to fight for your position on the wheel in front miles before the finish. I don’t like fighting in the bunch, life is too short. That’s just wasted energy when you’re going to need all of it later. I prefer to just ride and keep my eyes on what’s happening. That’s what I’ll have been doing all day anyway, it’s just getting a bit quicker by this stage. If you want to win a Monument like Flanders or Roubaix, for example, the last 100 kilometres will be like the last ten kilometres of a Grand Tour stage for me: ride carefully, ride positively, keep your eyes open.
It’s a percentages game too. If I’m left to do my own thing, without anything going drastically wrong like a crash or a course diversion, I usually finish in the top five of a sprint, without needing to weigh up the individuals I’m sprinting against. I don’t want to sound immodest, but if I imagined I was somebody else watching the race, it’s realistic to expect the UCI World Champion, who is known to be able to sprint pretty well, to be up there at the finish if he’s in the lead group. That’s just normal. With a lead-out train you take much of your own fate out of your own hands. Sure, it’s nice for someone like Mark Cavendish when that Omega Pharma–Quick-Step train he used to have with Tony Martin, Mark Renshaw and everybody drops him off with 200 metres to go, but there are so many things that can go wrong. You lose the wheel. Another team has a faster train and your guys get burned off early. Your last guy misjudges the distance. The likely result is yes, in theory you may have a better chance of winning, but you also have a greater chance of coming nowhere. I prefer to do my own thing and if somebody is faster than me, then he is faster than me. No problem. But I won’t be far behind him. And I like podiums, even when I’m not on the top step. I’d still rather be there than in the bus, arguing with the team about what went wrong.
I suppose, in an ideal world, rather than a lead-out I’ll have a teammate nearby, just in case I can’t handle things on my own. Especially in the National team, that has worked really well, with either my brother Juraj or Michal Kolář close at hand in difficult moments. One man – one good man – can get on the front and drive a group along to dissuade attacks, can drag an escapee back, or give up a wheel or even his bike if I am struck by some act of God at the sharp end of a race.
One of my mantras is that it’s good to have a plan, but plans don’t always work. There is an old story from the salesman’s manual: you’re a travelling sales guy, and you walk in to see a customer who has bought the same thing off you many times in the past, and he says he doesn’t want any today. What do you do? You sell him something else. And that’s what I have to do, too. Sell my rivals something else.
Basically, I will try to ride as ‘normally’ as possible until the last couple of kilometres. The most common shape for stages in Grand Tours now is that the first hour of the day is a crazy rush to get somebody in a break, then it calms down. With the better communication between the team cars, riders and race organisation, people have become very experienced at knowing what is needed to bring that long escape back. And you don’t want it caught too soon, as that would just encourage some other guys to go and it gets messy again. You may feel it’s unlucky when a break gets recaptured within two kilometres of the line after 100 kilometres out in the wind, but it’s not really luck, it’s the masterplan working.
So, we’re all together with about 2000 metres to go. Yes, somebody may breakaway, and you have to be alert to who it is, but if the bunch is travelling fast enough and there are sprinters’ teams and lead-out trains with a lot to lose, it is unlikely to succeed. Stay cool and play close attention. With 500 metres left, I will pick the wheel of the rider who I think is most likely to give me the best route to the line.
This is another moment where being a solo artiste is a big advantage. Let’s say that at the team meeting this morning, you agreed the order of the lead-out, who was going to pull over when, and when you would be let loose at the line. Let’s say you’ve looked at the course in the roadbook that the race organisers give us all, and we settle on 300 metres as the ideal point to begin the sprint.
OK. Now I’m there, with 500 metres to go, the crowd is screaming, banging on the barriers with anything they can find, and the wind is in my ears as I hit 50 kmh. Suddenly, I realise there’s a headwind that we hadn’t planned for. No way do I want to h
it the front at 300 metres, I’ll just get buffeted and then swamped. How can I get that message to everybody in front of me, a-reeling and a-rocking as we already are, holding each other’s wheels in the mayhem and the maelstrom of noise? No chance. That is one plan that can’t be changed.
My agent, Giovanni Lombardi was one of the lead-out men for Mario Cipollini when the Lion King was in the rainbow jersey of World Champion. He told me a story that in one of Super Mario’s earlier teams, they had both Cipo and Johan Museeuw, who was also really fast in those days. They claimed to have a system of whistles they could use to communicate. I find that hard to believe. There’s no way you could hear, no way to change plans. It might have worked if they had some sheep to round up, perhaps.
To be honest, when it’s a messy sprint with the different trains getting in each other’s way, breakaways being caught, lead-out men pulling over, that’s when it suits me best. Without anybody else to worry about, it’s easy for me to change plans.
Take Australia in 2018, for instance. It was my first race of the year, literally the first time the rainbow jersey had been seen since the podium in Norway. I had no condition and no real expectation. I was there to get fitter in the warm weather, to chill out away from the media frenzy in Europe and to enjoy a bit of bike racing. The real training would begin in the Sierra Nevada in Spain, a month later. In that Australian race, if I’d had a train, I would have said, ‘Forget it, guys, not today, we’re not here to win this one.’ Or if I’d not felt too bad, and felt I owed the team a result, we could have got organised and I would have stressed about staying with them and not letting them bury themselves for me without good reason. With half a dozen hammers battering away for your benefit, you want to make sure that if you’re the nail, you’d better be sharp.
None of that, thank goodness. I just enjoyed the ride in warm weather, wearing shorts and short-sleeves. All of a sudden, there were two kilometres left. I got focused, and the rainbow jersey had its first win of the year. Nice.
There are some basic rules to follow. If it’s a downhill finish, or fast because of a tailwind, I like to start further back from the front than usual, so you can hit top speed before you get to the front. That creates a bit more momentum and makes you harder to catch. If there’s a headwind, then you want to stay covered up until the last possible moment. Preferably, get on the wheel of the sprinter with the most powerful train, as they are likely to drop him off earlier than he would like and you can use his speed for an ultra-late charge as he begins to die away in the wind.
Uphill sprints need fewer tactics. It’s usually just a macho strength battle, and the strongest guy on the day will be the winner, which isn’t always the case in other finishes. If it gets too steep, I am likely to get out-punched by the real climbers … I’m thinking about Purito Rodriguez and Chris Froome when the Tour de France finished on the Mur de Huy, for example.
Apart from that, I love those messy sprints when everybody is all over the road and I can duck and dive my way to the line. I’ve never ridden the Giro d’Italia, maybe I will one day, but I have a feeling I’d like the finishes there. They always seem to have a 90-degree bend 50 metres from the line or something crazy like that, finishes so narrow you could reach out and touch both barriers. Plus, they tend to go through the finish line and then do a lap of the town before the end of the stage, so you can have a good look at it in advance. One day, maybe.
So, that’s all there is to it. You have all my secrets. Not really secrets, just common sense, but it’s all I’ve got to give you. It’s up to you now!
2016
SUMMER
The Olympics are amazing, aren’t they? What else, across the whole of life, culture and the entire human experience, can bring together so many people from across the globe? I remember racing home from school to see Slovakian athletes going up against the world’s best at the games in Atlanta or Sydney, and the snowy, dark nights screaming at the TV as our ice hockey heroes competed at the Winter Olympics.
Olympic road cycling is odd, though. To begin with, the peculiarly unique situation in cycling where a team sport gives up an individual winner is a difficult concept that sits uncomfortably alongside the other feats of personal achievement on show. Track cycling works well, but the format of road cycling is a lot less applicable to the Olympic set-up than many of the other sports represented.
There’s also the matter of cycling’s late arrival at the party. Atlanta in 1996 was the first time that professional cyclists were invited to compete at the Olympics, meaning that the Olympic Champion has been viewed as a respected curiosity rather than the solid plank of cycling history that attends the World Championships, which hardly seems fair. You don’t even get a jersey. I know the first Olympic Champion of the modern era, Pascal Richard, ran into trouble with the IOC when he tried to have the Olympic rings incorporated into his team kit. Sammy Sánchez, the winner in Beijing, came up with the idea of adding a bit of gold to his kit, a compromise that has stuck and keeps the IOC off the champion’s back.
I went to London in 2012, optimistic that I could produce something in the road race. The GB team had spent the preceding months telling the world how they were going to control the race, to give Mark Cavendish the best chance of adding an Olympic title to his Worlds victory. Ján Valach, the DS of the Slovakian squad, thought that they would find this very difficult in the latter stages with the small team sizes and the unchallenging circuit, but they were very welcome to try, and I agreed with him. As did all the other teams as it turned out. I basically dozed my way round the English countryside for a few hours, ten times up the same shallow hill, thinking that if I kept Cav in sight I wouldn’t go far wrong. In the run-in back to London, the GB team, tired from a long summer’s day on the sharp end of the bunch, understandably began to wilt, the race fractured and Alexander Vinokourov managed to clip off to win for Kazakhstan. It was definitely a case of a hundred riders with a hundred stories and a hundred opportunities as we approached those final stages. You will know that I’m fond of describing sprints as a bit of a lottery … well, this race was like the Euromillions. The only one of the big favourites to try to take the race to the home country was Spartacus himself, Fabian Cancellara, and his effort was short-lived when he misjudged a corner in Richmond Park and hit the deck.
The race was one thing. The Olympic experience was a whole new level though, and not in the way you might think.
The road-race disciplines were the first events of the whole Games. While those of us who were involved were doing our best to prepare quietly and professionally, the Olympic Village was crammed to bursting with excited young people. The opening ceremony was that same weekend – in fact, I think it was the night before our event – and as we prepared for the road race, we were surrounded by thousands of young sportspeople from across the world completely immersed in one of the most explosive nights of their lives. Outside of my bubble, I would have loved it. I would have been caught up in their joy and expectation. What a fantastic thing to happen to anybody. But it could never have been described as ideal preparation for one of the biggest events in a professional sportsperson’s calendar.
So the Olympic Village was like a high-school prom from a Hollywood movie. The air was thick with teenage hormones and, most incongruous of all for what is supposedly a paragon of modern sporting excellence, the heady scent of 10,000 Big Macs. The Games, and the Village, were sponsored by McDonald’s. It was the Supersize Me Games. Crazy. I love visiting London and one of the best things about the city is the quality and variety of the food available. Some of the best restaurants I’ve ever eaten in are in London, plus the general standard of snacks, supermarket stuff and even street food is great. Yet here I was living in a 24-hour Drive Thru crammed with teenagers all trying to see how many McNuggets they could get in their mouth at one time.
I’m sure that when Marlon is a bit older I will love seeing his face when I tell him that I went to the Olympics in London, but frankly it was an experi
ence that, on the whole, I was in no rush to repeat.
Rio 2016 was looming on the horizon. The road-race circuit featured a pretty significant climb that would seriously reduce my chances of winning. Another huge mark in the ‘cons’ column was the memory of Cav’s experience four years previously and the awareness that this time round it could well be me riding round and round with a hundred people on my wheel waiting for something to happen.
In the middle of what was beginning to feel like a pretty gloomy conversation with Gabriele and Lomba about all this stuff, we came up with what felt like a stroke of genius. Forget the Olympic Village. Forget the Olympic Road Race. We’d have a summer to remember chilling out on a Brazilian beach and do the mountain bike race instead. Yes, that’s right, the Olympic Mountain Bike Race. The chilled atmosphere of MTB racing was something I hadn’t experienced since I was a junior. And there was none of this ambiguity about how important the Olympics were to mountain biking. It’s the daddy, pure and simple. Turn up, become a mountain-biking legend, then disappear into the sunset, all in the space of one afternoon. Like the Lone Ranger. With Gabri as Tonto.
Why not? I love mountain biking. Come on, how hard could it be? Why so serious?
The first and biggest hurdle was getting Oleg Tinkov to agree to it. He was my boss, after all. He paid my wages. We knew by now that he was going to wind the team up at the end of 2016, but he wanted to be remembered, to be missed, and that meant going out with the biggest bang possible.