by Peter Sagan
I had no inkling that the straightforward-looking flat stage from Luxembourg to Vittel would be the most momentous of my whole Tour de France career.
Until the last 300 metres, it was indeed straightforward. A long, lovely day following the Mosel with nothing much to report, so I won’t bore you with that. But I will try to give you my account of what happened at the finish line, firstly in real time as it happened for me, then with the benefit of replays.
Dimension Data started winding up the pace, then Lotto took it up for Greipel, but the man to really open the sprint was Alexander Kristoff. He likes the long, sustained outside-lane power drive over the sharp burst, and he was travelling pretty swiftly. I was trying to follow him, but was suddenly aware of the other sprinters whooshing towards me from my left. Forced right, I felt a nudge on my right as the distance between me and the barriers shrunk dramatically. I heard a yell and the unmistakeable metal-on-carbon-on-Lycra-on-tarmac sound of a crash. A moment later, Arnaud Démare had won the stage, I was second and Kristoff third, but Mark Cavendish, John Degenkolb and Ben Swift were all on the ground.
I learned it was Cav who’d gone down next to me. Shit, it sounded like a bad one, and we were certainly travelling fast. When I saw Gabriele 100 metres past the line, he was grim-faced and I was instantly worried that somebody, probably Cav, was seriously injured. He put his arm round me and ushered me quickly towards the BORA - hansgrohe bus. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘we have a problem.’ Huh? We have a problem? I knew that the sprint had ended badly and people might be hurt. We take our lives in our hands every time we try to win a Tour de France stage with nothing but a polystyrene lid and leather mitts to protect us from the road. Cav and I had touched at high speed, either one of us could have gone down, but he was the unlucky one. But now Gabri was telling me that we had a problem. We? Me? Why?
We watched the playback. Oh shit. As we get squeezed and Cav is on my right, you can clearly see my elbow come out into him. It looked bad.
Immediately, I said sorry to Cav. Not ‘Sorry I pushed you off’, you understand, but, ‘Sorry you crashed.’ There is a brotherhood among sprinters: you have to respect each other’s safety and you have to feel for each other when it goes wrong. It was Cav today, but it could have easily been the other way round, and maybe tomorrow it would be.
Within minutes, the race jury announced that I had been demoted to last in the bunch, with a penalty of 30 seconds in the general classification and 80 points in the points classification. I was now out of the top ten on GC and falling down the green jersey rankings.
Cav had broken his shoulder and cut his hand quite badly. He was definitely out of the race. Then, abruptly, so was I. Following a protest from Dimension Data, the Tour de France kicked me out.
It seemed that veering off my line had been enough to earn me the original punishment, but they agreed with Dimension Data that I had deliberately elbowed Mark to the floor.
It wasn’t true. I didn’t deliberately elbow him. We protested, but to no avail. Cav was out injured, I was out disqualified.
I love Mark Cavendish. I am fond of saying that though we cyclists race against each other many times, we never really get to know each other unless we make friends away from racing, and very few of us do so. Mark is a little bit different because he wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s so unreserved and openly emotional that he’s very easy to like and understand. You feel like you know him when you’ve only met a few times, and by 2017 we had been together on countless occasions. That evening I called him to find out how he was. It was a really difficult time for him. He’d broken the same shoulder before, crashing at the Tour in Yorkshire a few years ago and it wasn’t in the same position that it had once been, not to mention a bit weaker. He was very down and was clearly in two minds about the incident. He knew that I didn’t bear him any personal ill will and he knew I was worried about him, but still the idea that I had used my elbow to make him crash was hard for him to process. I thought that he had been egged on a bit by his team – his DS had made a few forthright comments – but they would no doubt claim they were trying to protect him. I know Gabri and my crew would do exactly the same if the tables were turned.
Other riders were equally damning of me. Andre Greipel said, ‘We’re not friends any more.’
OK, so that’s what happened that day. I know what I think really happened, and I think that the jury made a mistake. I’ve gone over it with my teammates and friends many times, read everything, watched everything, seen every angle, heard every opinion. Let’s go through it and I’ll explain the whole sorry tale from my perspective. You’re allowed to skip this bit if you’ve heard enough already. Don’t worry, I hear you.
Andre Greipel is getting a nice lead-out from his last teammate when Kristoff starts that long wind up to his top speed with Bouhanni on his wheel. Seeing Kristoff pass to his right, Greipel thinks, ‘There goes my train’, and goes for his wheel, inadvertently squeezing Bouhanni right.
Behind Bouhanni and to his right, coming from further back at higher speed, is Arnaud Démare. He is squeezed further right by the whole concertina effect started by Greipel. It’s like flicking a piece of rope and watching the ripple pass along it. This is nobody’s fault: just cycling, sprinting in particular, and the laws of physics. Bouhanni and Démare’s movements push me in the same direction, and the last man in the line is Mark Cavendish. There were five in the bed and the little one said, ‘Roll over,’ so we all rolled over and one fell out. What started as a sprint in the middle of the road has suddenly become a sprint up against the barriers and Cav has been cast in the role of the unlucky man when the space runs out. We all rolled over and one fell out.
So far so logical, but what happens next is why I ended up back in Monaco while the race headed for the Alps. On the video, as I try to keep my balance in the squeeze, my elbow suddenly juts out and Cav goes down hard, all in one movement. This is the point where the race jury make their error. I didn’t deliberately put my elbow out. In fact, I didn’t put my elbow out at all, even to help keep my balance, as some have speculated. This is what happened: Mark is going faster than me, but into a gap that is rapidly disappearing. As he and I touch, his angle and extra speed mean that his left-hand brake lever hits the back of my right forearm. It’s that collision that nearly causes both, or maybe all of us, to crash, but directly results in him going down on to that ill-fated right shoulder. My elbow coming out is the result of that contact, not the cause of it.
I understand that it looked bad, just as I’m sure you can understand why I was so surprised to be told I’d caused the crash. With a less histrionic reaction and a bit more professional understanding, the situation could have been much more sensibly resolved. Instead it turned quickly into a massive political mess.
Leaving aside the severity of Mark’s injuries and the repercussions of me getting thrown out of the race for a moment, I would also argue that my original punishment for leaving my line was also unjust. I didn’t deliberately choose to go right, I had no choice. What was I meant to do, crash? Knock everybody else off? If I was to be demoted, then all of us should be: Greipel, Bouhanni, Démare and me had all in turn moved across the road, but in legitimate racing moves, not in dangerous or calculated ‘professional fouls’.
The whole thing began to simmer down. Mark and I exchanged some supportive tweets and messages. Andre Greipel, being the gentleman that he is, apologised for his heat-of-the-moment reaction and told his team Lotto that they were also wrong to blame me, which he didn’t have to do, and I really appreciated that.
But then, just as it seemed like we were moving on, the UCI came out with a big statement about how they were going to increase their finish-line analysis because of what Peter Sagan did in the Tour de France! Dimension Data opened it all up again by demanding a retrospective ban for me. For fuck’s sake. Let it go. It’s racing. It happened. I wasn’t trying to kill anybody, least of all my friend Mark Cavendish. When you see some of the punching and headbu
tting that goes on in the melee that is a Tour stage sprint finish, all this fuss about me and him was ridiculous.
I was really hoping that Mark might go on Twitter to tell the world that it was a bit of a joke, but that was his decision to make. Not mine, and I respect that. It would also have obviously been in contravention of his team’s position, which is never a good place to be. And at the end of the day, it would have further prolonged the agony and left the patient – cycling’s credibility – stuck in Accident & Emergency waiting to be released back into a world that had long since moved on.
I wasn’t the best of company for a few days. But you can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself for ever.
The emotion that finally got me off my ass and into a mood of frenzied activity was the feeling that I’d let everybody down. BORA - hansgrohe and Willi for the faith and cash they’d invested in me and the huge sense of anti-climax that follows your prize possession being unable to deliver one of the main things they’d brought you along for. Giovanni, Gabriele, Maroš … all of Team Peter for working so hard to make things like the Tour happen then having to face it not happening after all. My teammates were focused and dedicated to the Tour, each one with a clear purpose, then the pointy bit of their intercontinental ballistic missile was removed and decommissioned. But the hurt I felt most acutely was for my family and friends who saw it all unfold, powerless to intervene, who heard and read all the bad things being said about me and felt fiercely obligated to defend and protect me. You understand the true nature of ‘supporters’ on days like those.
I needed to do something – anything – to break the mood I’d fallen into, but more specifically I wanted to do something for all those people. My teammates and friends at the team were beyond my reach with more than two weeks of the Tour remaining, but they knew I was with them in spirit and would have been there in reality but for the intervention of the race jury.
But my friends, family and the Team Peter gang not still engaged on the race … I could do something for them.
Hmm. What was Monte Carlo good for? I got on the phone to the yacht brokers. Could you perhaps organise a yacht for about ten people to have a holiday next week? You could? Great. A bit later, they called back. Yes, they could organise a yacht for ten, no problem. But if I was interested …
Once upon a time, the richest man in the world was a Greek shipping magnate called Aristotle Onassis. Now, shipping magnates are expected to have luxurious boats. This being after the Second World War, the seas were awash with ships no longer being used for what their builders intended, namely sinking other boats or trying to stop other boats sinking other boats. One such vessel was HMCS Stormont, a Canadian frigate that had protected merchant shipping in the Battle for the Atlantic, then helped land allied troops on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. Ninety-nine metres of sleek seafaring quality would make the ideal vessel for Onassis’s alchemists to create the most opulent floating palace the world had ever seen. The conversion cost him $4,000,000 … that’s $4,000,000 at 1954 prices. Bearing in mind this was during the period of crushing post-war austerity, this lavish display of wealth must have put a fair few noses out of joint. Finished, she was the most desirable ship afloat and, to many, remains so today. He named her after his daughter Christina.
The Christina O had played host to the likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and the Monégasque royal family, Frank Sinatra … Winston Churchill had smoked cigars on her expansive rear deck. Jackie Onassis had of course spent long hot days at sea avoiding the crowds, despite the rumours that her late husband John F. Kennedy had frolicked below decks with a certain Marilyn Monroe in his time.
Now, 20 years after a $50,000,000 spruce-up reconfirmed her as Queen of the Med, she went out on private hire if you had the cash, and the patience to wait five years for the chance. It just so happened that they’d had a cancellation. I could hire her for my holiday, but we’d have to sail from Monte Carlo tomorrow.
OK, I’ll take it.
The rest of the day was a blur. I had to get the message to everybody that they had to be in Monaco tomorrow, and then I had to book and pay for flights for everyone. It was a whirl of internet, travel agents, constantly ringing phones, numerous call backs, credit card pummelling, passport numbers and connecting flights. Normally this would be the sort of thing Gabri would do for me, but I hadn’t done my job during the Tour so it was time for me to do his job and make it up to him.
I could scarcely believe it when we set sail into the gorgeous, azure July Mediterranean the next day with 28 of us on board.
It is an unfortunate fact that, still in my twenties, I am condemned for the rest of my life to never have a better holiday than those mystical, magical days aboard Christina O. The sun resolutely refused to stop shining until it was forced, complaining over the horizon each night by beautiful cool night skies. Sea birds and schools of glittering fishes followed us like court followers of Louis XIV. We cruised along the Riviera and the Ligurian coast, taking in the sights in a way that isn’t really possible when you’re flying up the Cipressa or the Poggio as I have been when previously passing through San Remo and the rest of this coast. You see a lot of lovely places on bike races, but I can rarely remember being as enchanted by anywhere as crazily beautiful as Portofino where all of us spent a glorious afternoon meandering through the shady narrow streets between tall, colourful houses or dangling our feet between shivering shoals of silver fishes in the shallows.
We ate like those indulged favourites of the Sun King. We drank like prohibition started in a week’s time, which for me, back on the bike, it would. Gabriele leapt from the deck into the cool blue waters, showing off his new tattoo. It was a fantastic portrait of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, accompanied by the immortal line: ‘Why so serious?’ Where did he get an idea like that?
Time spent with the people you love most is never time wasted, even if you just spend it wasting time. It’s beautiful.
The boat itself. I don’t know where to start. Hell, no, I know where to start: at the rear deck. This huge, open area was dominated by a beautiful swimming pool, the bottom of which was covered in the most captivating mosaic of Theseus and the Minotaur doing battle. Many a happy hour was wasted here in the heat of the day. Then, as night began to settle around us, a switch would be flicked, the pool would drain away, and the bottom would rise until flush with the rest of the deck and we had ourselves a Minotaur-themed dance floor on which to party until the sun came back.
I was talking to the skipper – I hope you didn’t think I was piloting this thing myself? – about the opulence and he claimed that the seats were covered in a special kind of leather made from whales’ foreskins. It sounds unlikely, I know, but until I see lab results showing the contrary, I’m sticking with it.
I just let life happen for a few days. It was so refreshing to not find myself trying to control everything all the time. There are some things you can’t control, like the weather, like a flick of direction in a sprint or somebody else’s perception of your elbow movements.
I couldn’t control the UCI, ASO or the race jury, but I could control my own condition and my actions, and that was what I would do from this point forward.
One more thing I clearly couldn’t control was my balance. I slipped approaching the onboard jacuzzi and went headlong into the far side, face first, knocking out my two front teeth. These teeth, the teeth that replaced my milk teeth at nine years old, had served me well up to that point, surviving all the crashes that have happened to me in cycling. We resolved not to tell anyone lest we – well, just me – got into trouble and Christina O got the blame. I had already begun to realise that she was the key to everything. There was no glorious end to the season, no Bergen, no shot at a third consecutive Worlds without Christina O. My floating palace of redemption.
Ah well, I can’t control everything, as we have established, but I can find a dentist.
On The Other Guys
People often
ask me about other cyclists. ‘Hey, Peto, what’s Kristoff like? Froomey? Spartacus?’
The truth is that I don’t really know. Obviously, I know them and we’re very rarely anything other than courteous, respectful and caring towards each other, but know them? Not really. Likewise, they might be able to tell you things about how I ride a bike, how I’m likely to react in certain circumstances, maybe a story or anecdote, but none of those guys could say they really know me.
People say that we work together, but that’s not really true. Let’s say you have a shop in the high street. A butcher’s. Now, you’re going to get to know the guys in your shop better, obviously. So if your butcher’s is successful and everybody likes working there, over a few years you’re going to get to know people like Maciej Bodnar, Roman Kreuziger and Marcus Burghardt. But how about that guy Tom who works at the bakery down the street? Seems a nice fellow. We had a chat over a beer at the Christmas party last year. Dumoulin, I think his surname is. And what about that guy in the hairdresser’s? Dashing chap … Marcel maybe? Yeah, decent guy. You see my point. You don’t actually work together, and the fleeting nature of professional cycling means that by the time you get to know somebody, they’ve moved on.
And then of course we’re doing different jobs that don’t interweave as much as you may think. I saw Alberto at maybe two races in 2015 because we had very different schedules, even though we were teammates. Some teams – Sky do it like this – break their weighty squads down into units like the Classics unit, the Giro unit, the Spanish unit, with the same riders, masseurs, mechanics, coaches and DSs working together throughout the year and they’ll only cross-pollinate when something changes. We’re lucky at BORA - hansgrohe because we’re not so big that we don’t all know each other, though we may have to do something like that as we grow, and it’s already harder for new guys coming in at the start of the season.