by Peter Sagan
I’ve got some good pro cycling pals that I see out of the race environment for a beer or a pizza, but they tend to be guys that you choose to live near or train with, like Sylwester Szmyd, who’s been a friend, training partner and neighbour for years and is my coach now. Oscar Gatto is one of the few who I hang out with but don’t share an employer with.
All I can tell you about the other guys in the peloton is how I find them to ride with or against. There is virtually nobody I can think of who I don’t get along with, at least on the superficial basis of people who share a workspace. Even Mark Cavendish, with whom I’ve inadvertently created one of the most-reported controversies of the 2017 season, would say there’s a mutual respect between us. I certainly would. We’re a bunch of guys who compete fiercely at an elite level in a sport where the difference between success and failure can boil down to the click of a camera shutter.
The different schedules we all have each season also mean that I have not spent a great deal of my life chatting with many of the biggest names in our sport. For example, I hardly know Alejandro Valverde and Nairo Quintana, giants of the game as twin leaders of Movistar. We have never got beyond amiable smiles and hellos, because our paths just don’t really cross. Sylwester rode with them both for years and he says the dynamic is very interesting, with Valverde’s years of experience making him the skipper, but Quintana’s reputation outside of the team, especially in South America, is immense, giving them a relationship not unlike the captain of the flagship and the admiral of the fleet. Listen to me, straight into the gossip, and this is just the stuff that Sylwester told me, I haven’t got a clue. When Sylwester and his wife went on honeymoon to Colombia, it turned out that Quintana had quietly and personally organised every last detail to make sure they had the best possible holiday. He’s that type of guy.
Chris Froome is always very friendly and a model of dedication, not just to the sport but also in the loyalty he shows his team. The rest of the world might speculate about his standing in the sport, but he just keeps his head down and continues to perform. Talking to Gabriele and Giovanni over dinner, the consensus is that it’s scarcely believable that he’s any kind of measured drugs cheat; much more likely, knowing the man as a bit of an absent-minded professor, it’s a screw-up. But the fact remains that the rules were broken, and when you do that, there’s normally a tab to pick up somewhere. It’s hard for the average sports fan to take in – a cheat’s a cheat, they say from behind their newspapers – but there’s obviously far greater complexity involved than I would like to sort out.
This might be as good a time as any to give you a quick look inside the world of the professional cyclist and drug testing.
The first thing to remember is that you have to give the doping inspectors an incredibly detailed itinerary of where you’re going to be at any time. No quick changes of plan. No riding to your cousin’s for a game of PS4 instead of the four-hour recovery ride because it’s started to rain. No dropping in at the hospital to see a friend who is ill. You stick to the itinerary or you have a bloody good reason for not doing so, and you tell somebody in advance. It’s no wonder people make mistakes and we shouldn’t dismiss everybody who makes an error as a cheat. We have to accept that it’s as crucial a part of your job as riding up hills, doing sponsors’ events or training properly.
Amid the confusion of our busy weeks, we have to give a one-hour window each day when we absolutely must be at home, or wherever counts as our base if we’re away. I say 6–7 a.m. or 7–8 a.m., knowing that I’ll be available anyway. OK, if you were hoping for a lie in and they knock on the door at 6 a.m., it’s a bit of a pain, but it’s a minuscule price to pay to safeguard the integrity of the sport and our own reputation. If they call outside of that window but during a day that we have listed as being at home, we have one hour’s grace to present ourselves. The only time I really struggle with the process is when they call at 6 a.m. during a stage race like the Tour de France, where sleep is hard to come by at the best of times and rest is everything.
If you’re a stage winner, a jersey holder, or the leader of a UCI category, you will be tested at each and every race. Over the season, I will literally give hundreds of samples, all of which will be tested as if they are the one and only proof of innocence and guilt. With the race controls, the home controls and the large number of random tests outside of the race, I am probably tested about once a week, evened out over the course of the year. And it’s absolutely, definitely, unequivocally worth it. In fact, it’s better to be tested all the time, as there is little scope for fluctuations in your numbers. There were stories in the past of riders under suspicion because of big discrepancies between tests, but if you’re not tested regularly and you go on an intense period of training at altitude, you’d be disappointed if there wasn’t a big spike in your figures. The answer is to be tested more, not less.
Consider this: Let’s say you went out with friends on a Saturday night two weeks ago. You had, say, five pints, a kebab on the way home, went to bed at one, got up at eight, felt great, went out for a bike ride. Then last Saturday, you went out with the same guys, had five pints again, another kebab, in bed by one, then woke up with a horrific hangover and had lost the ability to stand, let alone ride a bike. Sound familiar? We can’t always predict how our body is going to react to different things on different days. That’s why you need to be tested all the time, because you feel inexplicably different some days despite repeating exactly what you’ve done previously. You don’t want that looking like a squiggly line on your blood passport or eyebrows will rise. Test as often as you can and all patterns will be smoothed out. Unless you’re cheating, and then you’ll be caught and bloody good riddance.
Moving on … leaving aside the tour contenders, the people I spend most time rubbing shoulders with, literally, are the sprinters. Sprinting is one of those disciplines in sport where your character is on show for all to see. For instance, it’s not easy to get a handle on what a swimmer might be like, but nobody who has ever seen Zlatan Ibrahimović play football could be left without having formed some sort of opinion about him as a person. Strange, and possibly wildly inaccurate, but true nonetheless.
Let us accept that one needs to have a certain amount of brio to be a sprinter in the first place, so once again I’m not likely to get drawn into telling you what somebody is really like. But I can tell you their characteristics as sprinters.
The fastest in a straight line, all things being equal, for most of my career has been Marcel Kittel. Just in terms of downright speed he is a difficult opponent. If everything goes right for him, he’ll often win. Fortunately for the rest of us, there are many variables to ruin his day and they do.
As he ages, Marcel could do a lot worse than study Andre Greipel. A gentleman who has the respect of everybody else in any race he rides, especially his fellow sprinters, Andre’s skills have kept him at the top of the tree when you could reasonably expect his top-end speed to be blunted by the seasons. We’re talking tiny amounts to make a big difference here. His longevity is exceptional. He just knows how to do it better than anyone else and is nearly always spot on with his judgement.
If Kittel has been the fastest guy pound for pound in the last few seasons, the man for the future is undoubtedly Fernando Gaviria. The guy’s raw speed is frightening, he’s had a superb tutelage at Quick-Step and he’s only 23. Sure, there’ll be others to round out his generation, but they’ll have to be fast if he’s not to be the king of the castle for years to come. You can’t help thinking that when it comes to the flatter stages of the Tours de France of the next few seasons, if you finish in front of Gaviria, you’ll win.
In out-and-out explosiveness, Mark Cavendish has ruled the roost for so long it’s hard to believe he won four stages of the Tour de France way back in 2008. His maximum speed when he hits the front has remained largely unmatched ever since, although the search for his best form has to go a little deeper these days. The way to beat Cav is to recognise that t
hough his top speed is peerless, it’s hard for him to hold it over any length of time, meaning that timing is more important to him than to others. Never give up if he is in front of you, but never write him off if he is behind you.
Alexander Kristoff is the opposite to Mark. His jump is nothing to write home about, but his top speed is like a jet fighter cruising at 20,000 feet. Allowed a long lead-up to wind up his gear and given a gap, he will take some catching. He probably doesn’t win as many races as he deserves because many riders, myself included, use his high speed as a launchpad for our own designs, but he is a fearsome competitor. If I added up the closest sprints I’ve been in over the years, Alexander will probably feature in 50 per cent of them, including that incredible arm wrestle for the line in Bergen. It shouldn’t be forgotten that this is a man with two Monuments to his name, testament to his ability to ride at the front of difficult races and still produce a winning kick when the rest of the sprinters have fallen by the wayside.
That crossover from sprinter to Classics rider is a bit of a gulf and for a few years I thought I might not make it. The best example of someone who has done this in modern times must be Tom Boonen. On the podium at Roubaix at 21 and a Tour green jersey five years later, it was Tom’s style that was the secret of his longevity. He was just sublimely smooth. You couldn’t imagine him breaking a bike. He’s the reason that Zanatta believed I’d never win Paris–Roubaix: I smash the bike into every cobblestone whereas Tommeke just floated a couple of inches above them like a Japanese monorail train. Three Rondes and four Roubaix wins aren’t things that fall into your lap. Tom rode for Quick-Step for pretty much his whole career which didn’t always give him the advantage you might think. They were so strong with so many potential winners that Tom could be the perfect foil for his teammates – remember Niki Terpstra’s Roubaix win, when nobody wanted to tow his team leader back up to the front?
The other giant of the Classics is indisputably Fabian Cancellara. He had a different route to the top. For a long time he had a reputation as a short time-trial specialist, but he also ended up with seven Monuments on his mantelpiece, like Boonen. Their careers constantly intertwined. In our first clashes, Cancellara wasn’t too pleased with me. My first Tour de France stage came about when I used his late attack to mount my own victory bid, and then he found my silly finish-line salute disrespectful. I earned some respect from him eventually, and he wasn’t just a gentlemen, but a smart enough competitor to recognise that rivalries can be good for everybody. As for me, I just loved the way the man rode a bike. Completely in control with rippling core strength, he was often criticised by the cognoscenti for doing too much work in races, allowing others to profit. You know what? So what? So what if he didn’t win every race he could have won? He was an entertainer, a showman who raced as hard as he could every day he got on his bike. That’s why fans loved him, not just for his undoubtedly fantastic palmarès, but for the style and panache that lit up every race he competed at. I’ll never be Fabian Cancellara, but that’s the way I want to ride my bike.
Of my current rivals in the peloton, Michal Kwiato’s career and mine have been tied together like a pair of laces since day one. We went to the UCI Junior World Championships in Mexico when we were 17 – him with Poland, me with Slovakia – only to see Diego Ulissi win the road race. Michal won the time trial in Cape Town the following year while I won silver in the cyclocross race. He’s got such amazing staying power for somebody who looks so reedy. I struggled with distance in the earlier part of my career, but, bearing in mind we’re exactly the same age, Michal won the longest one of them all, the UCI World Championships at 24. He’d already seen me off that spring with a great late attack at Strade Bianche that I couldn’t match. He’s the last guy to wear these lovely rainbow threads before me, and it would be a brave man who would bet against him winning it again some day. You wouldn’t get very good odds on it being him versus me for the right to wear them again before our careers are through. He’s also the winner of probably the best race I’ve been involved in, that Milan–San Remo where I stuck it to the bunch on the Poggio but couldn’t shift either him or Julian Alaphilippe and Kwiato ran me out in that incredible three-up sprint on the Via Roma. Underestimate this man at your peril. I don’t think there’s any race where you could declare outright that Michal couldn’t win it.
Last but not least is GVA, Greg Van Avermaet, the two of us seemingly inseparable in the bookies’ minds. Like me, he’s always there. Like me, everybody looks to him. It hasn’t been easy for either of us since Fabian Cancellara and Tom Boonen hung up their cleats. Everybody else in the bunch seems to think there are only two wheels worth following, which is patently ridiculous. On paper, you could hardly describe either of us separately or even jointly as dominant, even if he is the Olympic Champion and I’m the World Champion. The funny thing about Greg and me is that we have so much in common and are so similar in so many ways. We effectively share the same calendar, the same targets, we both ride aggressively to get into breaks, we can both sprint, we’re both threats at the end of long races. Yet we are so different in character. Maybe it’s because he’s Belgian? There’s so much Flemish history piled on those guys’ shoulders, so much pressure to be the next Merckx/Van Looy/Schotte/De Vlaeminck/Museeuw/Boonen. There are always big names around you, riders with specialities, who will be fancied more than others on certain stages. It can either work against you as pressure or for you as camouflage. It used to irritate the hell out of me that if Greg and I are in a group, they treat him like every other rider, yet sit on me like I’ve got rocket boots on, waiting for me to merely flick a switch and soar into the stratosphere. But, and this might be to do with the retirements of those two titans, I think that presumption is changing and he’s now finding it harder to get away too. He’s also an extremely nice man, very straightforward and fair, and always a dangerous opponent. You can’t imagine Greg going to a race just to make up the numbers, and that will always make him one of the good guys in my eyes.
2017
AUTUMN
Christina O had turned my year around. All 99 metres of her. Of that I was certain. All I needed to do now was ride my bike and everything would be right with the world. Sometimes the best plans in the world are the simplest ones. Why so serious?
Sticking to the tried and tested, I headed back to Park City, Utah for some quality training at altitude and more peace of mind. There’s something about the US that seems to cool my bones whenever the plane touches down. I love the West Coast pace of life so much. A couple of weeks riding, eating and sleeping at 2,200 metres above sea level certainly speeds up the training process, even if the first few days give you legs of lead and a tiny pair of lungs that would struggle to blow up a kid’s balloon. By the time my next scheduled races in Canada started to loom up in the diary, I was flying.
I went back to the start line of the Grand Prix of Quebec as the reigning champion, feeling good about the day and the coming weeks, since this was where Project Desert had really taken wings a year earlier. It’s a good test for the Worlds in many ways, not just because of its position in the calendar just before the big festival, but it’s a circuit, which is always a little different to a point-to-point race. You get a chance to look at the finish a few times, to see where people go hard, the corners that can cause problems, the likely launch points for attacks.
You’ll know by now that my philosophy is that no two races are ever the same, and yet the GP Quebec 2017 could hardly have been more similar to 2016. As in the previous year’s race, Rigoberto Urán tried a long-distance sprint a couple of times in the last few hundred metres, and then there was a mess of lead-out trains getting in each other’s way. The trick here is not to panic, rely on your speed and be glad that the pace is high enough to make getting swamped unlikely. Sure enough, with about 150 metres to go as they weaved across the road and lead-out men faded and pulled over, a tasty Sagan-shaped gap opened up right in the middle of the road and it was a straightforward blast
to the line from there.
Like 2016, Greg Van Avermaet was next over the line, leading the press to ask me afterwards if there would be a repeat in Bergen two weeks later. ‘There will be a lot more riders than Greg and me in Norway,’ I told them. A hundred riders, a hundred stories. Or in Bergen, more like two hundred riders and two hundred stories.
It was then pointed out to me that this was my 100th victory as a professional. A different 100 stories. Yes, of course, it’s a number to be proud of, but in the moment, any one of those victories was more enjoyable to me than looking at them as a whole. Maybe when I’m a fat old guy trying to persuade Marlon that I used to be somebody once upon a time I will dig out a silly fact like this, but until then I’ll just carry on trying to win every day I race. ‘I’d rather live to be a hundred years old than win a hundred races,’ I said to the flashbulbs.
The other Canadian race in Montreal, two days later, didn’t deliver number 101, but despite the disappointment people might have expected me to feel, it was a really useful exercise. If I hadn’t learnt by then that with the UCI rainbow stripes on your back and form in your legs, it’s only to be expected that the other riders will follow your every move, then I’d not been paying attention. ‘Go on then, champ,’ they might as well be saying, ‘show us what you’ve got.’ I think that’s fair enough, and it’s never likely to be as bad when you get to the Worlds, when any number of other riders arrive with the intention of taking the gold medal home with them. Sure, they’re going to look to see what you’re doing, but they’re going to be more inclined to do something themselves, and the higher the number of potential winners, the longer the odds of the favourite, even if you’re still the favourite.