by Peter Sagan
So, I ended up having a really hard race in Montreal, and so did the team, closing down all the moves ourselves, being marked immediately when we tried something. The whole BORA - hansgrohe unit, including Juraj, who would be with me in Norway again, had worked really well at Quebec, really controlling the front of the bunch when the race got to the business end, and they were flat out again today. When the attacks started coming late on, nobody – and I mean nobody – would help us chase, just following my wheel in the hope that I would bring the move back and they could all counter. I sprinted in just behind Greg and Michael Matthews, the same top three (in a different order) as two days earlier, but this time we were seventh, eighth and ninth. It was hard, but just what I needed.
I flew back from Canada to Monte Carlo for a few days as I was doing the Team Time Trial in Bergen. The TTT is always at the beginning of the Worlds festival, giving the riders and teams time to regroup for the Elite Road Race the following weekend. I’d had the best preparation possible for the Worlds. I had the benefit of two winning experiences under my belt. Christina O and Canada had brought me virtually to the start line in the best shape of my career.
And then it all went wrong.
I woke up in Monaco with a fever. Snot and sweat were pouring out of me like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Riders often get sick: we play with fire by asking too much of our bodies. Physically, we sail as close to the wind as we can, pushing ourselves beyond reasonable limits. It’s hardly a great surprise when it goes tits up … but this wasn’t like that. I’d never been in better form. Yet here I was, shivering, and sweating under the sheets in the middle of the day while Monte Carlo buzzed outside. It was just one of those good old-fashioned bugs, picked up from a stranger at a race, in a hotel, on a plane … who knows? I just hope whoever gave it to me was suffering like me in his own bed, somewhere else in the world.
Team Peter swung into action, like it always does in times of stress. Giovanni and Gabriele called Ján Valach to let him know that the chances of me being able to ride the TTT were nil – it was the following day! – and that I had to be a doubt to start the road race. The three of them vowed to be philosophical about the situation, but leave the door open until the race had begun without me. They were agreed that any expectation for me to perform in a week’s time was to be immediately dialled down.
Me? I spent three days in bed.
That meant that when I got up and pulled back the curtains on a Monte Carlo morning at last, it was Wednesday. The race was on Sunday, 2,500 kilometres away.
I rode that day and the next. On Friday morning I felt pretty good and phoned round the Monaco gang. If I was going to even start on Sunday, we’d have to ride pretty hard today. So it was that Sylwester Szmyd, Oscar Gatto, Moreno Moser, Alex Saramotins and yours truly headed out into the Alpes Maritimes on a beautiful, bright, autumnal morning on the Mediterranean. I felt OK, and we were all showing off, determined to give each other a good hard kicking. If you’ve ever driven down that autoroute from France towards Italy, the one that splits the Riviera from the hills, you’ll know there are some pretty hefty mountains bearing down on you. Yes, Monaco is a good place for a pro to live for lots of personal reasons, but being able to ride out of your front door straight on to hills like these is a huge part of the attraction. You can lose yourself – mentally and physically – within a few minutes and forget that the densely populated strip of Nice–Antibes–Monaco is just behind and below you.
In our efforts to show off, plunging down one little rocky road three hours in from the coast, Oscar pulled a spectacular locked-out rear wheel drift around a particularly enticing sweeping right-hander. But, as I know too well, showing off can get you into trouble, and so it proved for Oscar. His rear tyre was shaved into a huge flat spot, the inner tube poking out through the casing until it gave up the ghost with a resounding rifle crack.
‘Cazzo, Gatto? What the fuck?’
We all had a laugh and drained our bidons, taking advantage of the stop to rehydrate. I ripped off a bit of handlebar tape to cover the inside of the hole in his tyre – junior mountain bikers learn how to be practical, you know – and re-inflated it with a new tube. Gabriele says that I think I’m Inspector Gadget or something.
On we went into the mountains, no tiny road ignored, no hill left unclimbed. My repair job lasted an hour. Then – bang! Oscar brings us all to a standstill again.
‘Vaffanculo, Oscar!’
We take another drink, our bidons refilled many times now from roadside taps and springs in the hills. This time, I rip up an empty one and use the curve of the plastic to sit inside what is left of Oscar’s shredded tyre. Would Inspector Gadget have thought of that? Another spare tube and we’re back in business.
We’ve been out six hours now and we’re racing back towards the coast, seeing if we can drop anyone. We flash through L’Escarène and blast up the pass that separates it from Peille. It’s a tiny road, and as we dart down the other side, there’s plenty of gravel on the corners. As we take one bend, there’s a little boulder lying right in our path. Sylwester and I skim it, but the third rider isn’t so lucky and hits it flush with his front wheel without ever seeing it. No prizes for guessing the victim … it’s Oscar.
We race to his side but it looks bad. He went down straight on his face and there is blood all over the road. Fortunately, there’s a phone signal, and his Astana soigneur is immediately on his way up the mountain at speed, but he’s still at least 30 minutes away. We clean up Oscar as best we can and sit him down at the side of the road.
After he is escorted straight to hospital, we continue in a much more quiet and sombre mood, but when we get down to the coast, we’re met with the excellent news that there is no significant damage, Oscar’s helmet bore the worst of the impact and he’s still going to be a handsome bastard when it heals up.
‘We’ve got to celebrate, guys,’ I suggest, and we head for the pizzeria. Oscar is OK, and we’ve just conquered the worst that the Alpes Maritimes can throw at us. Maybe I’ll be going to Bergen after all.
I get home and Maroš goes to work on my battered legs for an hour. I slip into bed for a nap, tired but pretty pleased with the day’s work.
An hour later I’m crawling out of bed, barely making it to the toilet in time to vomit noisily and exhaustively. Something I ate? To be honest, it looks like everything I ate. Maybe it was the pizza, maybe it was all those bidons of roadside water. Shit, shit, shit. I’m flying to Bergen tomorrow. The UCI World Championship Road Race starts in 36 hours. Thanks, rainbow jersey. It’s been fun, but I guess it’s somebody else’s turn now. Goodbye from a true friend.
It’s a chilly, damp morning in Scandinavia a day and a half later. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been to the toilet since that ride. No matter what I eat or drink I feel bloated, or empty, or sick.
There are 40 kilometres of road to cover before we hit the main circuit, then 11 laps of 19 kilometres. Juraj is beside me as we reach the circuit and cross the finish line for the first time. ‘Take a good look,’ I tell my brother, ‘I don’t think we’ll be seeing this line again.’
And then I won.
8 APRIL 2018
EPILOGUE
Compiegne is a grand little town for somewhere so unheralded. It has wide boulevards, tall flat-faced stone buildings and squares that encourage a passer-by, or passing cyclist, to sit for a while, drink in a little of the peace while sipping on a coffee, a cold beer or maybe a Ricard, if you’ve finished work.
It might not, in that case, be entirely inappropriate that for one Sunday morning each spring, Compiegne is asked to stand in for Paris. Not for a film set, though I’m sure they could get away with it, but for the start of the world’s best known one-day bike race. And nobody anywhere in the history of cycling has ever called l’Enfer du Nord by the name of Compiegne–Roubaix, have they?
Before the days of big buses, the teams used to gather in the central square close to the start line, the likes of Sean
and Patxi have told me. Now, the first guys to show up can still squeeze their enormous Volvos and DAFs with blacked-out windows in, but the rest of us stretch out nose to tail along one of those long tree-lined avenues where huge sedate houses are set back a respectful distance from the asphalt. In 2018, the BORA - hansgrohe truck is the very last in the long line of hi-tech buses parked under the trees which are just beginning to leaf. This is not a bad thing for the calm and collected townspeople of Compiegne, nor for the other teams. I’ll tell you why.
A year or so back, I was introduced to these amazing Bang & Olufsen speakers that look like satellite dishes. If you go to my house you’ll see them, and in my dad’s house, and my brother’s … they’re really cool. Well, this spring we brought a couple along to the races. And though Paris–Roubaix doesn’t start in Paris, BORA - hansgrohe are giving the citizens of Paris every chance of hearing the start even though they’re 80 kilometres away. The speakers sit outside the door to the bus, instantly turning the springtime avenue sprinkled with birdsong into the darkest, deepest, dirtiest, Bratislava nightclub. There’s a huge crowd around our bus, and you can see staff from the other teams craning their necks to look over, part envious, part disapproving. But our fans love it, we love it, I love it. We are here to entertain, we’re here to make an impression, but most of all we’re here to win. The mood is summed up perfectly by Patxi as DS, when the UCI lanyards arrive to give our bikes the once-over.
‘How are you, Mr Vila?’ he is asked.
‘Ready,’ is his one-word response.
As they go about their business, passing their iPads over the S-Works frames in the belief that if any are harbouring secret motors, alarm bells will ring, they each blink inadvertently in time with the music. Why so serious, guys?
It’s been a strange spring, to say the least. I’ll give you a quick recap to put this Roubaix in a bit of context.
This year we were trying something different. In a plan devised by Patxi and Sylwester, now respectively my DS and coach as opposed to my coach and friend, we had decided to prioritise the central northern classics of Flanders and Roubaix as the days where I should be reaching my best form. This was a bit of a shift from previous years, and a fantastic illustration of what I was saying about Ralf and Willi at BORA - hansgrohe and the difference between them and Tinkoff. With Oleg, his passion and excitement always meant that he wants to win now, today, every day. Now, Patxi, and before him Sean, also have experience of working with Grand Tour winners like Alberto Contador, Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins, where tapering your training for specific races and maintaining your best form in the crucial weeks of the season has proved essential to their success. Patxi and Sylwester wanted to do this with me, arguing that the glut of podium places through the spring was all well and good, but we would always trade a dozen days of being sprayed by somebody else’s champagne for a Monument.
And of course, Ralf and Willi said, ‘Sure, you know best.’ That’s the difference. They didn’t just hire Team Peter for our ability to get results, they trust us to know best. That’s pretty cool. Higher risk, because BORA - hansgrohe get less exposure week in, week out, and if I then fail in my targets, it’s an overall loss. But, and this was where Patxi and Sylwester were convinced, a little bit closer to my dreams of winning the biggest races.
This doesn’t mean entirely sacrificing races like Strade Bianche or Milan–San Remo, but it does mean racing them on my way to top form, rather than finding that form first.
Accordingly, Strade Bianche was my first European race in 2018. I came close again at Milan–San Remo, but once again ended up on the wrong end of a quite brilliant race. Vincenzo Nibali held me and some other guys off for a really great victory in San Remo, making him the winner of the two most recent Monuments, with his similarly audacious first place in the Tour of Lombardy at the end of last year. The man is a great showman and I take my hat off to him. Is it better to lose a great race than win a boring one? I’m not sure. I will try to win great races in the future so that I don’t have to ask myself again.
Almost every race I complete in, I seem to start among the favourites. The retirement of Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara hadn’t helped me one bit either … superb riders like Niki Terpstra and Greg Van Avermaet still don’t cast as long a shadow as those guys, and as a result it often feels like Me versus The Rest. I try to take it as a compliment and use it to my advantage, but at my low ebb it can be soul-destroying.
On the plus side, the Classics team we had put together at BORA - hansgrohe was the best I’ve ever been in. Having managed to hook Daniel Oss from BMC, not only did we have another high-powered gun, but it left Greg short of one. Body and Burghardt were both flying and incredibly motivated and Juraj was riding better than at any time in his career.
So we went to Gent–Wevelgem and I fucking won. You know that I don’t swear very often – only in the bunch in Flemish – so maybe that will give you an indication of how much it meant. Burghardt was imperious throughout. Some of the great names have worn that German Champion’s jersey over the years, and it brings out the best in Marcus. Knowing that he can not only pull the race back together on his own, even with 230 kilometres in the tank, but that if you take your eyes off him he will win, makes him a massive weapon in the BORA - hansgrohe armoury. I doubt the group would have reached the finish intact without his power or the fear he sowed in the others. Then my nose for sniffing out the best line in the sprint showed itself to be intact.
I didn’t think I was at my fastest yet, but I was winning long races and outsprinting quick guys like Viviani and Démare to win them. Three times Gent–Wevelgem winner. I like threes. A week later in Flanders, I felt I did everything I could. We talked earlier about Tom Boonen’s long shadow at Quick-Step, and his retirement really has loosened the reins on his former teammates. Now they all felt that they could win. Daniel Oss put in his first immense performance for BORA - hansgrohe when I asked him to ‘make it hard’, (remind me never to say that to him on a training camp) but with Niki Terpstra, Philip Gilbert and Zdenek Stybar all cruising for Quick-Step, his effort helped all the big names, not just me. Terpstra used an attack by Nibali – that guy! – as a springboard and soloed away. I tried my usual trick of carrying my speed around that dead corner at the bottom of the Paterberg then going up it like my back wheel was on fire and burning my arse. It worked to a certain degree: I went clear of the others, but Terpstra was too far gone and flying. Such is life. I felt that at least I’d tried and I hadn’t died wondering. Organising a chase with Greg, Nibali and the others was always going to be difficult with those blue Quick-Step jerseys sitting on us, and they would have been freshest at the death, even if we had reeled in their Dutchman. I tried on my own but it wasn’t to be. I faded back to the chasers and Terpstra took a great Monument victory.
So. Here we were. Compiegne. The pivotal moment of my spring. Since Flanders last weekend, I’d come as close as I’d been all spring to being happy. That’s maybe not the right word for it, but making that switch of focus to Belgium and caning the roads, while enjoying riding with friends, was a feeling I’d lost and it would make do instead of happiness for the time being.
All the talk in the week before Roubaix was about how it was going to be wet.
I don’t think I’ve ever ridden a really wet Paris–Roubaix, the sort of race animals like Giovanni will tell you are for real bike riders. I’ve seen videos: Andrei Tchmil and Franco Ballerini in the 1990s, or Johan Museuuw’s epoch-defining solo win in the last wet edition, 16 years ago now. That was the day Tom Boonen announced himself too. His whole brilliant career had passed by since that epic day without it ever chucking it down in Le Nord on the second Sunday in April.
There was a big groundswell of fans begging the clouds to burst. #prayforrain was trending on Twitter. And on those days between De Ronde and l’Enfer du Nord it did rain. We had a hoot scouting the route, splashing the hell out of each other, carefully guiding teammates into the deepest troughs an
d ugliest puddles just for the hell of it, with laughs and challenges handed out over coffees on the way. I had new kit and I was going to test it to within an inch of its life. Not bothered about bikes? Skip this next bit …
Specialized make three main road bikes. There’s the Venge, the aero one, popular with the likes of Daniel Oss with his long levers and time-trial heritage. I’ll use a Venge sometimes, usually when speed is the only consideration. Isn’t it always the only consideration, Peto? But no. The Venge is a no compromise weapon, so it’s a harder ride and less versatile than some. We’ll use it for, say, a shortish stage of a race on good roads that’s likely to finish in a group kick for the line.
For most days on the bike, with corners, climbs, descents, changes of pace and the need to leave yourself feeling OK to do it all again tomorrow, you need more versatility. My mount of choice is the Tarmac, long the flagship of Specialized’s road range and the perfect allround weapon.
But the third bike is designed with the paying customer in mind, a comfortable long-distance machine that will soak up all sorts of shit and still have you flying at a finish line. What’s it called? That’s right. The Roubaix.
This is the only day I’ll really use this bike. I might ride it at a race like Scheldeprijs to make sure it’s working OK, but for me this bike has one job only.
Specialized made two S-Works Roubaix bikes for me just for this race, both in my custom gold and black colours, one with rim brakes and one with discs.
With the move across cycling towards disc brakes and their ability to work better in bad conditions, it makes sense that all Roubaix models available to buy are now fitted with discs. I don’t have a problem with discs at all, but the issue in Paris–Roubaix always has been and always will be punctures and mechanicals. I might need to grab a wheel from anywhere to sustain a winning move or avoid being dropped when the pace is high, and the last thing I want to deal with at that moment is compatibility. Basically, with will, elbow grease and the correct swear word at the right moment, you can slam any old wheel into any old bike … but not if it’s got a disc brake rotor on it. We were aware that probably 90 per cent of the spare wheels out on the parcours were still going to be designed for traditional bikes and that swung it for us: stick to the old school.