by Peter Sagan
Riis had been running a cycling team pretty much since the day he’d retired. He won the Tour de France in 1996, then rode alongside Jan Ullrich as his younger teammate took the victory the following year. Soon afterwards he was instrumental in setting up the Danish team that would go on to become CSC and then Saxo Bank, winning most things that could be won at some point during the team’s existence. He had a reputation for getting the best out of riders who might have otherwise ridden out less stellar careers or even disappeared altogether. He sounded like a great fit for me. After bringing Tinkov in originally as a sponsor, he’d recently sold the team organisation itself to the Russian oligarch, but was continuing to work for the team as the head honcho on a three-year contract.
Giovanni had been fielding calls from BMC, Sky, Quick-Step and the racing driver Fernando Alonso, who was apparently putting together a top-level team, all of whom were interested in taking Team Peter on board for 2015. In the end, though, through all the talk and noise, only Tinkoff were prepared to negotiate positively. With the good feeling I was getting from Riis and the decisive actions of his team, it was the only choice to make. Giovanni had seen out his riding career under Riis and had been a teammate of his a few years before that, and he hadn’t a bad word to say about the Dane. Serious, trustworthy, engaged and knowledgeable. New team, new people, new system, new bikes … new motivation.
Giovanni worked hard to ensure that the whole of Team Peter would be absorbed into the Tinkoff organisation. That was easier said than done. There were riders and soigneurs who had been there for years who would have to be placated if all the various arms of Team Peter were to be accommodated. In the end, Juraj and Maroš came with me.
Suddenly we were part of a bigger set-up, with a more professional approach, and with the bigger expectations and pressures that involves.
The UCI had been implementing stricter rules on coaches in an effort to make sure that riders’ health was being correctly protected and any possible fluctuations in performance due to doping would be more likely to be flushed out. To be honest, one of the things that had been grinding me down at Cannondale was having to report to a guy every day with all my numbers: training figures, heart rates, power output, calories taken, number of breaths, how many pisses … it was doing my head in, but I knew it had to be done and I put myself at the mercy of my new team. Bjarne Riis hooked me up with Bobby Julich, a rider who had hit great heights with him at CSC and was now a well-respected coach.
I talked with Bobby every day. ‘How do you feel, Peter? What did you do today, Peter? What was your resting rate, Peter? What was your training rate, Peter? How did you sleep, Peter? What did you eat, Peter? What colour was your shit, Peter?’
Right in the middle of trying to come to terms with this new and intrusive way of working, the shit really hit the fan at Tinkoff. It was clear that there was a bit of a power struggle going on between Bjarne and Oleg for control of the team. I didn’t really know either of them or anybody at the team, so I didn’t know if it was normal or not, though some of the older hands were convinced it had got worse since Bjarne had sold the whole operation to Oleg. Later, Bjarne would claim that Oleg was jealous of his close relationship with the riders and staff, while Oleg thought that Bjarne saw him as nothing more than a cash provider, funding everything Bjarne wanted and getting treated like a mug in return. As usual in things like this, the truth was somewhere in the middle. They were certainly completely different characters: Bjarne considered every word before delivering it and thought laughing an unnecessary expense of energy. Oleg had no filter between brain and mouth and every thought he had ended up in the wide world, no matter how offensive or outrageous. People probably think I’m more like Oleg, but in truth I am very uncomfortable with rudeness, either in myself or other people. My dad never let me get away with it when I was a kid and it stuck. Beyond my public persona as a ‘crazy character’, I always try to be polite.
We were at Tirreno–Adriatico in March, 2015. Oleg wanted us to be pushing every day. We had Alberto Contador as leader and Oleg wanted us to be challenging Nairo Quintana for leadership of the race at every moment, while Bjarne was all for taking a more cautious approach so early in the season. He gestured to the points jersey that I was wearing and the couple of stages I had won, but basically ignored Oleg. And there is nothing Oleg hates more than being ignored. After one stage, Oleg came to the team hotel in the evening to exert his authority. He was furious to discover that Bjarne had gone out for dinner with friends elsewhere. After kicking lumps out of furniture for a couple of hours, he finally confronted Bjarne when he showed up, completely oblivious, outside the team bus. They had a raging argument right there and then in front of everyone. There were other teams, race officials, journalists present, you name it.
After the race, I was feeling OK. A bit fatigued, but I figured all this hard work so early in the season was good preparation for the Classics. As ever, the first of these would be Milan–San Remo – La Classicissma, La Primavera, and a race I thought I could win – in just a few days’ time, so instead of going back to Monte Carlo, my girlfriend Katarina and I went to stay with Bjarne and his family at his place in Switzerland. I was still tired all the time, but it was a great few days: riding on hard, clean surfaces, not much traffic, calm guidance from Bjarne, and lovely food at his house in the evening. Plus, because I was with Bjarne, I didn’t have to speak to Bobby every two minutes: ‘What does your piss smell like today, Peter? Can you count the hairs on your big toe for me, Peter?’
On the Friday morning after a beautiful dinner the night before, we said our goodbyes and arranged to meet in Milan the following day.
Saturday arrived, but Bjarne didn’t. Confusion and rumours began to spread through the team. Where was Bjarne? What had happened? Had Oleg had enough? At dinner in the team hotel that night, the news broke officially: Bjarne had been fired and removed from his post with immediate effect.
At the team meeting, the riders were like a cross between a bunch of old women wailing and wringing their hands at a funeral, and kids in the school playground after somebody has kicked the ball over the fence into the allotments. ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to doooooo?’
‘Guys, come on,’ I said. ‘It’s just a bike race, you know? Che cazzo? It’s not like Bjarne was going to ride our bikes for us. We get up in the morning. We put warm clothes on. We ride up over the Turchino Pass. We get down to the Riviera. We take our jackets and legwarmers off. We ride over the capi. We sprint into San Remo. It’s pretty simple.’
It was indeed pretty simple, and as we came to the finale I was in with a big shout. Alexander Kristoff had Luca Paolini lead him out for a long sprint, as he prefers. He’s really fast when he gets rolling, but he lacks that explosive Cavendish-style punch. I tried to respond, but 290 kilometres is a hell of a long way in March, especially when you’ve been training yourself half to death, and my legs let me know loud and clear that they strongly disapproved of sprinting. Only John Degenkolb could get past Kristoff, and Michael Matthews edged me off the podium. Oh well, at least it was a short drive home.
Great. So now the guy who had brought me here had disappeared. But not after lumbering me with a coach who was destroying me week by week. Bobby didn’t understand me and I couldn’t stand his persistent interventions.
I’m lucky. I’ve never had any problem motivating myself to train. If I want to win, I have to race well. And if I want to race well, I have to train. But that is what training is to me: preparation to race. Not training for its own sake. Maybe that works for some riders: GC riders, for instance, like Alberto Contador or Chris Froome, who don’t race so often, need to train with structure to make sure they arrive at their goals in peak condition. Also, they can use races like the one-week stage races in Spain or the Dauphiné or Tour de Romandie to train. If you take this year, 2018, as a comparison, I won my first race in Australia in January. I’m basically trying to win twice a week pretty much from then until the Worlds
in September with a couple of weeks off here and there for good behaviour. Or, in the case of last year, bad behaviour, but we’ll come to that.
Training to say you’re in good shape. Amazing numbers. Wow. Well, as far as I’m aware, no bike race has ever been won on a power meter. Nobody ever got UCI points for wearing the Maximum Output jersey. Even Chris Froome has to stop looking at his computer and run up mountains in his cycling shoes sometimes. Training for its own sake. That’s exactly how it felt with Bobby. He was obsessed with my figures. I had to do exactly as he asked every day, and then spend the rest of the day talking to him about it. I was absolutely exhausted and miserable with it. I’d start thinking I’d turn my phone off or pretend I was sick. It was ludicrous. I love training, but this was killing me. Death by numbers.
Every coach I’ve ever met asks me: ‘Do you want to be a better climber? A better sprinter? A better time trialler?’ I say, why mess with nature? I am what I am. I go OK. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I believe that if you make a drastic change to improve one facet of your performance, there will be a price to pay elsewhere. Riders who have lost weight to climb better lose their kick. People who have improved their stamina become unable to sprint. Becoming more aerodynamic means losing their power. The list is endless and I’m sure you get what I’m talking about.
The basic problem was a pretty simple one. Forget resting heart beats, fat content, power outputs and training algorithms, I was just plain knackered. Tired beyond belief. But still, I’d drag myself out of the flat in Monaco and cajole myself into riding along, sticking to whatever plan Bobby had set for me that day.
I went to the northern Classics and admit I was truly shit. This was meant to be the year when I cracked it: no more second and third steps of the podium, no more near misses. Well, we got that right anyway. I was nowhere near. By the time April blew itself out, I’d forgotten what a podium looked like.
The team was not happy. All sorts of rumours were floating around about what was going wrong. I can’t say if Bobby actually said this or not, but I heard he told the team I’d been over-raced so much since turning pro, that I was already burnt out. Any results I would ever achieve in my career had already been won. I was finished at 25. A busted flush. A racehorse whose knees had gone.
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘Fuck it, I quit.’
In my mind I was already an ex-professional cyclist on the beach with Katarina. Well, I’d still have some stories to tell about the times I’d had. Maybe I’d write a book one day.
Giovanni activated crisis-management mode. To be fair to him, he has only ever tried to support me in what I want to do. There was no pressure to get me out there, no anger or disappointment, only concern that I was OK, and worry that I wouldn’t go and do something stupid.
I was a few months into one of the most lucrative contracts the sport had ever seen, and it ran for three years. Turn up, ride, do my best, play my part, and after three years I could retire and support my family comfortably for life. Don’t worry about Bobby, don’t worry about Oleg, don’t worry about the team, don’t worry about anything. That was Lomba’s job. Surely, wasn’t that the point of Team Peter? Relax, man. Why so serious?
In the end, Giovanni’s solution was the most sensible one. It was clear I was going to need a new coach, and that man was about to become the next key member of Team Peter. Patxi Vila was already on the staff at Tinkoff, but he was a different type of guy to Bobby. A Basque who’d been a pro until pretty recently, without hitting the heights that Bobby had, but perhaps that was a strength for him as a coach. Winners are often so driven they’re not so good at listening to others’ needs. A good domestique has to know what his leader wants or he’ll never make a good career. Maybe that’s a better base for being a coach?
Patxi was very smart at the beginning. ‘I realised straight away that you knew what you were doing,’ he told me. ‘You ate well, your weight didn’t fluctuate much, you had a strong constitution that didn’t need a lot of attention. Most of all, you’d won a shed-load of races without ever having a coach.’
I liked him. He let me get on with it.
‘The training plan I worked out with you at the start was just so we had something written down, really,’ says Patxi now. We’re all sitting around remembering these days in the Sierra Nevada where BORA - hansgrohe are doing our customary February training camp before the 2018 Classics start. It’s after dark, it’s freezing outside and the Wi-Fi is terrible, so we might as well sit and talk. ‘It was clear you had an accurate understanding of your body. I saw my role to support that rather than dismantle it. If you told me that you’d only done one hour instead of four because you felt shitty, I’d know it was the right decision. It was easy.’
With Patxi as my coach, I slowly began to relax. In my head I was already done. I started to think about what was important: health, happiness, being myself, having fun. It’s good to have a plan, because it points you in the right direction, but you can’t expect it to work 100 per cent, that’s not racing. That’s not life. Say you have a plan to be in the first ten riders with seven kilometres to go in a race, because there’s a narrow bit of road and a little hill up ahead. But a hundred other riders have that plan, too. That’s 90 people who are going to be disappointed, but what are they going to do? Get off and walk home? You have to adapt. Find another way. Accept what is in front of you and find another way. There are some things that you just can’t change, like punctures and crashes. I decided from that point on that I would do my best but accept the results whether good or bad. If I win, I win. If I crash, I crash. If I come thirtieth, I come thirtieth. I’ll still be Peter at the finish, the sky won’t crash in.
That’s how it was when I first started out. Then you start winning, start leading, the pressure builds, and one day, somewhere along the way, you lose what it was that helped you win in the first place. Thinking back to my debut at the Tour Down Under, I remembered thinking, I could win one of these. Five years on, I’d lost that feeling. It wasn’t just the overtraining, it was the contract negotiations, the uncertainty, the pressure. And then, as if to reassure me that I wasn’t completely losing my mind, amid all the tests at Tinkoff, the team doctor said the results showed I’d had a virus slowing me down for much of the previous season. Thank you! It wasn’t all me, then. Had Cannondale known? Did they decide not to tell me because they needed me on the start line week in, week out, knowing that I was leaving at the end of the year? I don’t know. But they either knew and kept it from me or their medical testing was shit. One of those scenarios had to be true.
I still talked to Patxi most days and filled him in on what I was doing, but the pressure was off completely. All I had to do was get through the 2015 season. I was quitting soon. Why so serious?
By now, I knew how much I liked the Tour of California. I’d been there five times and come back with five green jerseys. The people were always pleased to see you, but they were never in your face. The air smelt clean and of oranges. The roads were good, the racing was fast but laid back … what wasn’t to like?
My road manager, Gabriele, always says that there is something to remind me of Giovanni there, too: the biggest climb was called Mount Baldy. Thanks, Gabriele. Don’t worry, I’m sure Lomba will never read this.
Oleg, Bjarne and Bobby were a world away, as were the disappointments of Roubaix, Flanders and San Remo.
Mark Cavendish was here, though, and he was on fire, sprinting in that explosive way that only he can, and reminding me what a pure sprinter looks like. He showed me a clean pair of heels on the first two stages and I began to think that my green jersey count would be likely to stick on five. Never mind. It’s good to have a plan, but when your plan doesn’t work out, you find another way.
Stage 3 was 170 kilometres with six King of the Mountain primes and over 3,000 metres of climbing around San Jose. Not a Sagan kind of day at all. So it felt pretty fine to win the kick for second spot – a great long solo effort from a Latvian guy, Toms
Skujinš, held us all off for the win.
The next day I was too quick for Cav for once, and I bounced my wheel off the road a couple of times as I crossed the line then pulled a big wheelie to show how pleased I was. Now that I didn’t care if I won, I was winning again, and I remembered that I liked it.
After Cav turned the tables again on the next stage, I surprised everyone, including myself, by pulling out a win in the penultimate stage. No surprises in that, you might think, Sagan, you greedy bastard, but hold your horses … it was a time trial. In my new mode of not giving a shit, I smashed it round the flat ten-kilometre course to not only take the victory, but also the yellow jersey. Not my usual colour, but I liked it.
I liked it so much that on the Queen Stage to Mount Giovanni, sorry, Mount Baldy, I dug in and finished in the top ten, losing less than a minute to Julian Alaphilippe and coming to the summit ski-station in front of climbers like Haimar Zubeldia and Gesink. Alaphilippe had taken the jersey from me by two seconds, but with time bonuses to be won on the final stage, I was still confident.
Ahead of the final stage, we were all gathered round the start line, eagerly anticipating the starter’s gun. It was one of the tightest Tours I’ve ever been involved in, and every rider in contention had been crunching the numbers to calculate how the stage might play out to their advantage. As we were held at the start line, Lomba approached Cav and casually enquired whether he intended to challenge for the intermediate sprints and the bonus seconds that came their way. Since I was just a couple of seconds behind Alaphilippe, Cav confirmed he would be shelving his own ambitions to help the Frenchman in the GC. No sooner had he finished answering Lomba’s enquiry, than his tyre exploded! Right in front of him! Surely a good omen for the rest of the day, and an exchange that would have Lomba in hysterics for the rest of the year. To be fair, Cav did storm the sprint to win the stage, and I had no qualms about that – he was flying all week – but nervously I waited to see if I’d pipped Tyler Farrar to third, as that carried a four-second bonus. As usual, Gabriele was confident and told me not to worry, and sure enough, I’d won the Tour of California.
