by Peter Sagan
2015
AUTUMN
Remember how I mentioned that I enjoy a personal challenge from a friend, or sometimes a little wager, to inject a touch of motivation to a particular race or task expected of me? Now, you might suggest, very reasonably, that a man from a modest background with a very short career window being paid a decent amount of money to win bike races should need no further reward, and you’d be right. The only trouble is that all sounds a bit serious, and you already know where I stand on being too serious. This enables me to focus and really go for it, but still keep it fun.
There have been various dares, bets and trades over the years among the members of Team Peter, but one of the first that sticks in my mind is the bet I made with Giovanni before going to Richmond for the 2015 Worlds.
‘No, wait …’ Giovanni steps in to remind me. ‘What about Liquigas at your first Tour de France?’
Ah, yes. Giovanni got into one of our whadaya-gonna-do-for-me-if-I-win? conversations with the boss of Liquigas, Paolo Zani, before my first Tour in 2012.
‘I said that if Peter can win two stages for Liquigas at his first Tour it would be a remarkable achievement and that they should mark it in an appropriate way … maybe with a car, for instance? Presidente Zani said, OK, let’s make it two stages AND a green jersey. And then he’d give Peter a Porsche.’
And what happened, Lomba?
‘You won three stages. And the green jersey.’
Bang. So now I can tell you what I had in mind for Richmond in 2015. Beforehand, I’d been back to altitude to get some relaxed miles in. We’d hit upon a very attractive plan of staying on the western side of the Atlantic after the Tour, mixing a bit of rest and relaxation with altitude training in August, then building up to the race in September. We knew it was a balancing act to hold my condition from the Tour, which was really good, and to keep me free from anxiety and tiredness, which had been as bad in the spring as my fitness was good in the summer. We were also trying to manage a problem with my hip (that I still have to keep an eye on now and will do for the rest of my career, maybe my life). I’m naturally a bit twisted on the bike, and that period of overtraining in the spring had really made my right hip and lower back tight. Maroš was working on it right through the year, and I was doing some gym work to improve my core strength and stability. It really assists with my climbing and big efforts, especially increasing power when you want to stay in the saddle, over the cobbles, for instance. My routine in the gym after training keeps me strong and injury free.
This time, we headed to Lake Tahoe in California. The lake is at around 1900 metres and surrounded by such beautiful mountains that you can’t fail to feel relaxed and happy. Giovanni, Katarina and I were having dinner, a really pleasant meal, talking about the spring, about my hip, how I was feeling, and about motivation for Richmond. Now, as I said, Lomba was a shit-hot rider in his day. We didn’t cross over, but my coach now, Sylwester Szmyd, was in the pro peloton alongside him for a few seasons. There were a string of strong Italian ‘horses’ like Giovanni, Martinelli, Scirea, Poli, unsung heroes who their whole team could rely on to do the work of three men each, but also to watch carefully as they could keep you out of trouble. ‘Foxes’, is how Sylwester described these guys, and I would suggest that smartness and nose for a solution have been very useful to Giovanni (and me, by implication) after he retired and set up his agency. However, unlike a lot of modern ex-riders who stay in the business, Lomba hung up his wheels for the last time at his last race and they have gathered dust in his garage ever since. Either that or he made a killing on eBay, that’s probably more his style. The point is that unlike people like Patxi or Sean Yates, both awesome directors and coaches for me at that time at Tinkoff, I’ve never ridden a bike with Giovanni. Sean Yates still races against his sons and his brothers in England sometimes. But not Giovanni.
So, when he cracked open a very nice bottle of wine in Tahoe, we were celebrating, but planning too. My hip was feeling great after concerted strengthening and manipulation by the genius Maroš, despite the team doctors having declared that I would need an operation. The wine was called No. 1, and Giovanni said, what could he do to repay me if I finished No. 1 in Richmond?
I thought about it. Thought about the glorious 120-kilometre rolling route I had ridden all the way around Lake Tahoe that morning. ‘Lomba, if I become UCI World Champion, you are going to come back here and ride a lap of the lake with me.’
He thought long and hard. One thing about Giovanni is that he never just says, ‘Yes.’ He always has to twist it, or add a clause, or make it more interesting.
‘OK,’ he said at last, turning to Katarina, ‘but you’re coming too.’
The three of us raised our glasses and chinked. The game was on.
I went to the Vuelta a España in the autumn, mainly to pick up a little form for the Worlds but also to try and remember what it was like to win. Fortunately, it came to me early when I outsprinted John Degenkolb and Nacer Bouhanni to grab a stage and a spell in the points jersey early on, no mean feat in a race as mountainous and explosive as the Tour of Spain. Unfortunately, my luck didn’t hold far beyond the first week, when some fool on a neutral service motorbike whizzed up the side of the bunch and knocked me off towards the end of Stage 8. With some deep bruising and a certain amount of Slovakian skin lost to Murcian tarmac, I was forced to withdraw from the race. If that wasn’t enough to put my nose out of joint, I then learned the race had fined me for throwing my bike on the ground and kicking a race car in frustration in the aftermath of the crash. Thanks, guys. You might as well pop up to the hospital while you’re at it and see if you can extract some penalties from old ladies who have sworn at muggers while having their handbags stolen.
Sometimes it’s hard to stick to your aim of always taking a positive from a negative, but on this occasion two good things came about indirectly. First, eight days racing was good time to get in the bank before the almost daily mountain-top finishes that characterise the Vuelta truly kicked in, meaning that at least I wasn’t going to finish the race tired. I could focus fully on Richmond.
And that was by no means the first time that season that motos had got in the way of the race they were supposed to be assisting. The most common issue is that as the race compresses towards the finish and the pace picks up, the support guys who have been following the race for any number of reasons have to squeeze past and get to the finish before the race does, leading to some risk taking, bad decisions, dangerous moments and occasionally crashes like mine. I’m pleased to say there’s been some genuine improvements made since then, the simplest and most useful being improved deviation shortcuts for traffic to leave the race route and breeze to the finish without having to use the same route as the race.
I got to Virginia a little bit earlier than I probably would have liked in preparation for the road race, especially with concerns about that Vuelta tumble still so fresh. But an event that was introduced into the UCI World Championships in 2012 is the Team Time Trial, challenged for in our usual professional teams.
You can imagine that Oleg would love a world title with ‘Tinkoff’ emblazoned on it. Not Contador, Meika or Sagan of Tinkoff, but just Tinkoff. Winners. Champions.
And so a week before the road race took place, I was on the line with five strong Tinkoff teammates, focused on a medal that would mean that I would have something to bring back from the other side of the Atlantic, no matter what happened the following weekend.
Manuele Boaro was a bit of a horse for us, an Italian TT specialist who had ridden smoothly and strongly in these events as a powerful teammate on a number of occasions, so when his saddle slipped down after only three kilometres and the rest of us sailed off into the distance, it was a massive blow. We weren’t just losing a rider of his quality very early, but the Worlds TTT is a six-man event, unlike the nine teammates who gather together in the Grand Tours. That meant that instead of each of us doing 16 per cent of the work, we would have to do 20 per cent f
or virtually the whole 40 kilometres or so we had to cover. That was bound to be a factor in the closing stages.
Well, it should have been, but it wasn’t. But not for a good reason.
The remaining five of us were pulling pretty hard and the changes were good; very tight and close. Too tight and close, it turned out. Michael Valgren was in the line behind Michael Rogers and managed to get his front wheel just marginally alongside the Australian’s rear wheel and that was it. Crunch. Both of them went down, Rogers straight over the bars and Valgren skidding along the tarmac on his shoulder and arse. It wasn’t pretty.
For a moment, Maciej Bodnar and I sat up, still rolling, and looked at each other. What do we do? Push on? But the rules for the World TTT are strict: the time is taken when the fourth rider crosses the line. Not much point in me, Body and Christopher Juul-Jensen racing to the line and leaving our stricken teammates behind. We weren’t even sure they’d be able to continue, but both the Michaels are tough guys and they had that added incentive of neither wanting to be the one who let the team down. Leaving Lycra, skin and blood on the tarmac, we gingerly regrouped. By that time, Boaro and his fixed bike had got back up to us too, so we rode on as a sextet, but now in search of nothing more than dignity and obligation to each other and the team. Being the senior riders who hadn’t had any problems, Body and I pulled for most of it, so I guess it was training that wouldn’t go amiss. Nobody was cheering at the finish when we arrived stone-cold last of 27, eight minutes and more behind BMC. Inauspicious. Thank goodness we hadn’t set off last. They’d probably have packed everything up by the time we arrived.
A week later, the men’s road race of the 2015 UCI World Championships was held on a lovely late summer’s day on the eastern seaboard of America. Richmond, one of the oldest settlements in the whole union, was named after leafy Richmond-upon-Thames on the outskirts of London, by pioneers of the Jamestown settlement. The state, Virginia, was named in honour of the first Queen Elizabeth of England by the great explorer Walter Raleigh. Pocahontas and George Washington called this part of the world home. There’s a sense of history in Richmond, Virginia, that is rarely found in the United States, and the Virginians guard it fiercely, as you might expect.
What can I say? I was there all week, you pick this stuff up.
One of their nods to the past is found in the neat cobbles that line some of the roads. The locals might have been proud of their streets, but I was pretty keen on them too.
I really liked the circuit. Really liked it. There were two twisting kilometres of intense climbing, descending and cornering, then a relaxing circuit where you could take stock, get your breath back, see what damage had been done, a climb, then the intense section would be on you once more. The damage was nearly done extraordinarily early. With a slightly longer first lap being followed by 15 laps of 16 kilometres each, I was settling in for the long haul, proudly wearing the blue, white and red of Slovakia alongside Juraj and Michal Kolář, and happy to be there and considered a ‘player’. This player was very nearly back in the changing rooms before the game had even properly begun. The race director withdrew his flag into the leading car to signify that the neutralised section was done and the race was on, and the pace went stratospheric in an instant. Now, this is very common in Grand Tours these days, but a race as long as the Worlds ridden by national squads rather than teams with commercial TV exposure in mind, tends to be a little more thoughtful in the opening stages. I’m ashamed that Peter’ Strategic Mastermind’ Sagan was dropped so swiftly that spectators might have thought I was riding in the opposite direction to the others.
Two groups quickly formed with a significant gap separating them, and the man at the back of the second group, stone cold last, was me. Well. Something had to be done.
Fortunately, somebody did it. There were plenty of startled hitters in the back group, and the bizarre sight of a desperate chase in a race with 250 kilometres left lit up the streets. Not that they needed lighting up: it was one of the best atmospheres at a race that you or I are ever likely to experience. The various nations’ travelling fans bellowed their support, naturalised US-based Europeans cheered on their representatives from the Old Countries, American cycling fans kept up a steady chant of ‘U-S-A!’ and enthusiastic locals yelled with excitement at the whole spectacle.
The two groups came back together and the rest of the first half of the marathon race was a bit calmer. The Dutch, Belgian and German teams kept it quick enough to stay relatively tidy, but not so fast that it was uncomfortable. There’s a complicated qualification process for the Worlds that essentially means that the bigger cycling nations get more places, so the Slovakia team of three swashbuckling pirates could just hang in and let the big guns of the heavy battleships boom out at the front. With the biggest field in cycling – nearly 200 riders – it’s good to make it hard and shell out those who aren’t strong enough to last the course as early as possible, and the big teams do a good job.
The first move to cause genuine concern came with a couple of laps to go, when the Great Britain team set up Ian Stannard for a bullish attack. I knew him to be a strong guy from the early northern Classics where he had become a real force, and his attack led to a regrouping and a very tidy little breakaway going clear. I bit my lip, sucked my teeth and told myself there was a long way to go, that it was no time to panic and there were big teams that would want this escape closed down. There was no denying that a group of Michal Kwiato (the defending champion), Dani Moreno, Bauke Mollema, Tom Boonen, Andrey Amador, Elia Viviani and Stannard could take the race away from the rest of us if things went their way.
The good thing about having fast guys like Viviani, Boonen and Kwiato in there, you can be sure the others won’t fancy dragging them to the finish line only to eat their dust. And the good thing about having fast guys like those three together is that they will be eyeing each other too closely to totally commit to the attack. Stay calm, I told myself for the 100th time, and keep riding.
It was really fast now: 225, 230, 240, 245 kilometres gone. I was feeling absolutely shafted, but I knew that if I was feeling that way, the others were probably hammered too. I was aware of the one shot that I had in the chamber, the one big payment that I could spend, and knew that I couldn’t afford to blow it at the wrong moment.
The corners in that twisty crucial closing couple of kilometres had been causing problems right through the race, more for some riders than others. I knew that it was key to take them without scrubbing speed off if at all possible, and on the dead left-hander that led in to the final ascent of Libby Hill, I took a very wide line and didn’t touch the brakes, finding myself gaining a few places and coming out of the bend fast. Zdenek Stybar, a great bike handler, had a similar idea and put his head down and went for it. I tried to control my breathing and stay within myself, but truth be told, I was very close to my limit at this point, just one of the remaining hopefuls strung out behind the Czech rider.
Nobody went clear, and on the next corner, a dead right-hander at the base of the climb up 23rd Street, I tried the old trick again, taking it wide with the intention of being catapulted out of it compared to those taking the shorter inside line but needing to brake.
Greg Van Avermaet now led. I’d been pleased he hadn’t been in that earlier break as I would have been really up against it then. Not only is he strong with similar characteristics to me, he doesn’t mind putting in a shift of work, and they would have been all the more dangerous with him on board. Greg hit the cobbles of 23rd Street and fired his cannonball, his one shot.
People asked me afterwards if 15 laps give you the time to plan the point of your attack to precision. I have to say that it wasn’t like that at all. I was trying to stay at the front and use the corners, but, for sure, there was no way I had targeted this climb as my launchpad. But with the speed I’d carried out of the corner I hit the cobbled stretch at a big rate of knots and quickly realised that it was now or never. Two kilometres to go. I could see that i
f I could match Greg’s effort, the speed I had from the corner would carry me by him, so I gave it everything I had and reached the top maybe five metres in front of him. I could taste metallic blood in my throat and my calves were screaming at me with all the accumulated pain of 260 kilometres. The race was nowhere near won and my needle was glued to E on the gauge. Fortunately, the next section was downhill and I squatted flat on the crossbar in the way I had become accustomed. Maybe this was the day when people began to wonder if it was actually a useful technique rather than a trick like a wheelie or a bunny-hop, as I belted down to a 90-degree left-hander and trusted my tyres to hold the line, offered up a quick prayer, ignored the brakes and lent my Specialized over at the sort of angle the designers would cringe at. By the time I’d levelled out again, miraculously upright, Greg and Edvald Boasson Hagen were still chasing, but were looking a bit smaller in the rear-view mirror. Perfect, except there were a horribly draggy 800 metres separating me from the line and far fewer metres between me and them.
I put it in the biggest gear I dared and did my best to relax my breathing, to slow down the world around me as it passed by. The noise was at a pitch and level that was beyond anything I could remember at a bike race: it was like the Kwaremont, but with an intensity you’ll only hear at the finish and when the flags of nations are inspiring extra effort from both those bursting their lungs on bikes and those bursting eardrums on the barriers. I tried to shut it out, forcing myself to use that core strength to push the pedals down in straight lines and resting my forearms on the bars to keep myself from rocking to and fro.
How badly did I want to win? That’s the challenge I asked of myself. Some races you can make the finale hard by attacking and continually trying to outmuscle everyone. These are the races where people say, ‘Oh, well done, Sagan, or Greg, or Fabian, or Tomeke, or Kwiato, you were the strongest … but you didn’t win.’ Today was not that race. This was the one-shot race, the one bullet that I had been waiting the whole year, my whole career, my whole life, to fire. I wasn’t going to lose without having tried to win. I wasn’t going to die wondering. But still, I was convinced I would be caught.
