by Peter Sagan
The shape of 2016 had been warped, as it often is in an Olympic year. The Games were to be held in August, then the Vuelta a España would straddle August and September, with the Worlds pushed right back to the middle of October. They were set to be held in Doha, and the extreme heat of the Gulf States in summer provided another reason for the event to be held so late in the calendar.
Long gone are the days where Jacques Anquetil or Bernard Hinault could turn up at Paris–Nice in the spring, and then race to win every week until the Tour of Lombardy in the autumn. There are many factors to explain this. Expectation is higher, even at the small races that used to be regarded as little more than training rides or exhibition events. The average speed of a stage on a Grand Tour has gone through the roof, largely because of the greater importance placed today on getting somebody into a break. In the twentieth century, the first hour of a long stage was a chance to chat to old friends in the peloton, catch up on the gossip or work on your tan lines. Now this first hour is an insane free-for-all that takes place at the same sort of speed you’d expect in the last 20 kilometres of a stage, not the first.
Attention is so much higher now. Years ago there wouldn’t have been any television coverage until the last hour of the biggest races and none at all at smaller ones. Apart from the Tour de France and the Monuments, the press corps could usually share a car to get from start to finish and they’d be stopping for a decent roadside lunch too. Sean Yates told me stories of his first years in the peloton as a rider in the eighties, when the entire team would hide in a village somewhere on a circuit and then rejoin the race as it approached its closing stages!
We shouldn’t gloss over the fact that drugs in cycling have shaped the racing too. Yes, there were cheats at the top looking for the smallest advantage over their rivals, but there were dozens, maybe hundreds more, for whom illegal substances meant the difference between getting through the day or abandoning. I’m not going to suggest that the fight against drugs is won yet, but without doubt the widespread use of drugs on an industrial scale thankfully ended before my days in the professional peloton and you can see the difference in the shape of races. Look at races from the seventies, eighties and the current decade and you’ll see something that had virtually disappeared in the nineties and noughties … you can see riders getting tired!
There is a new generation of directeurs sportifs and coaches in the sport who are also helping to clean up the sport. When Yates became a DS and rode with the team on a training ride he was looked at as a curiosity by his car driving peers, but as my career has progressed, riding with Yates, Patxi Villa, Steven de Jongh and now Sylwester Szmyd has become the norm. The general consensus among these guys is that for their predecessors, once their career was done, no way would they want to go through all that again, whether they were taking illegal enhancements themselves or just trying to keep up with those who were. These guys love riding their bikes and are able to ride comfortably alongside their team in a way that suggests strongly that the sport is significantly cleaner than it was.
Anyway, I know I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but what I’m trying to say is that you simply can’t turn up at every race and expect to compete, and when your targets are as far apart as Gent–Wevelgem in March and the Worlds in October with the Tour of California, the Tour de France and the Olympics or Vuelta thrown in, you have to plan your year with extreme care, or you get burnt out.
With this in mind, we went to Oleg with our plan. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about this before, but what the hell, eh? Why so serious?
Hey Oleg, wouldn’t it be cool to have the Olympic MTB Champion on your team? Wow! History or what?
What Oleg wanted more than anything else was to end the season as the World’s No. 1 Team. And the Olympic MTB Race was not the place to pick up UCI road-ranking points. He wanted me at the Vuelta, which began in Galicia the day before the Olympic MTB Race in Rio de Janeiro. That was a bit of a stretch.
Oleg, listen. I’m not going to be able to compete for the General Classification at the Vuelta. It’s got ten summit finishes, the first of which is on Stage 3, and Stage 1 is a team time trial, so basically I’m not even in with a shout of a few days in the leader’s red jersey. In total, there are probably about four stages that I could get seriously contend for. How many UCI points for a Vuelta stage win? Six. If it’s UCI points we’re hunting, it would be better to go to Canada again. Two proper World Tour races, bags of UCI points. And much better preparation for Doha. The Vuelta is going to leave me exhausted, a month short of the Worlds.
He had a think about it. I knew there was going to be a bit of bargaining. That’s how we do things. We can’t just accept a proposition, there has to be negotiation. And that is what Oleg was bound to come back with.
‘OK, Peter,’ began Oleg. ‘You can do the Olympic Road Race instead of the Vuelta.’
‘Oh, no, I don’t want to do that. I’ve got no chance, it’s too hilly. I might as well go to the Vuelta as do that.’
More thinking.
‘OK, this is the deal. You can do the Olympic MTB race. You can miss the Vuelta. But I want two Tour de France stage wins, two wins from the two Canadian races, and you do GP Plouay and the Eneco Tour.’
The Eneco Tour was ideal prep for Doha, a week of good-quality racing in Belgium and Holland in late September. But Plouay? God, I hate that race. Brittany in September. Whenever I’ve visited it’s been like Glasgow in November. It’s up and down all day in the wind and rain on a nasty circuit and then you lose.
‘Take it or leave it, Peter.’
‘I’ll take it, Oleg.’
We shook hands.
I had another little addition up my sleeve, but I wasn’t going to tell Oleg about that just yet. I’d try and knock off the first part of his deal, and then see how the scene was before I rocked the boat.
The Tour de France started in poignant fashion, with some similarities to the previous year’s race. In 2016, the race was honouring the Normandy landings by visiting some of the beaches, and it began with the incredible spectacle of the peloton rolling away from Mont St Michel, on the causeway that separates it from the rest of France. The similarities? Riders were falling off left, right and centre.
Unluckiest was Alberto. Despite Tinkoff doing everything right and keeping him near the front, despite his undoubted talent as a bike handler, he was a magnet for trouble in the first couple of days. Part of this thing about keeping your team leader at the front to keep him out of trouble is misleading. Yes, it’s true, logic says that if there’s a crash in the bunch somewhere, the closer you are to the front the less likely you are to be behind the stoppage. The statistics also show that the risk of losing time to crashes or other splits – crosswinds are always a gust away from causing problems in northern France – can be minimised by sitting nearer to the front. However, if you’ve got, say, ten teams of nine riders trying to ride within the first 30 places all day, the mathematics dissolve pretty quickly.
Ninety into thirty equals crashes.
On Stage 1, Mark Cavendish showed that the speculation about his advancing years catching up with his speed were as premature as ever and he flashed the rest of us a clean pair of heels. That made it nine years since his first Tour stage wins, suggesting that all this stuff about ‘burnout’ affecting sprinters is subjective at best.
I’d been having a good look at Stage 2 for a while, knowing that if I was to meet Oleg’s target of two stage wins, I’d better pinpoint the ones that suited me best. I was also acutely aware that while I may have had four green jerseys hanging in my cupboard, I’d gone the last two Tours without winning a stage.
It was a disappointing finish for me. A break had been away all day, and with nervousness, crashes and horrible weather affecting the bunch, we had misjudged catching them all, as they began to split ahead of us. In the last kilometre, Roman Kreuziger got on the front and put in a massive turn, catching Jasper Stuyven, one of the breakaways, in the last couple
of hundred metres. I found myself on the front as we rose up the hill to the finish line with the likes of Alejandro Valverde and Julian Alaphilippe and the other uphill finishing specialists crowding on my wheel. Knowing this was a good opportunity to grab some green jersey points from Mark Cavendish, who was likely to finish further back today, I led out along the barriers, but held back a little. Alaphilippe came round me and went eyeballs out for the line, but I’d stored enough that I was able to take his wheel as he came past me and then re-pass him at the top. It was good to win the sprint, just a shame it wasn’t for the win.
Hang on. It normally takes quite a lot to get Gabri jumping up and down, but there he was, 50 metres past the line jumping up and down. He looks like a man who’s fallen into a muddy ditch a lot of the time, but here he looked like a man who’d fallen into a muddy ditch and come out holding a winning lottery ticket. What? Had something happened to the people ahead of me on the classifications? Maybe I’d taken the green or even the yellow jersey?
I had taken the green and the yellow jersey. That was pretty good. But how I’d come to do it was a mystery until Gabri explained that Jasper Stuyven hadn’t been left behind by the rest of the breakaway. He was the last of the breakaways, we’d already caught the others. Kreuziger’s massive effort had set me up for the stage win, not the sprint for the minor placings. Come on!
I like jerseys. This rainbow one? It’s pretty cool and I will admit that I’m not going to enjoy watching somebody else wear it very much. I’ve also got used to that particular shade of green that you only see on the Tour de France’s points jersey. But yellow? This was something new. Even people who’ve never seen a bike race in their lives know what the yellow jersey means. Some things are universally recognised by their colour: Red Army. The blues. Black Sabbath. White wedding. Yellow jersey. And here I was on the podium of the Tour de France taking the prize for winning the stage in my rainbow jersey, covering that with the green jersey of points leader, then topping them all with the yellow jersey. Tour de France race leader. Not bad.
I wore that golden fleece for three memorable days, clocking up a couple more top-five finishes before passing it to my old sparring partner Greg Van Avermaet, who took it with a classy win after his breakaway group stayed away over some hilly roads in central France. After Cav took his third win of the race the next day, my green jersey disappeared as well. Never mind. I’d been missing those rainbow stripes, I told myself.
In all honesty, I knew that if the race went to form and I kept going well, the green was likely to come back to me. I wasn’t the fastest flat-out sprinter in the race, but I could get up there when the flat-out guys couldn’t. My target was another stage win. The green jersey would look after itself. So would the yellow, but if it didn’t end up on Chris Froome’s back, it certainly wouldn’t end up on Peter Sagan’s, that was the truth. Tinkoff’s yellow jersey hopes were looking pretty thin with Alberto’s travails since the start, compounded by him getting sick at the end of the first week. When we hit the Pyrenees as the race entered its second week it was clear that he wasn’t going to make Paris, which was a shame for him and a final nail in the coffin for Oleg’s hopes of winning a Tour de France. As consolation, I took back the green jersey from Cav when the road sloped up and I was determined to make it the fifth time in five attempts that I would be wearing it on the Champs-Elysées podium.
I fancied the transitional stage that went east in the shadow of the Pyrenees from Carcassonne to Montpelier, Stage 11. It ended up being one of the most talked-about stages of recent years, but neither I nor anybody else who I know thought it would be beforehand. I knew that I would have a good chance if it came to the expected sprint. I’d been going well and came out of the mountains better than I had been while winning that stage and taking the jerseys in the first week. The Pyrenees had either weakened or removed some of the fast finishers and I felt that this would be a stage that I could legitimately target.
All the talk all day was ‘Watch out for the crosswinds, look out, it’s windy, yada yada yada.’ To be honest, it was fine. The promised wind didn’t start rushing in off the Med until late in the day, probably the last 15 kilometres or so. Being keen on the finish, I’d made sure I was close to the front in case those winds led to a tired rider letting a wheel go here or there and echelons of riders battling gales starting to split and reform.
With 11 kilometres left, I felt pretty good and could feel the race stretching. The normal big arrowhead and following snake that you’d expect to see in the last 20 kilometres of a flat Tour stage just wasn’t there. It was just a thinned-out long line of guys, not much teamwork, and I could see from the faces on show that nobody was enjoying it much.
I slipped up to the front of the line and put my head down. Maciej Bodnar was with me and there is no better rider on any team that you would want with you at a moment like that, let alone one who had been a teammate for my entire professional career. Body saw what I was doing and we went flat stick.
The team leader doing his job best and hanging out at the front of the race to avoid the splits that everybody was warning about was the race leader, Chris Froome. He latched on, and at first I thought he was trying to close me down, which would be fair enough. But a quick look and a word between us established that we had seen the same opportunity: ‘Let’s do it.’
Like me, he had a loyal teammate with him, Geraint Thomas, and he was wise to the game. Between the four of us we slipped into team time-trial mode immediately. I thought to myself, ‘No way should we get caught: two Tinkoff, two Sky. One yellow jersey, one green jersey. Unusual? Yes. A good idea? No question.’
We smashed it for ten kilometres, the bunch panicking behind but not able to reel us in. The nature of crosswinds means you don’t get as much protection in that arrowhead, so catching breaks isn’t as easy as it would be on another stage. And when that break is comprised of the race leader, the points leader and two of their strongest teammates … good luck.
Froomey was keen on a few seconds, but also the stage winner’s bonus seconds, so to his credit he decided to duke it out with me for the win, but I had enough to make it my second stage win, fulfilling Part One of my Faustian pact with Oleg. We had a few seconds to spare on the gnashing teeth of the frustrated bunch sprint, but enough for my win to be comfortable and for Froomey to bag a bit more time on Quintana and his other rivals. They called it the most daring attack of modern times, which was bollocks. It was a chance, and when you see a chance, you have to try. That’s how you win races. Chances come along in different ways, and you have to be alert to them: that’s why a plan is only worth so much.
We clambered over Mont Ventoux. Fortunately for those of us not on such good terms with the high mountains as our skinny brethren, they shortened the stage and we managed to miss the famous desert at the top because of high winds. Not quite so amusing for those GC guys though, as the effect of closing the final six kilometres of the most iconic mountainside in sport was to compress untold thousands of fans who had booked their entire summer holidays around that hour of excitement into the Forêt du Roland, on the lower slopes. As usual, the fans come last in the organisers’ thoughts, but it was the riders, who usually run them a close second, who bore the brunt of the decision, when the race was physically stopped by the weight of people on the road and the press of motorbikes.
Motorbikes. Don’t get me started. I’m in a good mood. Maybe I’ll come back to them when I’m in a foul one.
Anyway, the brilliant but farcical sight of Froomey trying to run up cycling’s most storied mountain in a pair of cycling shoes quickly relegated any other footage of the entire Tour to purely supporting features.
After beating me again a couple of days later in one of the only remaining sprint stages, Cav thoughtfully retired from the race to prep for that Olympic Road Race and missed the Alps that were beginning to loom large before we could make Paris. Only after I’d managed to win my third stage though – bonus, Oleg! – in Switzerland. Still,
he had four by then, and 30 in total. Thirty!
That stage win was memorable in its own way, just like all of them, I suppose. Cancellara was pumped up as it was in his homeland and he thought that with a few sprinters missing, this could be his day to take on the bunch. God knows he can shift at the end of a long hard race, so it was no real surprise. He probably didn’t go for them more often because he had plenty of other ways to win and didn’t need to get his hands dirty with us lot. On this occasion it looked like that strong bugger Alexander Kristoff had done for both Spartacus and me, not to mention the other hopefuls dashing for the line. However, on the day I seemed to just have a better idea than he did of where the line was, and when I threw my bike, my ass hanging way out over the back wheel, he was still sprinting, and I got it by less than the width of my tyre.
It had been such a long hot day, 210 kilometres in absolutely sweltering conditions, and we did it in less than four and a half hours, which is pretty swift for a day like that in a race that was two and a half weeks old. There were two factors in that. The first was Tony Martin, who put in a monster long break that looked like giving him a beautiful solo win. But the second was my equally beautiful Team Tinkoff, who got on the front and drove the race into the ground in pursuit of Martin and to set it up for me.
There was added pressure and motivation for me, on top of the work my teammates had put in on my behalf. This is about as close as the Tour de France ever gets to Slovakia, and there were so many white, red and blue flags and banners waving in the streets of Berne that I just couldn’t let them down.
Alexander Kristoff is a really nice guy and this wouldn’t be the last time I put his nose out of joint, but what can I say? I like winning bike races. Sorry, Alexander. I believe in God, I believe in destiny, and I believe in balance. After all the narrow second places I’d endured in the last few years at the Tour and elsewhere, maybe the seesaw was just beginning to edge back up my way? Until Sunday, anyway, when Andre Greipel beat me by about the same margin on the Champs-Elysées. C’est la vie. And come on, Peter, three stage wins and that green jersey that is your July colour of choice. Why so serious, man?
