by Peter Sagan
In terms of his own cycling career, while he was pretty swift, he wasn’t Mario Cipollini. So he went to the team with the second best sprinter, Erik Zabel, and said, ‘I can help you beat Cipollini.’ Five of Zabel’s six Tour de France green jerseys came during Lomba’s tenure with the team, where he built himself a reputation as the lead-out man’s lead-out man. He went on to do a similar job for Cipo himself as the Lion King basked in the glorious Indian Summer of his career.
He’d always had a reputation for being good at handling statistics in the bunch. In the mountains on a Grand Tour, Giovanni would always know what speed the bunch needed to ride at to avoid elimination. He got it down to a fine art, the autobus of flatlanders coasting home after a relaxed day with a minute or so to spare on the clock. That trust thing was in evidence right back then. His head for numbers made him a good candidate to become a riders’ agent when he retired, with his knowledge of life on the other side of the barriers a huge asset. But as handy as his calculator brain is, it is certainly not the key skill that makes Giovanni the king of his chosen profession. That is the absolute refusal to deal with any problem – and they are legion and diverse – with anything other than a direct head-on approach. What is the problem? How do we fix it? Simple questions, but sometimes very difficult to ask. I am certain that if I ever sit down at a negotiating table and Giovanni is on the other side, not only will I lose, but also my life must have taken an inexplicable, unplanned and horrific turn for the worse. He shows no fear, and he knows what everybody else around the table wants to achieve, but also the bare minimum they can live with. He makes it happen.
At Tinkoff, I remember the night before the Tour de France began in Utrecht in 2015, Oleg wanted to meet me to talk about money and bonuses and all that sort of Oleg stuff, so I wisely took Giovanni with me. We got there before Oleg, but Stefano Feltrin, who was his general manager then, was there. It’s fair to say Team Peter used to rub up against Feltrin on a fairly regular basis. Not only did he control the purse strings, he also resented agreeing to what he saw as our constant and unreasonable demands. I thought we’d just wait for Oleg, but this was just too good an opportunity for Lomba to miss.
‘Are you sleeping OK, Stefano?’ Giovanni said.
‘Yes,’ he replied warily, ‘why do you ask?’
‘I suppose I just assume you sit up all night figuring out ingenious new ways to fuck riders over. To save a few Euros for Oleg so you can wedge your tongue even further up his asshole.’
Stefano picked up his mobile phone and hurled it against the wall, where it splintered into a million pieces that Steve Jobs would have struggled to identify. Who knows, maybe they are all still under a corner of carpet in that anonymous Dutch hotel room.
Feltrin was puce. He looked like a Loony Tunes character with steam rising from his ears accompanied by klaxons and heat warnings.
‘Giovanni, let me tell you something. If you have to ask me if I’m fucking you, then I’m not fucking you. Because when I fuck you in the ass, it’s going to be the worst ass-fucking you’ve ever had and you won’t be in any doubt what’s happening. You’ll recognise it. God knows you’ve had more than your fair share of ass-fucking. ‘
Giovanni smiled and treated him to a little laugh, then Oleg walked in and it was never mentioned again.
I believe Lomba is still waiting for the ass-fucking.
The next longest serving member of Team Peter is Maroš Hlad. He may not be the first masseur to ever give my legs a polish, but I remember getting a massage off Maroš when I was a teenager back in Žilina and thinking that I must have made it as a cyclist. This bloke was incredible. Did you ever make a deal with yourself as a kid along the lines of: ‘When I’m rich, I’ll … wear new socks every day. Buy my mum a new car. Only ever use the expensive petrol.’ Something like that? Mine was: ‘When I’ve made it, I’ll get a massage off Maroš every day.’ And, thanks to my teams and Giovanni’s exemplary negotiating skills, I do. He comes everywhere with me.
That trust and belief in the people around you couldn’t be better illustrated than my relationship with Maroš. He’s such a calming, even-tempered presence in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had a massage and not come out of the room in a better mood than when I went in. What’s that poem? If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same? That’s Maroš. He’s happy but restrained when we win and calm and philosophical when we lose. It goes without saying that he’s an excellent masseur, but his intimate knowledge of my bizarrely twisted and knackered body is obviously something that it would take years for any other physio to sort out, no matter how skilful they are. I can’t imagine life without the guy. In Brazil for the Olympics, we rented a house on the beach, just Giovanni, Gabriele, Maroš and me, chewing the fat every night as the sun sank into the Atlantic. I’ve rarely been happier.
I don’t know if I’ve become more difficult to massage over the years or whether I’ve just become more demanding, but at some point, I just had too much leg for Maroš to manage on his own so he called for help. So now both Maroš and I are grateful to have Peter Kalany on our side. This is probably the most accurate representation of the phrase ‘I could do with an extra pair of hands’ to ever be set down on paper. If I shut my eyes, could I tell which one of them was working on me? Come on, don’t ask me that.
One of the hardest things about being a professional cyclist is renegotiating your contract each year when you’ve spent the previous 12 months burying yourself and your own chances of getting a favourable result. Come September, the team manager looks at your results and says, ‘Yeeeeaaah. Not much on here is there?’ It’s so ridiculously unfair. Everybody knows it’s unfair, everybody complains about it, and then they perpetuate it year in year out. The guy who spent the summer hiding but got into a break on one of those lazy, steamy, dog-days in July when the Tour de France raises a truce flag picks up a barrel of UCI points for outsprinting a 40-year old in Montpelier or Carpentras and sticks a zero on his contract for next year. Meanwhile, his teammate who spent three weeks keeping his GC contender-leader out of the wind, pacing him up Ventoux and the Tourmalet, trotting back to the car for water every half an hour, giving up his bike when the star’s gears pack up and then crawls into bed exhausted each night, is out on his ear because he earned no points.
This is all a lead-up to me telling you that you shouldn’t worry if you haven’t heard of a Polish cyclist called Sylwester Szmyd. If I was to tell you that he was a professional for top teams for fully 17 years without winning anything other than a stage of the Dauphiné once, you might think I’m damning him with faint praise or paying him a backhanded compliment, but nothing could be further from the truth. Just stop to imagine for a moment how good a domestique you would have to be to so completely subsume your own podium dreams in support of your team, that you barely ever threaten to win a race, yet your name is inked on to the team sheet race after race, month after month, season after season for the likes of Liquigas, Lampre and Movistar as an absolute prerequisite for the team’s success. Reliable climbing domestiques are like hen’s teeth and good teams know when they find one. Alejandro Valverde and Nairo Quintana knew a man they could rely upon when they saw him.
Sylwester was at Liquigas when I turned pro and I thought he was just the best. He never complained, he never questioned, he just did it, day in, day out, every day. And boy, could he climb. He made it look easy, his skinny legs and Polish complexion making him look like a ribbon of pasta on a bike as he disappeared up the road in front of you.
Plus, he had the coolest nickname in cycling. When he was a young professional, he rode in the service of the legendary Marco Pantani at Mercatone Uno, shepherding arguably the greatest climber the sport has ever seen over the mountain passes of Europe. As the years went on, Sylwester kept putting his signature on new contracts and his old teammates kept retiring. Pantani himself was dead in a tragic derailment of his own story. One day, somebody, one of his old Italian teammat
es on his own retirement, said, ‘Hey, Sylwester, you’re the last one of us left. The last of Pantani’s teammates still riding. You’re the Last Gregario.’
The Last Gregario. That’s a movie anybody would pay to see.
And now, having been a neighbour, mentor and training partner for many years, Sylwester has finally retired and is officially my personal coach. No smoking fags behind the wheel of a team car for The Last Gregario though … he hates it when he can’t ride with us, and you can see him itching when the races start without him.
Oh yeah, and that single stage he won? It finished on top of Mont Ventoux. If you’re only going to do something once, do it properly, eh?
The most cerebrally gifted member of Team Peter has got quite a story of his own. Patxi Vila comes from that never-ending production line of classy Basque riders raised on the slopes of the Jaizkibel, Euskadi’s holy cycling mountain. You’re born on a bike if you’re born here, and professional teams sign up infants faster than you can say vamos! But Patxi, good as he is, didn’t leap into the first offers that came his way. He was determined to study and build up some qualifications first. By the time he signed a professional contract with Banesto he was 25, having completed his degree in sports science before taking to the road.
Even as a pro, he was determined to sample all he could of life, leading him to work daily with people living with Down’s syndrome. He became a classy Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España competitor, securing the unfathomable and surely unique record of finishing in a quietly excellent twenty-second position in each of the three Grand Tours. Not content with arriving in the pro peloton late, he left it early too, joining Specialized as the main man charged with making their bikes the absolute best available. Now, my view on bikes isn’t complicated – if it works, that’s good enough for me – but knowing Patxi has given Specialized his input over the years is incredibly reassuring.
After a stint with Specialized and their S-Works factory people, Patxi took up a new role on the coaching staff at Tinkoff, where he could still work with those bikes but from the athlete’s standpoint, rather than the manufacturer’s. He became my coach at the time when I was at my lowest ebb and managed to turn my career – my whole life – around in a matter of weeks. He has the generosity of spirit to suggest that I have helped his career as much as he’s helped mine, but the man put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back from the ledge. That’s something I’ll never forget and I don’t intend to let him walk away from Team Peter too easily either.
He’s become the technical rock that we depend upon, directing from the saddle rather than behind the wheel wherever possible. He’s our DS now, with Sylwester taking on the personal coaching role that was the start of things between Patxi and me.
Oh, and how cool is this? When you see Patxi on the morning of a big race, the conversation will often go like this:
‘Hey, Patxi. How are you this morning?’
‘Ready.’
Come on, that’s cool, right?
It’s nice to have a DS that understands bikes as well as he understands riders, but there are some other guys on any team that need to really know their bikes. I’m referring of course to the mechanics. If they get it wrong, I can’t win. If they get it really wrong, I might not come back in one piece. And if I’m worrying about not winning or not coming back in one piece, then my chances of success take a huge hit.
Step forward Jan Bachleda and Mindaugas Goncaras. In my opinion, these guys are the best mechanics in the business and invaluable members of Team Peter. If they told me it was safe to jump in a barrel and be tossed over Niagara Falls, I’d hop right in. That said, I’d hope that someone important would forbid me from doing so.
So that’s it for the inner workings of Team Peter. You already know all about Ján Valach – unquestionably an integral member of Team Peter – so that’s all the important characters, all the different professionals and brilliant people that make my job so enjoyable and who have contributed directly to the successes we’ve had together.
Yep. Everyone. Cheers. Speak to you later.
What?
Oh, OK, Gabriele, don’t cry, I’m only teasing you. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Gabriele Uboldi, at my side for every minute of every day, keeping me out of trouble, letting me win at games. Take a look at photos of me on social media and you’ll no doubt spot him within seconds. The international man of mystery who comes to us from Genoa via Valencia, former professional Las Vegas poker star, America’s Cup insider, and owner of more dogs than most people have underpants. Gabriele is the very living embodiment of Team Peter. As with all the others listed above, he’s absolutely essential to the system, he dedicates his life to our success, spends huge parts of every day sorting out shit, is always there for me anywhere in the world whatever the time zone, yet the real reason we all end up spending so much time together is because we really like each other.
Team Peter. I’m a lucky guy and I know it.
2017
SUMMER
It hadn’t been a bad start to the year, but it hadn’t been ideal. Kwiato had edged me out of San Remo with the sprint to end all sprints. My bid to add the 101st Tour of Flanders to the 100th had been clotheslined. My glasses got broken. I’d had a string of second places (again) and nearly been hit by a lady walking her dog.
To be fair, she was on a zebra crossing and I was riding on the road rather than the cycle path. The only mitigating circumstances on my behalf was that it was during the time trial of Tirreno–Adriatico in San Benedetto del Tronto. Nobody had told her.
Anyway, I thought I was due a change of luck. BORA - hansgrohe provided a perfectly relaxed professional environment, with far fewer politics to contend with and no competing interests. This isn’t a criticism of how things had been at Tinkoff, just an acknowledgement that bigger teams are bound to have to deal with those kind of issues. My form was good for the summer. I’d picked up three points classifications already at Tirreno, California and Switzerland, and had my eyes set on equalling Erik Zabel’s record with a sixth straight green jersey at the Tour de France.
Once again, the race was starting outside France, this time in Düsseldorf. It meant more logistical questions and long transfers early in the race, but spare a thought for Giro d’Italia competitors. I’ve yet to ride the Tour of Italy – one day – but recent years have taken the start to Scandinavia, Northern Ireland and, in 2018, Israel! It makes good press I guess, but the general effect on riders and especially team staff is increased stress and tiredness, generally at a time when the race is at its most dangerous.
Talking of dangerous, it poured with rain for the opening time-trial stage of the Tour in Germany. I’m glad I didn’t consider myself as an overall contender or feel as though I could compete on the stage, as the pressure to test your limits in those conditions is huge. That’s what happened to Alessandro Valverde, whose mid-thirties have been golden years. He was coming into the race as dual leader of the Movistar team with Nairo Quintana, a really powerful proposition, but found himself in hospital before the day was out, having lost grip in the wet and thumped into the barriers.
The following day took us into Belgium and was affected by heavy showers again. Chris Froome went down this time, but managed to regain the bunch before we began to line up for the sprint.
What is a sprint? That’s right. A sprint is very often a lottery. I found myself on the front this time, rather than covered up as I would have liked, and when I opened up the throttle, Kittel, Greipel, Cavendish et al were already flying. I was swamped, only a couple of lengths behind Marcel Kittel on the line, but in tenth, way down on the German drag racer.
Stage 3 looked more to my liking. Finally, we would enter France, but the terrain in Lorraine looked more difficult, the race organisers having chosen a flatter route into Liège than fans of Liège–Bastogne–Liège have come to recognise. The finish comprised a short, sharp climb to the line, a type of course that had always been good to me at the Tou
r, right back to my first ever stage win at Seraing. That was not so far from here, either. It felt good.
The first thing on a day like that was to make sure that a break didn’t stay away, always tricky on a twisty, rolling stage on smaller roads. That first hour was insane as a result, everybody trying to get into a break before the day settled down. After a very fluid day, we approached the finish gruppo compacto, and my chances of winning were helped by a nasty little 11 per cent climb within the last two kilometres. That was enough to break up the sprint teams’ lead-out trains and take some of the fast guys out of the equation.
The GC contenders were sensibly staying near the front to reduce the risk of lost seconds to each other at the tricky finish, and as we came to the bottom of the ramp up to the line, it was the likes of Alberto and Froomey around me rather than Greipel and Kittel. Richie Porte was there for the same reason, but saw a glimpse of a stage win and he took off with about 500 metres remaining. It was the ideal launchpad for me and I went round him, my initial burst enough to put daylight between me, Greg Van Avermaet and Michael Matthews. A comfortable win beckoned. And then I pulled my foot out of the pedal, just like at Richmond. Unbelievable.
Once again, fortunately, I didn’t lose my balance or my momentum. I was able to clip back in and begin to sprint again, biting down the panic. I just had enough left to relax on the line and give a regal salute, like I’d planned the whole thing all along. You know that saying about the swan serene on the surface while its feet paddle like mad below the water? That’s how it was, but with webbed feet in cycling pedals.
It’s so good to win at the Tour. The whole world knows. And winning in the World Champion’s jersey was pretty special. I wasn’t planning on wearing it for too much longer in this race, though. I fancied that green one. Stage 3 had been a good one to win regarding green, as I scored heavily with most of my rivals out of the running and I clawed back some of the advantage they’d taken from me the day before. With another likely sprint day tomorrow, I thought I could stay competitive and see where we were come the weekend.
