HE'S A MONSTER ON THE BIKE SAGAN
Ahead of the 2014 Classics season, the expectation on Peter Sagan to achieve cycling greatness was immense, not that he showed any sign of it. Ever since his sensational breakout at Paris-Nice four years ago, the Slovakian star has been tipped to win virtually everything on the calendar and, as Procycling discovered, the outcome of this spring shouldn’t alter his sparkling future. Still only 24, Sagan is less concerned than most with what lies ahead. “If you knew what was going to happen, there would be no surprises and no fun.” We met him in Tuscany as he prepared to go into battle on the cobbles.
F or the erstwhile Liquigas team, it was their JFK moment; everyone remembers where they were when a 20-year-old neo-pro named Peter Sagan won his second stage of his first Paris-Nice, riding with the youthful insouciance of a kid on his after-school paper-round. The Pole Maciej Bodnar, who had broken his collarbone a few weeks earlier and was recovering at home, says that the PlayStation controller that he was holding clattered to the floor. In Italy, at Tirreno-Adriatico, the team press officer, Paolo Barbieri, boasted to journalists that they had a campioncino, a “little champion”, on their hands, though wasn’t quite sure if it was a fluke. After the initial shock and jubilation, the team’s DS in France, Mario Scirea, could only giggle when, on the way back to the hotel that night, he nodded towards the ASO car that had just drawn alongside them, asked Sagan if he recognised the passenger, and watched Sagan shake his head blankly. It was Bernard Hinault.
As for Sagan himself, well, he seemed almost as matter-of-fact at the time as he is now. Over a herbal tea at a four-day training camp in Riotorto Vignale, Tuscany, the week before this year’s TirrenoAdriatico, the realisation that it’s exactly four years since his breakthrough seems to cause no pangs of sentimentality. “I’m not the kind that thinks too much about this type of thing,” he grunts.
It’s been quite clear since he gingerly pulled up a chair 20 minutes ago that Sagan is approaching this interview in the way that most of us would a tooth extraction but he also doesn’t want to come across as rude. So, whenever he senses his own frostiness, he breaks the ice with a smile, a joke or a nasally giggle. “Put it this way,” he grins now, “if I’d known four years ago that I’d be here now, talking about my ‘big
breakthrough’ in an interview, I think I’d have been pretty happy.”
Photo-shoots, interviews and added scrutiny all come with Sagan’s newfound superstar status, of course. The 24-year-old is not a naturally expansive talker and clearly treats media duties as a necessary evil. “But he’s never once said ‘No’ to me,” stresses Paolo Barbieri, the Cannondale communications chief. Speak to anyone in the team or the Slovak’s entourage and you’ll hear the same things. DS Stefano Zanatta tells us over breakfast on the second day in Tuscany that Sagan has continually surprised him since 2010 and not just on the bike: “The great qualities that people don’t see are his manners and his respect for other people. When he calls me up to ask for something, it’s still always “May I?” and “Grazie”. Even when there’s 30 kilometres to go in a race, he’s on the rivet and I hand him an energy bar out of the car window, he never forgets to say thanks. That makes me realise that it’s something deeply rooted in him. It’s one of the most satisfying things about working with Peter: seeing that he has kept those good solid values in spite of this image he has as this jack-the-lad, this extrovert.”
If the two sides of Sagan sound like a contradiction – the courteously shrinking violet and the bottompinching rogue – they have somehow found a vessel in which to coexist. Our photo shoot in a first-floor hotel conference room is a revealing snapshot: having dutifully trudged into our makeshift studio and changed into his racing kit, Sagan begins a shirtbursting metamorphosis. His interpretation of the Hulk role, as per our photographer’s instructions, is at least as convincing and committed as anything served up by Ed Norton in the latest Hollywood adaptation. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised: Sagan briefly took acting lessons when he was 11. The Hulk schti ck came about, of course, because there is a heroic, comic-book quality to Sagan’s cycling, and one that its perpetrator both recognises
and keenly cultivates. Ask Hinault – him again – for the secret of his success in the 1970s and 80s, and he’ll tell you that throughout his career cycling remained first and foremost a game: “If you know how to play, you can do fantastic things. Nothing can beat it,” the ‘Badger’ told us once.
Sagan patently shares this outlook. It underpinned those victory celebrations that some rivals have misconstrued as taunts – dismounting as he reached the finish-line in the 2008 European MTB crosscountry championships and peering back down the course for the rider in second place, or his original Hulk impersonation in Boulogne-sur-Mer at the 2012 Tour de France – and it emerges clearly when we broach the subject in Italy. “Cycling is a game, isn’t it?” he says with a shrug. “I think it’s only hard when you’re struggling to hold on in the bunch on a climb, or fighting to make the time limit. There you start to
Sagan has a profound gratitude for the talents th at mother nature has best owed
think that it’s a hard job. But even then you get to your hotel, lie down, share a joke with your teammates and start thinking that it’ll be better the next day. We race 100 days a year and obviously you can’t feel good every day. It’s always up and down. You know that, so there’s no point getting negative. It’s just a question of waiting for the good times to come again. It may seem like it’s easier for me but that’s just life; we all have different roles. There are people who sit behind a computer screen every day and earn millions, and others who slave over machines in a factory for almost nothing.”
This final remark hints at another recurring theme with Sagan: a profound awareness of, and gratitude for, the talents that mother nature has bestowed. In this, he is helped by the implicit comparison with his older brother, Juraj, who joined Cannondale with him in 2010. Since then, it’s fair to say that Sagan senior has hardly taken the cycling world by storm. Not that you’ll find anyone at Cannondale complaining; Juraj is apparently a model pro, of whom his younger sibling is fiercely protective. “I’ll tell you one thing: I wouldn’t be here without my brother,” Peter assures us. “He inspired me to start riding. Then, when I was 14, I was bored of cycling
and wanted to quit. I’d won most of the races I’d done up to that point but I preferred motocross, downhill mountain biking, these things. But Juraj persuaded me to get back on my road bike.”
Over the past four years, the more famous Sagan has seen his brother’s struggles in the pro peloton and learned that life, and even the same family’s gene pool, is an unfair lottery. With a prodigious talent therefore comes a daunting responsibility. It is one thing to muck about, signing female fans’ cleavages before stage starts and pulling wheelies, but it would be quite another – and dare we say an insult to his brother’s hard work – to squander his unique gift. Luckily no one needs to explain this to Sagan. He is not particularly religious but throughout our interview we lose count of “Thank Gods” footnoting near enough every mention of his inherited abilities.
Ivan Basso and Sagan seem to sit at opposite ends of both their careers and the personality spectrum - Basso the 36-year-old could-be monk, Sagan the 24-year-old would-be punk. If it wasn’t already clear from the way they interact in Tuscany, though, Basso tells us he holds his team-mate in the highest esteem. More to the point, he has identified the same trait in Sagan – the way in which he cherishes and nurtures his talent – as his most valuable asset.
“Of all of the fuoriclasse [super talents] that I’ve come across, Sagan is maybe the most tenacious and methodical,” Basso says. “He’s a machine gunner, a beast. He’s one of the first to go out training in the morning and last to come back. If he wins 20 races one year, he’s back the next season even more motivated. He’s an anomaly. I’ve seen many talented riders but never one who’s that talented and also as tenacious as he is. He doesn’t miss a beat. Normally the super talented rider trusts his talent – no one wants to get up at 6am and go on the rollers; anyone in their right mind would do it at 9am, especially if your talent allows you to be more relaxed. With his ability, it would be so easy to get complacent. And yet he’s more determined than anyone.” To listen to his team-mates and even Sagan himself in Riotorto Vignale, you’d have struggled to see any impediment to his total domination of the 2014 Classics season. Watching him would have brought anyone to the same conclusion. On the road, on training rides up and down the cypress-lined avenues of the Tyrhennian coastline, he pawed at the pedals like a famished grizzly pulling the meat off a fresh kill, nonchalant yet fearsome. Off the bike, he padded quiet hotel corridors with the same look of languid menace, eyes half-closed, muscles ominously hidden under the billows of his sweatpants.
There have been once-in-a-generation riders who have captivated with their style (Anquetil) and others
“He’s a machine gunner , a beast . He’s one of the first to go tr ainin g in the mornin g and last to come back”
who were defined by their panache (Hinault). With Sagan, it’s his physicality that fascinates, as was the case with Merckx. Coaches, like fans, instinctively wonder what physiological X-factor accounts for a unique repertoire: the sprinting speed to compete with Cavendish and Kittel, proven potential to win mountain stages and timetrials, and maybe the rarest and most impressive of all – the finisseur’s flourish that allows him to bolt out of a fast-moving bunch alone in the last ten kilometres, as he did at Gent-Wevelgem and the GP de Montréal in 2013.
Fortunato Cestaro, DS to Sagan in the Under-23 Marchiol team, once claimed to have seen only one other rider with anything like Sagan’s capacities, and that was Moreno Argentin. Cannondale’s former coach, Paolo Slongo, later said that Sagan could tolerate more lactic acid in his muscles than anyone he had ever seen. When Slongo left Cannondale to rejoin his old protegé, Vincenzo Nibali, at Astana at the end of 2013, the privilege of tuning Sagan’s high-spec engine was passed to the former T-Mobile, HTC-Columbia and Katusha trainer, Sebastian Weber. In Tuscany, Weber tells us that he, too, was impatient to discover Sagan’s secret when he tested him for the first time in November 2013.
Weber says that the results answered his questions but won’t tell us why. “There was one thing that came up pretty quickly and clearly, and which I explained to Peter, but I don’t know if he wants me to tell you,” Weber says coyly.
Unfortunately for us, Sagan is also keen to preserve the mystique: “I know what he means… but maybe I’ll leave it to the end of my career to tell people.”
Weber does, at least, share his intention to “only make small tweaks, not change a winning formula” in Sagan’s training. He also effuses about a characteristic which, while not explaining everything, is one oftoverlooked facet of Sagan’s arsenal: the economy of his riding in both races and training.
“I would definitely agree that he’s very efficient in races,” Weber says. “He expends minimal energy moving through a peloton, whereas other riders waste a lot. The second thing – and this is also what I wanted to understand – is that he really doesn’t need that much training to get into very good shape. I look at that and then start to think of how much better he might become when he is able to train more, because to date his workloads haven’t been that great. I don’t think he’s anywhere near fulfilling his potential.”
While it understandably excites Weber, Sagan’s sheer physical robustness must be daunting to his future opponents. Most of his team-mates remember little of meeting him for the first time at the end of 2009 at a training camp in Cecina but one thing that lodged in their memories was his superhuman appetite for… food. “At the first breakfast, I think he took three croissants. We were all looking at him and looking at each other like, ‘What does he think he’s doing?’” recalls Maciej Bodnar.
“A lot of the best riders have it – that incredible metabolism,” the Cannondale DS, Stefano Zanatta, observes. Sagan jokes to us that he doesn’t put on more than a kilo or two in the winter because he loses so much muscle, not because he watches what he eats. But this is just his usual self-deprecation; Weber has been impressed by Sagan’s diet so far, too.
He showed up to that first battery of physical tests of the close-season tipping the scales at 77kg. He then jumped aboard an ergometer and scored 500 watts on a Conconi test – a team record. In fact, Cannondale team doctor Roberto Corsetti told Sagan he hadn’t seen anyone break 450 watts for over 10 years.
Having established that Sagan is a more emotionally intelligent man than you might assume, and every bit as good a rider as his fans hope and rivals fear, it seems dutiful here to issue some disclaimers. The first arrives within hours of us leaving Italy: despite a scintillating attack on the run-in to Siena, Sagan is beaten to victory in Strade Bianche by Michał Kwiatkowski. This pair, incidentally, were slugging it out for years in age-group races in Eastern Europe before they turned pro. Perversely, Kwiatkowski tended to win the sprints and Sagan in the hills.
But there, in Siena’s fabled Piazza del Campo, was an early warning: perhaps Sagan wouldn’t have it all his own way in the Classics after all. Another, even
“When he ’ s won all you think he can win , he ’ll st art on major tours . this guy is goin g to mark cyclin g hist ory”
ruder awakening would follow two weeks later, this time when it really counted, at Milano-Sanremo. Having played it more or less perfectly on the Cipressa, wearing down the sprinters and their teams, Sagan froze, almost literally, on the rain-sodden Lungomare Italo Calvino. He finished only 10th.
It just GOES to show that are few certainties in cycling, even when your name is Peter Sagan. At the time of writing, the Cannibal of his era was still nursing an empty belly as far as Monuments were concerned. If that’s still the case at the end of the year, Sagan might begin to look less like the new Merckx and more like the new Edvald Boasson Hagen.
No one at Cannondale really expects that to happen, of course. Stefano Zanatta, the team’s most senior directeur sportif, can see only one minor chink in Sagan’s armour, and only one real pitfall on his road to glory: “Peter’s already won a lot but he hasn’t had those huge victories that would have allowed him to rest on his laurels. Last year he was on the podium of four big Classics, he’s won the green jersey… but if he was to win two big Classics this year and the Worlds, then maybe he could start to feel a little like his appetite had been sated. If that happened to Peter, though, I think he’d be more likely to just retire than continue with less motivation.
“As far as weaknesses go, I can see only one at the moment: He struggles to stay focussed in stage races,” Zanatta continues. “He says that he wants to have fun on his bike and he finds it hard to do that under the mental strain of racing for days on end. If he doesn’t have a clear objective, like he did when he won the Tour of Poland in 2011, his concentration can wander.”
This is something that Sagan himself has often acknowledged. Midway through last year’s Tour de France, he told L’Équipe that targeting the general classification in a major tour looked to him like “a big ball-ache”. This doesn’t stop Ivan Basso opining that, “When he’s won all you think he can win, then he’ll start on major tours. This guy is going to mark cycling history.”
Sagan isn ’t lookin g that far ahead but does promise us that there is enough in his current line of work to keep him occupied and motivated for a few years yet. Neither he nor Weber wants him to make the changes to his training and body shape that could conceivably make him competitive over three weeks, and the high-octane appeal of cross-country or
even downhill mountain biking won’t tempt him away. The adrenalin junkie in Sagan finds its outlet on training rides, where his various stunts leave his team-mates open-mouthed. “On one ride this winter, he sat on the bars, facing backwards, and rode down a hair-pinned descent. It had to be seen to be believed,” says Bodnar, still shaking his head in disbelief.
Sagan will tell you that tricks like these are just his way of keeping it fun. The same goes for mid-race wheelies, the Hulk poses, and grabbing a podium girl’s derrière at Flanders a year ago, though he soon realised that was a jape too far. An old adage states that you grow up fast under the media’s magnifying glass, and that has certainly applied to Sagan over the past 12 months. At home in Slovakia, his face stares out of Citroën billboards all over the capital city, Bratislava, and Sagan can’t go for a walk in his home town, Žilina, without being gawked at. Generally now, he tells us with a cackle, he doesn’t answer his mobile when he doesn’t recognise the caller’s number, leaving his Slovak manager to face the telephonic bombardment. “Now the gossip magazines in Slovakia have even started talking about me,” he says with a roll of the eyes. His growing profile at home and the resulting intrusion prompted Sagan’s decision to move to Monte Carlo at the end of 2013. “The first time I went to look at apartments, I hated it,” he says. “The traffic, the kind of people that live there… I thought it wasn’t for me. Then I found a flat that I liked, and figured out how to get around. Now I’ve realised there are some normal people living there and it feels like home.”
Life in the Principality is a far cry from Sagan’s childhood in Žilina as the fourth and youngest child of Lubomir, a pizzeria owner, and Helena, who until recently ran a grocery store (like Merckx’s parents, incidentally). But beyond the obvious tax and privacy benefits, there are more intrinsic aspects of Monaco life to appeal to Sagan. It’s a location synonymous with speed. Fast-living and fast cars… like the ones driven by Fernando Alonso, a double winner of the Monaco Grand Prix.
Will Sagan join Alonso’s still unnamed, still mystery-shrouded new team at the end of the year? We have been politely asked by Cannondale not to break that taboo in Tuscany, and frankly we don’t really need to: Sagan has been denying reports that he has signed on with Alonso for € 4million a season for weeks. He’ll soon be giving the same short shrift to rumours that it is Oleg Tinkov who has wooed him, maybe as part of a Tinkoff-Cannondale merger that nearly happened last autumn. What we do know is that Sagan’s choice will matter less to his bank balance than to his palmarès. His versatility as a rider has become a mixed blessing, making rival teams reluctant to assist his own in almost any race scenario, on any terrain. So potent are Sagan’s weapons that he has often still come up with solutions – witness his race-winning attacks at Gent-Wevelgem, the Brabantse Pijl and the GP de Montreal in 2013 – but he also knows that opponents’ spoiling tactics will ask ever harder questions of his teams in future. Cannondale’s demolition derby at Albi in last year’s Tour de France, when they forced the pace for 120km to oust Mark Cavendish and Marcel Kittel, gave Sagan a blueprint. Whether his current team can repeat it consistently, and how easy it will be to find a group that can, are issues very much at the forefront of Sagan’s concerns.
“My minimum requirements are that I want to be the leader for the Classics and the green jersey in the Tour,” he says firmly at the end of our interview. “My manager [former rider Giovanni Lombardi] will look after the money side. I just know that it’ll be hard to
“My require ments are to be the leader for the Classi cs and the green jerse y in the Tour. My manager wi ll look after the mone y”
find somewhere better than what I already have. It’s getting harder and harder for me to win, because of the way other teams ride, and that’s why I’m going to need an even stronger team in the future…”
At Cannondale, they certainly hope that he can be persuaded to stay. “He’s popular with his team-mates because he’s learned how to give back,” says Zanatta. “He knows that if he volunteers to work for a teammate in one of the smaller races, like he did with Moreno Moser at Strade Bianche last year, they’ll be much happier to sacrifice themselves for him.”
“He’s a great team leader,” says Maciej Bodnar. “It’s massively motivating to know that you’re working for a guy who won’t let you down. He also never rants and raves if someone can’t do their job because they’re on a bad day. He just tells us not to worry, that he knows we’ll be better the next day…”
Sagan doesn’t like setting targets or looking into the future, he says with a broad smile, because “if you knew what was going to happen, there would be no surprises and no fun.” They are the words of a young man who, as he puts it now, arrived at his first ParisNice four years ago “thinking that I was going to suffer”, and left knowing that cycling still felt like a game.
That has remained the case since then and Bernard Hinault would tells us that, as long as it does, Peter Sagan will continue to do some fantastic things.