Peter Sagan
As Peter Sagan walked through the media mix zone at the Tour de France last year on stage 8, his fifth day in the green jersey that year, there was a look of apathy across his face. By the end of the race he’d have clocked 126 career appearances in the Tour’s media zone thanks to how many days he’s worn green alone, and his enthusiasm for answering questions was visibly waning. Most of the journalists waiting didn’t stop him, instead craning to speak to yellow jersey holder Julian Alaphilippe, or the man he took it from, Giulio Ciccone. Sagan stopped once, then walked by to the team car. Maybe everyone knew that any response he’d give was going to be short at best, at worst monosyllabic. It was a bizarre scene. While it had been a quiet race day for Sagan, here was one of the the most bankable, high profile cyclists in the sport - a rider you typically can’t get anywhere near outside his team bus on race day due to the volume of fans who crowd around it - and yet no one wanted to talk to him.
A year before, at the same race, the Bora-Hansgrohe press officer told Procycling that anyone wanting to interview Sagan needs to come up with something original to get his attention. If they rolled out the same subject matters, chances were he’d just switch off out of boredom.
Peter Sagan has been his era’s defining rider. Ever since he burst into the sport as a 20-year-old neo pro with Liquigas in 2010, his big wins have been matched by his even larger character. At the same time he was winning stages of Paris-Nice just two months into his career and living up to the highest of expectations results-wise, Sagan the showman was getting ready for his first encore. There have been finish line celebrations: Superman, the Hulk, the running man. The endless wheelies during, as well as out of, races. Videos of gravity-defying trickery to show off his expert bike handling. Photobombs. The wacky, headline-worthy quotes: “I flew through the forest and hit a big rock with my ass,” was how he summed up a crash at the 2018 Tour that left him with a bloodied and bandaged leg. Quirky adverts: showering for Hansgrohe, decorating Christmas trees and racing ‘Grandma Joan’ for Specialized. He reenacted movie scenes, danced as Danny Zuko in Grease, impersonated
Sylvester Stallone in Rocky or Russell Crowe in Gladiator. He signed a copy of his autobiography for a fan at last year’s Tour while riding up the Tourmalet in the grupetto. Even when he won ParisRoubaix and stood on the podium he pretended to buckle under the weight of the cobblestone trophy when it was handed to him, garnering a laugh at one of his proudest career moments. His motto, ‘Why so serious?’ is so important to him that he emblazoned it in tattoo form across his chest (complete with a portrait of himself as the Joker). Sagan’s long-standing team-mate and friend Daniel Oss explained to Procycling that they see themselves as performers of a show, whose purpose is to entertain the fans.
Sagan became the perfect pinup for a sport suddenly thrust into a world of social media in the 2010s, whose fans
His motto ‘ Why so serious’ is so important to him that he tattooed it across his chest
experience cycling through gifs and videos online as much as watching the racing broadcasts.
But the distance between the two versions, Peter Sagan and ‘Peter Sagan the showman’ seems to have been widening each year. Perhaps the pressure and expectation of a decade of being the life and soul of cycling is taking its toll. Perhaps Sagan’s quietening is simply a sign that he’s growing up and maturing. Perhaps he’s just faced a testing few seasons - his win tally has slowed the last two years, down to four in 2019. Maybe he’s achieved so much he’s searching for a new challenge, something to renew his motivation. His hat-trick of world titles and record breaking seven green jerseys are sure to stay unmatched in the history books for some time. He has 12 Tour stage wins across a variety of terrain, plus one title apiece in Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders, even if there is a sense that for a rider as talented as Sagan, his palmarés should be packed with monument victories by now. For all the big wins there have been countless near-misses, as his biggest strength - being Peter Sagan - has also tended to be his biggest disadvantage. He’s finished in the top six of Milan-San Remo six times, for example, and has a further six top 10 results in Flanders and Roubaix.
Sagan has repeatedly hinted he’s not going to be cycling forever, professing an approach that he’d rather burn twice as bright but for half as long. And now he’s turned 30, where Sagan goes next is the big question.