INTERVIEW: PETER SAGAN
“The most important thing is to be consistent. After that, if you win or lose, well, that’s how it goes”
Peter Sagan has endured a testing two seasons and won only once in 2020, albeit spectacularly from a long-range breakaway at the Giro. But after more than a decade at the top, he tells Procycling why only fine margins separate victory from defeat
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Srofessional obligations. Peter Sagan’s life has been full of them ever since his gifts on a bike made his image the most marketable in cycling. Interviews, advertising shoots, meet-and-greets. Whatever the result, Sagan is always a story and very often the story. After Sagan notched up his first world title in 2015, Marc Madiot, a staunch admirer, suggested to L’Équipe that the Slovakian’s talent was such that results were now almost incidental: “He has the enormous freedom of not being obliged to win in order to exist,” said the Frenchman. Perhaps, but it never felt that way to the man concerned. “I’m obliged to win because I put pressure on myself,” Sagan says. “There’s pressure to win for the team, but I don’t feel pressure from people outside, from what they think or what they want.” It’s January, and Sagan is speaking from his hotel room in Peschiera del Garda, where Bora-Hansgrohe have gathered ahead of 2021. Fresh obligations are already mounting, and he’s weeks from furnishing a positive test for covid19 which threatens to derail at least the early part of his 2021 season, but there’s time to recall how he fulfilled the most pressing obligation last October.
When the Giro d’Italia gruppo lined up for stage 10 in Lanciano, 461 days had passed since Sagan’s last victory, a long time for a rider who once won four stages of the Tour of California in four days. After a frenetic start, Sagan infiltrated the day’s early break, but his presence posed a distant threat to Arnaud Démare’s maglia ciclamino, which compelled Madiot’s Groupama-FDJ to give chase. Sagan considered sitting up but then opted to roll the dice. “I thought if I continued, they might stop and then I could see how the race developed,” he says, even though this stage wasn’t so much taking shape as morphing from one melange of chaos to another.
The situation was no less fraught by the time the escapees hit the succession of short, steep hills on the approach to Tortoreto Lido, but now it was the GC contenders who were closing in. Various races within a race were collapsing upon themselves, but Sagan slashed his way free with a stubborn acceleration on the last muro and then churned his big ring to fend off the chasers as menacing clouds rolled in off the Adriatic.
In a race where the pandemic meant there might be no tomorrow, he had served up a reminder that he was not yet yesterday’s man. He was still Sagan, just maybe not as often.
tretching back a decade, obligations have made Sagan’s a life of perpetual motion. His residence has changed from Žilina to Treviso to Monaco, but his true home always seemed to be somewhere out there on the road. From January to December, he traipsed to the ends of the Earth, half bike rider and half billboard as he won races and pitched his sponsors’ wares from Argentina to Japan.
The young Sagan had shown up at Paris-Nice in 2010 and won two stages. From there, he simply put his head down and kept on going. A raw kid from Slovakia became an international superstar in the blink of an eye. One green jersey became seven. One world title became three. The victory celebrations went viral and the contracts grew bigger. So did the commitments. Even when the bike rider needed rest, the brand couldn’t allow it. Another flight, another ad campaign, another sportive bearing his name. Rinse, repeat.
And then, shortly after Sagan turned 30, the world stopped spinning beneath his wheels. The pandemic interrupted the season in March and brought his Never Ending Tour to a stop. In 10 years as a pro, he had never endured lasting injury. He often sequestered himself at altitude to train but never dropped entirely out of view. Now, for the first time in his adult life, he was in neutral.
Sagan was confined to his Monaco flat for the lockdown, with agent Giovanni Lombardi for company. “He was in Monaco at the same time, so we thought it would be better to isolate together than being stuck at home by ourselves,” Sagan says.
The days of inertia soon settled into a pattern. Each morning, Sagan would do core exercises and ride for an hour on the turbo trainer. Each afternoon, he would visit his infant son Marlon at the nearby home of his ex-wife Katarina. Each evening, he would return to share a meal with Lombardi before they worked their way through box sets on Netflix. The man was grateful for the unexpected opportunity to see so much of his son, but the athlete still fretted about races missed and diminishing fitness.
“Being at home felt good because I spent a lot more time with my son,” Sagan says. “But from a sporting point of view, I’d prepared all winter, I was ready to fight and then I was shut in at home. I won’t say it was frustrating, but you don’t see a reason to stay at the level you’re at. You wake up and have to go training, but you don’t know why. It was a very strange period in my career, but I could spend more time with my son, so it’s not like I was in a bad way.”
For a man who had hitherto seemed to measure out his life in social media clips and sponsor shout-outs, Sagan’s relative silence at the height of the lockdown was striking. Later, he would channel Zlatan Ibrahimovic when shrugging off his absence from online races during the hiatus. “I’m a real cyclist, not a virtual one,” he said. In truth, his restraint came out of a sense of decorum.
“He did very little in those three months on social media, because he told me that he wasn’t sure about doing something fun when so many people were dying,” says Lombardi. “He didn’t want to ‘use’ the moment or profit from it. He wanted to respect the times.”
When the season resumed in August, Sagan, like many of his generation, seemed to pay for the months without competition. The familiar consistency survived intact, but the sharpness of old never quite returned. He was fourth at Milan-San Remo and denied an eighth green jersey by Sam Bennett at the Tour de France. All told, 13 top-five finishes yielded a solitary win, at the Giro. Yet if Sagan struggled immediately after the lay-off, Lombardi maintains it might prove more beneficial in the longer term.
“For Peter, those months were like recharging a battery, because it had been 10 years where, for a thousand different reasons, his life was very stressful,” Lombardi says. “The older riders, Peter included, were probably penalised by that break when the season restarted, but I think it’s helped him regain mental energy for the rest of his career.”
Early in January, when Sagan held a short press briefing, discussion turned to whether he still had the motivation to continue at this level, and he bristled playfully in response: “That’s a very bad question to me.” Yet only a year earlier, Sagan had confessed to Cyclingnews.com that the end of his career was in sight, adding that he found the thought “more motivating than frightening”. He didn’t mean that retirement was imminent, but simply that he had no expectation of spending another whole decade racing, not with all that entailed. Yet the longer his victory drought went on, the louder the murmurs that he was in decline.
There was, at least in Sagan’s view, a reason for that. As anticipated, he struggled to get back up to speed after lockdown. “We knew the season was going to be shorter but more intense,” he tells Procycling now. “It was complicated.” Honouring a prior commitment to RCS Sport to make his Giro debut in 2020, meanwhile, meant he crammed two grand tours into eight weeks. “Looking back at how the season played out, I was in better condition for the Giro than for the Tour,” he admits.
When a rider as prolific as Sagan stops winning, there is often an explanation to hand, like injury or illness, or a tacit one, like advancing years or waning desire. But the mystery of his barren run was that he was often so close to breaking it.
Over and again, he shoehorned himself into winning positions even on ill-fitting courses, like at Agrigento on the Giro’s opening weekend. Over and again, he was squeezed out. How?
“You have to be on a good day, and you certainly need a bit of luck. And maybe on some stages, I was unlucky, no?” he says. “With my experience, I know the most important thing is to be consistent. After that, if you win or lose, well, that’s how it goes. My level was quite stable all year, but every now and then, you’re just missing a centimetre to win.”
Sagan endured lean spells before, most notably in late 2014, when he responded by winning in double digits in each of the next three seasons. He made it look easy then, but maybe it wasn’t. It certainly isn’t now. He has won just five times in the past two years. The style of racing, Sagan insists, has changed, while his rear wheel remains cycling’s most valuable real estate.
“The important thing is to understand why you don’t win 22 or 23 races a year any more: it’s always more complicated,” Sagan says. “But rather than getting annoyed, it’s important to deal with it. Basically, you just have to accept it.”
When Sagan emerged, he was cycling’s great disruptor. The normal tactical rules didn’t seem to apply. He could sprint, or attack from distance. He was often naïve but nonetheless stronger than his mistakes, even if he tended to misplay his surfeit of options in the classics.
In time, Sagan learned the value of biding his time – his three world titles were studies in patience – but, in recent years, he has watched the biggest races become ever more anarchic. Gone are the days of waiting cagily for a Cancellara or Boonen to move in the finale. Now teams fling riders up the road early and often, leaving Sagan marooned behind.
“There used to be leaders and you knew the race would be controlled. Now teams are built more to win with different riders attacking from further out. I think the first team to do that
“On the bike, you don’t have problems. You don’t have to think about much. It’s a way to let off steam. I can’t say that I feel bad on the bike”
was Quick Step, and they could play tactically with other teams,” Sagan says. “Is it more complicated now? Well, it depends on your legs. When you’re going badly, you can’t get away with any mistakes. When you’re going well, maybe you can make a couple and then recover. But there’s more and more to think about when you’re racing.”
The lie of the land has also been shifted by a new generation of riders whose fearlessness and skill sets are reminiscent of the young Sagan. The obvious examples are Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert, who have insouciantly parlayed their cyclo-cross gifts onto the road, dominating the Tour of Flanders in Sagan’s absence last October. Sagan’s clash with Van Aert following his relegation in the sprint in Poitiers on last year’s Tour has only heightened anticipation of his matchup against the pair on the cobbles this spring, though, perhaps pointedly, he is reluctant to see them as his chief rivals.
“We’ll see now how these young riders grow,” Sagan says. “With Boonen and Cancellara, everybody knew they’d be strong in the classics. Now, I’m thinking they [Van Aert and Van der Poel] will go well, but let’s see, because every year is different. Looking at what someone has done for 10 years in a row is different to comparing just one year, no?”
As a pitchman for everything from showerheads to health food, Sagan has played various roles, spoofing Grease here, donning a chef’s hat there. “If I have to act as someone else, it’s beautiful,” he told
GCN presenter and ex-team-mate Alan Marangoni recently, but for all that dramatic range, it’s his performance as a bike rider that will decide what happens when his contract with BoraHansgrohe expires at the end of the year. A busy 2021 schedule includes the Olympics and a tilt at a fourth world title in Leuven, but his future should already be decided by what he achieves in April.
Sagan’s arrival at Bora in 2017 earned Ralph Denk’s squad their passage to the WorldTour and they relied heavily on him at first, but their emphasis has since shifted towards the German talent on the team, led by Emanuel Buchmann,
Pascal Ackermann, Max Schachmann, and new arrival Nils Politt. When Denk told Kölner StadtAnzeiger last August that Sagan was “one of the most expensive cyclists out there”, it felt like the opening gambit in contract talks. The fact that Sagan’s schedule for 2021 has only been confirmed as far as Paris-Roubaix, meanwhile, raised its own questions about whether he could co-exist with a sprinter like Ackermann in Bora’s Tour team.
“I’m here and if somebody wants me, well…” Sagan laughs, suggesting that speculation about his contract is less a distraction than a simple fact of life. In any case, Specialized and Sportful, the technical sponsors he brought with him to Bora from Tinkoff, seem eager to stay in the Sagan business, which might well keep him in situ. Perhaps the greatest insight of an otherwise unrevealing 2018 autobiography was the fact that the preface was composed by a sponsor.
Whether at Bora or elsewhere, it seems likely Sagan will sign a three-year contract that takes him past his 34th birthday and the Paris Olympics in 2024. Beyond that, a foray into gravel racing has been rumoured, but with Sagan, anything is possible. The public persona has been familiar for over a decade, but the man behind it remains elusive. Tempting though it is to ascribe deeper meaning to his aphorisms, introspection is one of the few things he doesn’t perform publicly.
Even at his most relaxed, Sagan maintains a certain distance from all bar his loyal inner circle, men like Lombardi, press officer Gabriele Uboldi, masseur Maroš Hlad, and, of course, his brother and team-mate Juraj. Beyond those friendships, his world is populated by more formal obligations. Cycling gave him this life, and it has increasingly more aspects that he could do without, but the fundamental attraction remains in place. The road still exerts a pull.
“On the bike, you don’t have problems, no? When you’re travelling, when you’re doing interviews, when you have to meet people, there’s more to think about,” Sagan says. “When you’re on the bike, you don’t have to think about much. It’s a way to let off steam. I can’t say that
I feel bad on the bike.”