Sagan, My World;

written by Peter Sagan with John Deering published by Velopress reviewed by Matthew Pioro

Get through the prologue of Peter Sagan’s book as quickly as you can. In fact, let me ruin that chapter for you: the then two-time world champion races for the rainbow jersey once more in Bergen, Norway. He had been very ill in the leadup to the event. He didn’t feel great at the start. Then, he won.

My spoiler may seem like a bit much, but that prologue nearly spoiled the book for me. The writing, which is supposed to be in Sagan’s voice, didn’t sound like Sagan. “Well, what should Sagan sound like?” you might ask. That’s a fair question. After all, this is an English book by a Slovak rider written with the help of a British author. John Deering has to “translate” Sagan onto the page. I didn’t buy it in the prologue. But as I kept reading, the literary performance of Sagan, Sagan on the page, sounded better.

You get a picture of a rider with a great sense of humour, and one who can laugh at himself. You get stories of his mischief. He confesses his love of fire extinguishers. He tells how he set himself up for a flying start at the Olympic mountain bike race in Rio 2016. I also like how he addresses questions such as, “Could he have won the Rio road race?” or “Could he have won the Tour of Flanders in 2017 if he hadn’t crashed?” To paraphrase the champ, who knows? You can’t know. There are simply too many variables. The famous “race is race” quote attributed to the rider is a distillation of all that, which all seems like authentic Peter Sagan.