Sagan (Procycling 2015)

No matter what he did at this year’s Tour de France, Peter Sagan simply couldn’t win a stage. Five times the Tinkoff-Saxo rider was a runner-up, beaten by faster sprinters or lighter climbers. Yet he came out of the race with his fourth green jersey and his popularity at sky-high levels thanks to the flair he demonstrated on the bike and the humour he showed off it. In a fractious Tour, he was much-needed light relief. His versatility is peerless: “I’m a special rider,” he says. But what does he need to do to turn second-place finishes into wins?

Writer: Sam Dansie

Late in July, Peter Sagan returned to the post-Tour criterium scene for the first time in two years. This wasn’t the money-making whirlwind of 2012, when he rode eight or nine. In fact, he only appeared at three but that was enough to confirm what we all already knew: that the 25-yearold’s popularity had reached new heights. It was captured perfectly at the podium picture from the Aalst criterium the Monday after the Tour. Over a ceremonial beer, he beamed out to the cameras and the massive, drunken crowd from the top step of the podium. To his left, the Belgian national champion; to his right, the 2015 yellow jersey. If criteriums are popularity contests – and they are – it was as good a snapshot as any of his current status as cycling’s most bankable star. All this, and he has not won a Tour stage since 2013. He left this year’s race with 11 top-five stage places (of which five were second places), a string of honourable mentions for days spent in the break and, of course, the fourth successive green jersey of his career. If only he could have closed the deal with a stage win. Sagan is not the first to feel the pang of the loser’s paradox. Roger Federer, arguably the best tennis player of all time, said his popularity swelled when Rafael Nadal defeated him in the 2008 Wimbledon final. Closer to home, Fabian Cancellara has echoed the sentiment too: spirited losses bring more fans than actually winning. Sagan’s recent experience proves that the Swiss don’t have a monopoly on lovable underdog status. In Slovakia, one newspaper’s memorable headline went along the lines that people will remember the winners, and Peter Sagan. His girlfriend, Katarina Smolkova, said it best in an interview with Belgian TV: “The fact that he’s second might be even better than being first because these second places are bringing him glory. He’s getting more and more popular because people are praying for him to win.” If Smolkova recognised it, the chances are that Sagan did too. Procycling meets the 25-year-old on the hot veranda of a golf hotel on the eve of the Vuelta. It is his first real race back after the Tour and he insists he wasn’t sure what state of form he was in, just that he was using the Spanish race to build up for the third and final target of his long season: the Worlds. Over a coffee, he jokingly says he’s already forgotten about the Tour, the string of runner-up spots and the jersey. “It was one month ago and now I’m looking forward,” he says. “Yeah, I’m happy with my Tour de France and what I did but I’m also happy I finished,” he adds rather ambiguously. Happy he made it to Paris, or happy it was over? He doesn’t elaborate.

“THE FACT THAT HE’S SECOND MIGHT BE EVEN BETTER THAN BEING FIRST BECAUSE THESE SECOND PLACES ARE BRINGING HIM GLORY”

We ask when he stopped listening and indeed caring about the chirrups that pipe up after yet another near miss? “Last year already!” comes the quick response, followed by the characteristic snort that accompanies one of his jokes. There are a lot of those. He has been taking regular English lessons since joining Tinkoff-Saxo, we’re told, and he has improved considerably.

Returning to the subject of his results at this year’s Tour de France, we ask if all those second places frustrated him. “No. Well, it depends how you take the second place,” he explains. “If you are the best and you are second then sure, it’s bad. But if you are in second place and the first guy has won by a long way, then to be second is

also good.”

It’s a response that sheds light on the strong self-criticism he made at being beaten by another perennial runner-up, Greg Van Avermaet, in Rodez on stage 13. “It’s not bad luck, it was a mistake,” he said at the time, after sitting up too early. “I’m pissed,” he added.

Conversely, he was proud of his distant second to Rub.n Plaza in Gap three days later. That was Sagan at his best. Recall his swooping, perilous descent off the Col de Manse, which had fans in raptures for his courage and skill. He thumped his chest at the line – his fifth second place. He came in 30 seconds behind Plaza that day but stole the headlines. “I tried everything,” he said. “I knew I had to try as hard as I could in the descent, even if it meant dying.” Back on the veranda, from behind reflective Oakleys, Sagan adds, “Maybe I wanted too much of myself and I was missing something. One time I was fighting with sprinters, the next time it’s a climber and another time it’s a small group or I’m in a breakaway. Every day was different and it’s very difficult to choose what I can do. I just take every chance that I can.”

SAGAN BROUGHT MORE to the Tour than a burning and ultimately unfulfilled desire to win stages. Arguably his greater contribution was his flair and style on the bike and his humour and charisma off it. Sporting theatre, at least the entertaining kind, was in short supply at the Tour but his offbeat remarks offered comic relief in an otherwise fractious, bad-tempered race. His sheer class, the persistent attacks and the crazy descending enlivened stage after stage. When the press corps grew weary of reporting on speculation about Chris Froome’s power data, Sagan always had a pearler for us, such as at the end of end of stage 16 when he was asked why he’d gone in the break for the third successive day. “Because I have big balls,” he quipped. Scything down technical descents – a skill that originates from his early days as a mountain biker and cyclo-cross racer – or ribbing Froome in the mixed zone about casquette etiquette, his omnipresence if not his omnipotence was worth savouring. Sagan insists the streak of exhibitionism isn’t showing off for the sake of it or for self-aggrandisement – it’s done simply to entertain. “I do my own thing,” he says. “I’m living my life, not somebody else’s. We ride for the people who are watching us. If I do something funny, it’s for them.” His tendency to play up when the cameras are on is nothing new but nor has it been universally admired. As far back as 2008, he was gazing back down the finishing straight at the MTB junior Euro Championships looking for the rider in second. When he pulled similarly theatrical celebrations in 2012, upon taking three Tour wins in seven days and becoming the youngest stage winner in almost 20 years, some found the ostentation of his Forrest Gump and Hulk impressions disrespectful. That feeling persisted into 2013, when a misplaced sense of mischief led Sagan to pinch a podium girl’s bottom. Rival Fabian Cancellara said Sagan “had a lot to learn”. That was Sagan version one. Part way through our interview Sagan says, “This sport is about respect.” Perhaps a couple more years of experience and the seemingly endless stream of runner-up places have rounded off his more jagged edges. But what has not been worn away in version 2.0 is his sense of playfulness. He says, “Many riders take the bike very seriously and there’s a lot of stress in the group – no fun. In many ways it’s how you take life. You can be frustrated or you can see the other side and see it’s still good and still fun, and maybe I passed that moment.” He is also now a more established rider, presumably with stronger, broader friendships across the peloton. “We spend a lot of time in the group,” he confirms. “Maybe five hours together for 21 days and I speak with everybody in the group. If I want some favour they give it to me, and if they want a favour I give it back.” From talking to team staff around him, it’s clear that the mantra ‘He just enjoys riding his bike’ is widely held. The team press officer showed us a video of Sagan at his insouciant best, swishing his back wheel at a falling bidon on a training ride on a fast descent. Stefano Feltrin, Tinkoff-Saxo’s general manager, told us, “He enjoys being on the bike, enjoys being with team-mates. I’d say he’s pretty true to himself. There is no difference between the public Peter and the private Peter.”

TALKING OF TEAM management, Sagan’s first year at Tinkoff-Saxo has been accompanied by unorthodox sledging... from Oleg Tinkov, the putative team owner but called a shareholder by Feltrin. In May, the day before Sagan won the Tour of California, Tinkov was reported in Gazzetta dello Sport saying he was talking to lawyers to find a way to reduce Sagan’s reported €4m a year contract. “When they start to win, that’s okay, they have more and more money, and teams even increase them during the season. It happened with my riders last year,” Tinkov said, regarding his prize asset for the Classics. “Unfortunately you cannot cut their salary but they have a bonus when they win. If not, they still have a huge fee, and that’s really painful.”

Two months later, however, after Sagan had been in the break for the third of four days on the trot, Tinkov was figuratively marching in the other direction, calling Sagan the strongest rider in the peloton. Stronger than Froome. “He said a lot of things!” Sagan says when asked about Tinkov’s comments. Next to him, the team’s press officer smiles sympathetically. They’ve all learned to live with the bluster. Sagan doesn’t elaborate on his relationship with Tinkov and insists that it’s also for other people to judge his worth and whether the label of ‘strongest cyclist’ should be his. One gets the impression that despite the capriciousness of his team boss Sagan is really enjoying life at Tinkoff-Saxo. “It’s very good, the group of riders here and it’s a very nice team,” he says. “There are lots of things that are different to Cannondale. This is much more international and here the budget is bigger and the support better.” And never for a moment in the last nine months has he wished to be in another team, he claims. 

THE QUESTION THAT has dogged Sagan for the past couple of years is why, with his superabundant talent, doesn’t he win more big races – Monuments, Tour stages? To many, Sagan’s fault is tactical naivety. Milano-Sanremo this year was a case in point: he floated to the front on the Poggio, but didn’t force the advantage down the other side. He sat at the front of the peloton with 2km to go, and finished fourth. When he signed for Tinkoff-Saxo last year on a three-year contract, the match-up with the tactically shrewd Bjarne Riis was supposed to remedy the problem. “He still has a lot to learn about the tactical aspects of cycling to fully optimise his power but I believe that we are fully able to help him improve even more,” Riis said in a press release in August 2014. Since then, of course, the Dane has been fired and Sagan’s string of second places has continued. Sagan, however, sees the issue differently. “This isn’t about how I use the weapons,” he says. “In the first two years nobody knew me and it was easy. Well, not easy, but different,” he clarifies. “You know, I could attack and come to the finish alone. Now I attack and there are 10 riders behind me. This is the difference now. It’s cycling, this is sport and you have to get used to that,” he states.

But Feltrin near as admitted that the tactical frailty remains. “We’ve seen this year there have been some races where he could have got a better result and he admitted that the lack of a result was his fault sometimes and sometimes it was not.” It’s a predicament Fabian Cancellara would surely recognise. In the 2011 spring Monuments, the Swiss couldn’t move without attracting a crowd of shadows. Moreover, he had a tendency to be the willing horse and haul a group back to the break. Sagan seems to be suffering the same condition. However, with a degree more versatility and lacking the Swiss rider’s sheer power, he’s more vulnerable to attracting wheel-suckers. Cancellara’s solution was in part to take his foot off the gas and force others to act – the privilege of a previous winner, perhaps, and Sagan may well try to follow that template in future. Feltrin explains that the team intends to diversify its tactical options. “What we saw is that we missed something. Other teams are better equipped than us and it’s fair to say that when you have a guy like Peter in those moments, he’s like Cancellara a few years back and that means everybody races against him. What we are trying to do for next year is to work on plan B. If everybody is looking at Plan A, what’s our alternative?”

At the time of going to press, the Russian team’s 2016 squad hadn’t been released but Feltrin said there wouldn’t be radical changes. “We think we have a very good team of riders who work together and our first goal for next season is to maintain that and add others who can merge into that group,” he said.

It’s the measure of both Sagan’s talent and ambition that he’s been chasing a Monument victory for three years, since he was 22. For some observers, the succession of near misses – six top-fives in the 10 spring Monuments that he has started since 2012 – has alarm bells ringing. For others, the question now is not when but if. Comparisons between Cancellara and Sagan abound and it’s worth remembering that the Swiss rider won his first Monument aged 25, (Roubaix, 2006). Sagan will be 26 when the next Classics season begins – hardly an age gulf. There is plenty of time for him to make his mark.

For his part, Sagan is unperturbed by the lack of victories and takes heart from the rarity of his hybrid talent. “It’s a game. I can see my characteristics,” he says. “I’m a special rider. A lot of riders are climbers, a lot of riders are sprinters but it’s very hard to be in the front with sprinters and also with climbers. To be there, fighting with both is something special, I think.”

This year, the neatest encapsulation of his all-round talent came at the Amgen Tour of California – a race where he has won at least a stage each year he has been professional. In total, he’s taken 13 stage victories there. This year, he went a step beyond and won the overall through a combination of a TT win, a tenacious climb up Mount Baldy and a last-gasp sprint that netted the time bonus which won the race. It was the climb that attracted the most attention: he finished sixth, 45 seconds down on a mountain which had ascended for 25km, the last five being particularly steep. Sagan was as surprised as anyone. “I had nothing to lose. It’s not my type of race. I never thought I could win it,” he says. He played down his

performance, claiming the quality of climber wasn’t so high. Yet he stayed within touching distance of Sergio Henao and Joe Dombrowski and beat GC climbers such as Haimar Zubeldia, Robert Gesink and Laurens Ten Dam. It was a classic example of the yellow jersey pushing someone beyond their normal boundaries.

What tickles Sagan is that he had heard the race had been made harder to prevent it becoming ‘The Peter Sagan Show’. “Three years ago I won five stages in eight days. And after the race an American team said it was too easy because of all the stages I had won so they started to make the race harder with these big climbs. Now three years later I won the overall,” he says, laughing.

Following his victory he stayed on for a two-week altitude training camp in Utah, meaning he spent more than a month in America. He has an affinity for the country and a strong fan base. Plus, he likes the change of scenery. “I like to train in America. I did a lot of training from the start of the season in California and in the middle before the Tour this year I was in Utah. It’s very nice to have the stimulation of new roads and different scenery. It’s quiet. It’s good,” he says.

SO WHAT OF the immediate future for Sagan? The hoped-for spring Monument victory remains unmet. The target he placed on the green jersey was smashed – a feat made more impressive by the fact he did it with little team support, which was diverted to Alberto Contador’s GC bid.

Being charitable, we could call it evens as he prepares for the third and final peak of the season.

When Procycling spoke to him at the start of the Vuelta he said it was part of his build-up towards the Richmond World Championships, where he will be a top favourite on the technical, Classics-style course, which even includes cobbles. When we broach the Worlds, Sagan appears to take a leaf out of team-mate

Contador’s guide to sandbagging. After insisting he doesn’t know where his form lies after a short post-Tour lay-up (last year he did a altitude camp between the Tour and Vuelta which left him flat) he also says he hasn’t reconnoitred the Richmond course, despite his time in America.

Anyway, he says, course familiarity won’t win the race if you don’t have the legs in the first place.

“We’ll see what level I will be able to achieve and what level I’m at now,” he says. “There will be just three of us from

Slovakia and so it’s a real lottery. You can do well or maybe not. It depends how the race will be,” he says opaquely and probably bored by the invitation to speculate on another Worlds circuit.

But he’s right, it is a lottery. Since 2000, the world champion has come from a team with either eight or the maximum nine riders on all but three occasions: Roman Vainsteins (Latvia) in 2000, Thor Hushovd (Norway) in 2010, and Rui Costa (Portugal) in 2013. Incidentally, though, each of those winners was also on a team of three.

Of course, the prize at stake is more than just personal glory. It’s the chance to become the first Slovakian to win the race.

No compatriot has even got on the podium so there’s a good chance he will add a new flag to the podium list and further enhance cycling’s status in his home country.

In Britain, we’re familiar with the galvanising effect Bradley Wiggins had on cycling’s status in the country and Sagan has had the same effect in Slovakia. He has taken cycling to centre stage there. The Road Race National Championships this year – a combined Czech and Slovak race – was held in his home-town of Žilina in front of massive crowds. He won his fifth road race title in a row and added his first TT jersey, too. The race was also broadcast live for the first time in its history. That’s the purest form of the Sagan effect. “When you ride in Slovakia it’s just my name,” he says. “Even when people see an amateur they scream ‘Peter, Peter!’”

Yet the competitive and financial success that has come Sagan’s way in six years does not seem to have turned him brattish. And nor has the lack of wins turned him bitter, either, mainly because he doesn’t give them much of a thought. He’s just grown up but still relishes the simple pleasure derived from riding and racing. As he has acknowledged before now, cycling has given him everything. Soon afterwards, the interview is over.

Some shots with Tim De Waele and he stalks away for a massage and a siesta before the Vuelta team presentation. On his way to his room he’s stopped by a mum and a small boy who ask for a photograph beside the pool. He obliges, putting a familiar arm on the child’s shoulder. We’re reminded of something he has just said: “I just try to be friendly. It’s good if I can do that for people because maybe it’s very nice for them if they can get a picture with me.”

It’s that humilityand humour that has made his starshine even more brightly when hiswin rate hasfaltered.

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WHY DOESN’T PETER SAGAN WIN BIG RACES?

Nick Nuyens, the 2011 Tour of Flanders winner argues that there’s nothing wrong with Peter Sagan’s tactical savvy – he just needs more time.

People who criticise Sagan will always find a reason but I don’t agree with them. I don’t think it’s a matter of Sagan not being tactically aware at all.

He was there in the Classics and look at the Tour: he was there in the final on so many days because he knew exactly when to get in the break and  when to pull.

Sagan is a really strong rider but he’s not the fastest. If you’re the best climber, sprinter or TT specialist you win more often. He’s really good, one of the best at everything, but then he comes across someone who is just a little bit stronger or fresher or whatever.

His other problem is that when he turned professional he started to win immediately. Any race he went to he was a contender. At a point he started to focus on the bigger races. So he still wins many races today but people focus on one big victory – a Classic or a Tour stage. The critics are coming out because he’s not doing it right now. I think maybe expectation is his biggest opponent because of the way he entered professional cycling in the first place.

He’s also growing every year, getting more experience, getting stronger and his body is developing. He just needs a bit more time.