Sagan - My World

Slovakian cyclist Peter Sagan is the three-time world road race champion, joining great of the sport such as Eddy Merckx and Alfredo Binda. He has also won the Tour de France green jersey five times and over 100 professional events on pro circuit.

He has been name professional cyclist of the year for 2016 and was the winner of the Velo DOr in the same year. In 2018 he rides for German team, Bora-Hansgrohe.

From 2015 to 2017, Peter Sagan achieved the seemingly impossible: he won three road race World Championships in a row, ensuring his entry into the history books as one of the greatest riders of all time.

But to look at Peters record in isolation is to tell only a fraction of his story, because Peter doesnt just win: he entertains. Every moment in the saddle is an opportunity to express his personality, and nobody else has succeeded in making elite cycling look so much fun. From no-hands wheelies on the slopes of Mont Ventoux to press conference mischief with clamouring journalists, Peter exudes a passion for the sport and a lovable desire to bring smiles to the faces of his fans.

If there are a hundred riders on the start line of a race, there will be a hundred stories to be told at the end. A hundred careers could yield a hundred different books. Everybody is remarkable but nobody is special.

I tell you this at the beginning of my story because its important to remember that everybody has a story. Mine isnt more important than anybody elses, but it is different. Just like everybody elses story is different from mine, and different from each others.

My story has changed since the start of my career. Its changed over the last three years and it will change over the next. It will change before I get to the end of this book, as will yours. Lets face it, some of our stories will have changed while Ive been writing this sentence.

What Im trying to say is that I cant tell you my life story because my life is happening and changing every day, just like yours, just like everybodys. Im only 28, so Im hoping to be sat in a big leather armchair, smoking a smelly pipe and stroking whats left of my wispy white hair by the time I tell my life story. One thing I can certainly tell you is what it has been like to be UCI World Road Race Champion for three years, and thats something that you can only hear from me, I suppose. Nobody else has been champion for three years in a row.

Life can change in the blink of an eye. Doors close, doors open. You can win or you can crash. You can fall in love or you can lose somebody close in an instant.

Even with that undeniable truth in mind, January of 2015 saw me standing at a significant crossroads.

I was 24 years old. I was from ilina in Slovakia, but now I lived in Monte Carlo. Id been a professional cyclist for five years, in which time Id won 65 bike races, been champion of my country four times and won three green jerseys in the Tour de France.

But now, for the first time in my career, I was changing teams.

I suppose I ought to go back a bit further to explain how I got to this moment. Back to the beginning.

As a kid, I loved riding my bike and winning races. People love the stories about me turning up to races on bikes borrowed from my sister, or bought for a few koruna from a supermarket, wearing trainers and T-shirts, and beating everybody. Im not saying those stories arent true, but really, they werent such a big deal. Slovakia was an emerging country, booming after decades dozing behind the Iron Curtain, and now let loose from our awkward embrace with the Czechs thanks to the universally popular Velvet Divorce. All of us kids were living the high life and screaming at the tops of our voices. I had two older brothers, Milan and Juraj, and there was my sister, Daniela. My dad would drive me all over the place to race bikes. Way beyond ilina and beyond Slovakia, too: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Italy wed just go. Mountain bikes, road bikes, cyclocross bikes it didnt matter. I just wanted to race. Because I was winning, and I liked it.

I was winning enough races that the professional teams started to take notice. In my last year as a junior I went for testing with Quick-Step at their academy, which had nurtured so much young talent over the years. I stayed at the anonymous building that could easily be mistaken for a factory or the regional office of a nondescript company, knowing that the corridors of this place had echoed to the young voices of many champions over the past 20 years or so. In the end, it was those huge numbers of young cyclists that became an obstacle in my progress. They process literally hundreds of kids through there every year and keep tabs on thousands more juniors across the globe, hoping to unearth the next Merckx, Kelly or Indurain. Neither my race results nor the numbers I produced in their tests were enough to lift me clear of the other hopeful juniors. They told me to work hard in the Under-23 category for the next couple of seasons and they would continue to monitor my progress.

It wasnt meant to be negative, but it felt like it. Which is why, when the Liquigas team came along and said theyd take me on board straight away, I couldnt wait to say yes. They didnt need to wait for me, and I sure as hell wasnt going to wait for a call from Quick-Step that might never come.

There were quotas on Under-23 teams in Italy regarding foreign riders, so I carried on riding in the Slovakian national set up, mountain bike and road races from Slovakia to Italy to Germany to Croatia. I might not be riding the Tour de France in a Liquigas jersey, but I was 19 and I was a pro-continental cyclist earning 1000 euros a month. It was pretty cool.

In July 2009, Liquigas called me up to come and meet the main squad at the Tour of Poland. Led by Ivan Basso, there were some guys there who I would become close to over the years, guys like Maciej Bodnar, Daniel Oss who is back with me at BORA - hansgrohe now, but most of all Sylwester Szmyd, who has been a good friend for many years and is now my coach.

The introduction was Liquigass way of telling me: Youre in. Even though I was still only 19, there were to be no more Under-23 races, no more barrelling round Europe in a Slovakia jersey, no more mountain-bike racing. I was to be a full-time professional on the Pro Tour circuit.

Liquigas got me an apartment in San Don di Piave near Venice. It was small, but it was mine. My brother Juraj came to stay, and so did Maro Hlad, my soigneur from back home. This was the beginning of Team Peter, a little unit of friends who could all rely on each other in any situation. I now had an agent too: Giovanni Lombardi, a classy ex-rider whod led out Erik Zabel to many of his green jersey victories. Giovanni, or Lomba as we affectionately call him, was the first to see the potential of Team Peter and the one man who has done more than anybody else to make it a reality. The first real appointment of Team Peter was to bring Juraj on board as a pro at Liquigas and that was thanks to Giovanni. He knew my brother was good enough to hold a pro contract in his own right, but he also knew he would fight like crazy to protect me on the bike and off it, too. Juraj, Maro and me stayed together in Veneto, moving closer to the mountains so we could vary our training more. They were great days, and we were there for two years until I moved to Monaco on Giovannis advice.

My first race as a professional was the Tour Down Under in 2010. Id never been to Adelaide before, but I wasnt completely unfamiliar with Australia. Six months earlier I had raced at the 2009 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the nations capital, Canberra, where I took fourth in the U23 men category. I loved the heat of Adelaide in January, riding out every day in shorts and a jersey without having to worry about arm warmers or the like. Its another country with its own distinctive smell. Eucalyptus, or gum trees, as the locals say. If I catch a scent of that anywhere in the world Im transported back to sunny days in the Southern Hemisphere, those hot days where the earth seems to be flattened by the heat from above.