rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_cce62efb-38f8-588b-bdda-a496d5ee30a4">SUMMER
With sunny miles in my legs and sunny smiles all over my face, I headed to Park City, Utah, for some altitude training as a new man.
Altitude training has proved itself to be a massive benefit for me over the last few years, but 2015 was when it took off. Patxi convinced me of its powers, and he has proved bang on. Plus, I get to hang out in places like Utah, Colorado, and the Sierra Nevada in Spain.
The trick to understanding altitude training and how it can help is to slightly tweak the title. It’s not really altitude training; it’s living at altitude while training. Hanging out and, most importantly, sleeping where the air is thin means you’re using less fuel (oxygen) to carry the load. On the one hand, you’re working your body harder to get through whatever you’re asking it to do, but you’re also teaching it to run more efficiently and make the most of the resources it has available. It’s teaching your engine to run leaner. You need to beware of overtraining, though. If you tip over the edge, it takes a long time to climb out of the drop on the other side. Altitude training with Patxi is safest for me because he is so knowledgeable and understands it better than most, but he also trusts me to tell him when I’ve had enough.
Lots of people say, “sleep high, train low,” but I think the second bit is less important. As long as it’s training, I don’t mind too much if it’s up at the top or down at the bottom. In Spain, we sleep high and train low most days as it’s bloody freezing up high with icy roads, and it gets pretty busy with skiing traffic on the roads at the weekends. The shape of the Sierra Nevada lends itself to it as well: It’s just a huge great lump rising out of the plain. So we hop in the cars in the morning and drive down to Granada to ride. We do a bit of team time trial training with new bikes too, so the quiet roads and warm weather are very handy as there is technical riding to be done, but a fair bit of hanging around too. If it’s a nice day, after the session we ride back up to get some climbing in the legs too. It’s a 30-kilometer drag, and the road can be pretty busy on Saturdays and Sundays. When you can be on the beach at Motril in 20 degrees Celsius and skiing in reliable powder within a couple of hours, that’s not surprising. When it’s grim in the mountains, we can usually persuade Patxi that the road along the beach would be the best place to head. As he’s a member of the new generation of DSs that like to ride with their teams rather than sit in the car barking out instructions, he’s very much up for that kind of training. A coffee. A beer. Why so serious?
There are no beaches in Utah, but I like America, and there is a cool West Coast vibe in Utah that chimes with my Tour of California experiences. I had a great time in Park City. Train hard. Kick back. Repeat.
Back in Europe in June, I went to the Tour of Switzerland, picked up a couple more stages and my fifth points jersey in five appearances there. I then had a brief visit home to Slovakia and got my fifth national road race championship, ensuring I’d have my own personal jersey for another year.
Whether I cared or not, it seemed I was ready for the Tour de France.
I would be riding the Tour de France alongside Alberto Contador at Tinkoff. We’d spoken together in the bunch ever since my very first European pro race, Paris–Nice in 2010, and had always got on well. There was no thought in my mind that we might have a problem racing a big event together. There was no need for me to be known as a co-leader or to have another kind of designation that other people might need to make them feel important. He was the leader. He had proved over many seasons that he was probably the best G.C. rider of his generation. He’d had his problems with the UCI and served a disputed ban, but he still had massive respect in the peloton and a massive point to prove, too. Going into that 2015 race, he had an amazing seven Grand Tour victories, plus two more that the UCI had scratched out for doping. As a result, he was looking for his third legitimate Tour de France win, going up against Sky’s Chris Froome, Astana’s Vincenzo Nibali, and the Movistar duo of Nairo Quintana and Alejandro Valverde.
In Bjarne Riis’s absence, Oleg had promoted Stefano Feltrin to general manager. Previously, Feltrin had been the guy looking after the contracts for the riders, sponsors, and such, and he had a very clear vision of how everything should work.
“You’re going to the Tour to work exclusively for Alberto,” Feltrin and Steven de Jongh, Tinkoff’s head DS, told me.
“No, I can’t do that. I have a green jersey to defend and stages to win.”
I couldn’t understand the logic. I was aware that there had been problems in the past in teams that had conflicting objectives, but I didn’t think that applied to me. I talked to Sean Yates, the British guy who was then one of our directeurs sportifs at Tinkoff about the issues he’d been through at Sky when Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins were hunting the green and yellow jerseys respectively. We agreed that this was a different situation, as Mark rides as the spearhead of a team effort and expects assistance, lead-out trains, breaks being chased down, tows back to the main group, dedicated domestiques, all things that are difficult for a team to provide when they are protecting the interests of a genuine G.C. contender or race leader at the same time.
I didn’t want any help at all. I just wanted to be left alone to do my thing. I didn’t need anybody to help me. And that left seven other guys free to do anything Alberto wanted. It seemed to me that if we couldn’t win the Tour with seven highly paid handpicked domestiques, we weren’t likely to do much better with eight. It was hardly likely to be my fault.
“No,” said Feltrin, “We’ll need your strength in the first week to hold things together.”
“I need to race from stage 1, or the green is gone,” I explained. The points competition is so loaded toward the rough and tumble of the first few days that anybody coming late to the party has no chance of leaving with the spoils. “I don’t need any help, Stefano; just let me get on with it. You’ve got seven other guys. OK, if Alberto and I are the only riders in the front group, of course I will help. But if seven guys can’t pace him back up after a puncture or a crash, eight guys won’t be able to do it either.”
“We can’t risk it. You might crash in a sprint.”
“Oh, Stefano, I know you’ve never ridden the Tour, but have you ever even seen one? I don’t need a sprint to crash. I can crash anywhere.”
To his credit, Alberto never put any pressure on me to be his bodyguard around France. As we were all preparing for the Dutch start in Utrecht, I found a moment to speak to him alone. There was a stage after the weekend that went through the Badlands south of Lille, hitting no fewer than seven secteurs of Paris–Roubaix cobbles. I knew it was somewhere that my experience could make a difference if he needed it.
“Listen, Alberto, stage 4, the pavé. I’ll be there with you. Don’t worry.”
“Thank you, Peter.”
That was it.
In more general terms, there is a much greater danger of internal team rivalry when you have two riders going for the same thing. It was before my time, but people still talk about the epic battle between Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond when they were on the same La Vie Claire team at the 1986 Tour. Less obvious, but another problem for Yates to sort out in that Sky team of 2012 was the battle between Wiggins and Froome. Two riders trying to occupy the same space in the team, in the race, and even on the mountain, raises issues for even the strongest squads, and it’s nearly always when the climbing starts. I should point out that for all these so-called problems, both La Vie Claire and Sky won those races and gave the fans enough entertainment that we’re still talking about both races today. Why
