only 25. Still, I was all burnt out and washed up, wasn’t I? So that white jersey must have been mystifying. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wear it seeing as I had the green one or people would have been mightily confused. When we got into the mountains, I lost it to Nairo Quintana, which must have been even more mind-blowing for the public, as he looks much older than 25.
Alberto lost some time. Rafal Majka won a stage for us, but we were all in shock. Feeling unwell for the first week of the race, our universally loved and respected captain, Ivan Basso, went for some tests on the rest day. He was hit with the completely paralyzing news that he had testicular cancer and needed immediate treatment. Within days, he was having surgery in Italy.
Ivan had been a part of my life since turning pro, as my team leader and a double Giro d’Italia winner at Liquigas, and now as a hugely experienced skipper for Alberto here at Tinkoff. We didn’t often ride the same races, but his relentless positivity, smile, and time for everyone he meets had a huge effect on me, as I’m sure they have for all his former teammates. Off the bike, we shared Giovanni as an agent, so I had come to know him and look up to him more than most. Nobody knew what to say as the news came through, and the team felt that weight of events bigger than cycling begin to descend upon us.
As a postscript, Ivan made a full recovery from his illness but, at 37, he felt it was time to wrap up his long career. He is not lost to the world of cycling, however, and it is a racing certainty that he will continue to play major roles in the future of our sport.
At the time though, you can imagine the news was devastating, and it was hard to focus. All any of us could do was to concentrate on our own internal commitments to the race and do the best we could without him, and for him.
After a week of being in the bunch, I was beginning to think about taking the green jersey to Paris and maybe winning a stage in it at last. So it was almost comforting to come second again on stage 13, this time to Greg Van Avermaet.
On stage 16, fed up with losing sprint stages, I tried my luck on a mountain stage. There were two second-category climbs on it. Second? That sounded like my kind of category, and it had a downhill plunge to the finish in gap in the Alps, which I thought would suit me.
I came in second.
There was one stage for sprinters left, the glorious pageant of a gallop up the Champs-Elysées and a hero’s welcome in Paris for the winner. I was determined not to come second. I didn’t. I came in seventh.
Did you know that Jerusalem artichokes aren’t artichokes at all? And that they don’t come from Jerusalem either? Amazing, no? They are actually very tall plants that look like sunflowers, but have a large, gnarly tuber in their roots that looks like a big, long piece of fresh ginger that you might pick up in a more enlightened supermarket. “What about the Jerusalem bit?” I hear you cry. Well, it seems English-speaking settlers in the New World misunderstood their French-speaking counterparts when they described a sunflower as a “girasol” and the name was born.
And if you think I had to look that up, then maybe I did, just to check, but it saved you doing it, didn’t it?
Another, more accurate name for a Jerusalem artichoke is a sunroot, and this is where this whole baffling section might start to make a bit more sense. My wife, Katarina, has started a company with her father called Sunroot. It’s a range of gluten-free, zero-fat foods all based around a core foodstuff made from Jerusalem artichokes. The plant is grown and harvested widely in Slovakia, so it’s an effective enterprise to boost the local economy, make something genuinely useful, and give Katarina an outlet for her creative and business-minded brain. They do all sorts of stuff: hot chocolate powder, blueberry jam, yogurt-coated snacks, white-chocolate-coated fruit drops . . . But the most useful thing is a flour that you can use for all your usual baking. Sunroot also has the benefit of being naturally sweet, so it doesn’t need sugar added to it in a lot of recipes. Cakes without getting fat. Yes!
The other thing sunroot does is grow like wildfire, so much so that it can take over if you don’t keep an eye on it, a bit like rhododendron does in parts of Europe. Like rhododendron, it looks pretty, so people don’t clear it. This got up the nose of one particular Slovak politician to such a degree that he got a law passed to have it banned. Can you see a pattern emerging here? Naturally, that would have been Katarina’s business down the drain without a backward glance, but fortunately there are a lot of farmers, growers, and sellers of sunroot in Slovakia, so he eventually backed down. The politician probably proposed the law because his neighbor’s garden was overgrown. As you know by now, that’s how things tend to work over in Slovakia.
If you put “Jerusalem artichoke” into Google, you’ll get the description I gave you at the top of this chapter. If you put “sunroot” into Google, there’s a good chance you’ll get Katarina and me pretending to be Olivia Newton John and John Travolta as Sandy and Danny in Grease. We did it as a promotional thing for Sunroot, but we also did it for a laugh. Why so serious? We’ve always had silly ideas. One of the benefits of being UCI World Champion is that you can get away with doing them. Actually, that’s not quite right . . . we still would have done it, but doing our own private lip sync battle in the kitchen isn’t quite as much fun as getting a crew in to recreate the fairground set for “You’re the One That I Want” and getting it edited shot-by-shot to match the original.
Katarina and I met at my house in Žilina. Actually, let me backtrack a little bit. When Juraj and I managed to start getting paid to ride bikes and when we weren’t at the Liquigas flat in Italy, we found ourselves a house in between the motorway and the huge bend in the River Vah as it widens into the Hricov Lake. They started building a bridge across it there shortly before we got the house. I was there recently, and they’ve just finished the bridge 10 years on. I love Slovakia, but it makes me smile.
I had the bit of land that adjoined it too, and I was starting to earn a bit more money. I had a couple of cars by then, so I thought I’d build a garage for them on this land. That’s all. Then I thought I might like my own place to sleep, so it should have a bedroom above the cars. That’s all I’d need. Then, often when I come back to Slovakia, I’ll have a friend traveling with me, so I should get a guest room. That’d be enough. But then, if I was back in the winter, which can be pretty dark and cold in Žilina, I might want a gym and a sauna in the loft to keep fit. That’s all a man needs.
In the end, the whole project morphed completely, and we ended up not building a house for ourselves at all. Instead it became the basis for the sports center I’d been trying to establish. Young Slovakian athletes from all different sports can go there to live, train, and generally get the support they need to make the step from keen youngster to full-time athlete.
But before we knew that would happen, Juraj and I put out a request for a few local companies to quote on doing the building. One guy I particularly liked ran a little construction company with his father, and they seemed pretty well organized. After meeting them in the winter of 2012, I went off for my first concerted crack at the classics and came back with a fifth, fourth, third, and second place to my name. The third was at Amstel Gold in Holland, after which Juraj and I had a spring barbecue party at our place to celebrate. As it was next to the plot where this garage/bachelor pad would be going up, I invited the construction guy to the party to hang out with us and talk about the project. He turned up with this girl who instantly made a bit of an impression on me: tall, beautiful, but with a confident way about her that seemed to suggest there was more to her world than a construction company in Žilina. I was just thinking that he was a lucky bastard, when he introduced her as his sister.
