wide road with just the two of us going mano a mano for gold, and this guy was the fastest there was on a long, straight road.
I didn’t think it was possible for it to be any louder, but the volume went up again. It seemed the whole nation was screaming in Kristoff’s ears, blowing him over the line. After pushing myself to breaking point to hold his wheel in that opening 100 meters, I tried to use his slipstream to fire past. Oh Jesus, he was just too fast. My absolute final tank-emptying effort brought me up alongside him, but that barrel-of-a-gun bang that fires you around the last guy in a sprint just wasn’t happening. I was alongside him, but the slipstream effect was spent, and he still had his nose in front. With two meters to go, he must be world champion.
At the Tour de France in 2016 in Bern, Switzerland, I had beaten Kristoff by the width of a tire, purely because I’d managed to “throw” my bike at the line at the right moment while he was still concentrating on sprinting. Remembering Switzerland, with all my might I thrust my arms forward, my backside hung out behind the saddle. My legs were straight, my arms were straight, Kristoff was a mirror image on my left.
I waited beyond the finish line, gulping in lungfulls of air and searching for any sign of a result. Had I given enough? Had I left it too late? Every second felt impossibly drawn out as I frantically looked around for any indication of a decision. Finally the finish-line photo came through, and it was clear: His front wheel was a sliver of racing rubber short of mine as we hit the line.
A huge swelling of Slovak fans burst the security line and rushed toward me, screaming, hugging, cheering. They were so thrilled for me and I was for them. We’d achieved the impossible . . . me, Juraj, my national teammates, these incredible fans, everyone back home. World champion three times in a row. One set of a UCI rainbow jersey and gold medal in the Americas, one in the Middle East, one in Scandinavia. Nobody had ever done those things before. And here was a supposedly crazy, supposedly feral kid from an ice-hockey-playing country that had only been independent of its bigger neighbors for 25 years. How the hell did that happen?
2015
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 it’s important to remember that everybody has a story. Mine isn’t more important than anybody else’s, but it is different. Just like everybody else’s story is different from mine, and different from each other’s.
My story has changed since the start of my career. It’s changed over the past three years, and it will change over the next. It will change before I get to the end of this book, as will yours. Let’s face it, some of our stories will have changed while I’ve been writing this sentence.
What I’m trying to say is that I can’t tell you my life story because my life is happening and changing every day, just like yours, just like everybody’s. I’m only 28, so I’m hoping to be sitting in a big leather armchair, smoking a smelly pipe, and stroking what’s 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 that’s 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 to you 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 Žilina, Slovakia, but now I lived in Monte Carlo. I’d been a professional cyclist for five years, in which time I’d 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 a T-shirt, and beating everybody. I’m not saying those stories aren’t true, but really, they weren’t 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 top of our lungs. 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 Žilina and beyond Slovakia, too: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, Italy . . . we’d just go. Mountain bikes, road bikes, cyclocross bikes—it didn’t 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 with 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 wasn’t meant to be negative, but it felt like it. Which is why, when the Liquigas team came along and said they’d take me on board straightaway, I couldn’t wait to say yes. They didn’t need to wait for me, and I sure as hell wasn’t 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 setup for mountain bike and road races from Slovakia to Italy to Germany to Croatia. I might not have been riding the Tour de France in a Liquigas jersey, but I was 19, and I was a pro-continental cyclist earning 1,000 euros a month. It was pretty cool.
In July 2009, Liquigas called me up to meet the main squad at the Tour of Poland. Led by Ivan Basso, there were some guys there whom 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
