introduction was Liquigas’s way of telling me: “You’re in.” Even though I was still only 19, there were to be no more Under-23 races, no more barreling round Europe in a Slovakia jersey, no more mountain bike racing. I was to be a full-time professional on the ProTour circuit.
Liquigas got me an apartment in San Donà di Piave near Venice. It was small, but it was mine. My brother Juraj came to stay, and so did Maroš 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 who’d 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, Maroš, and I 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 Giovanni’s advice.
My first race as a professional was the Tour Down Under in 2010. I’d never been to Adelaide before, but I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with Australia. Four months earlier I had raced at the 2009 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in the nation’s 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. It’s 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, I’m transported back to sunny days in the southern hemisphere, those hot days where the earth seems to be flattened by the heat from above.
It’s a gentle race to do, too. As well as the weather, there are no long transfers between stages, no packing your bag every day, and a nice hotel that the whole race is staying at. As with any career, there are tedious parts to life as a pro cyclist. Somehow, during the Tour Down Under, those elements are less apparent. As I’ve grown older, I’ve appreciated the laid-back nature of Australians in general, too. Nothing is too much of a problem. They have a look in their eyes that seems to say: Why so serious?
There was a bit of rough and tumble down under. I raced, sprinted, fell off, but overall thought, Well, if I’m only 20 and have never raced before, and these guys are all 30-something and have been doing it for years, I reckon I might be able to win a few of these one day.
I thought that day had come as soon as we got back to Europe. I wasn’t meant to be riding a big race like Paris–Nice this soon, but Bodnar was sick, and the team decided to throw me in for the experience with no expectation of me. Central France was freezing, but on just the second stage into Limoges, there was a crash 500 meters from the line as the different sprint trains got in each other’s way. As ever, I was sprinting on my own, watching the wheels, and the crash left me with a gap. I smashed straight through it, heading for the line, but just as I thought I was going to be a winner for the first time, I realized that I’d gone too soon, and the quick Frenchman William Bonnet came over me with the line in sight.
I was disappointed for about two minutes, but then I realized that I had nearly won in my first European race, and a big race at that. The wins would surely come.
And they did. The first one was the following day when I won from a small group after our attacks had whittled down the peloton over some hilly country. It was like being back in Žilina: a flat grey sky that seemed to merge with the horizon and snow flurries that caused the stage start to be brought forward 50 kilometers into the race.
Three days later I was at it again; this time attacking 3 kilometers out when everybody was waiting for the sprint and arriving in Aix-en-Provence two seconds before everybody else. The question that I would hear from the press most days in my pro career was asked for the first time that afternoon: Was I a sprinter or not?
That Paris–Nice gave me my first points jersey, too. As I stood on the podium next to Alberto Contador, who had won the race with his usual attacking panache, I thought: You could get used to this, Peter.
I picked up another points jersey at the Tour of California, and the season flew by. A year later and I was picking up that Californian green jersey again, then taking three stages in my first Grand Tour, the Vuelta, where I managed to complete the whole three weeks. In all, I won 15 races in 2011 and 16 more in 2012.
The spring of 2012 was when I was really able to make my presence felt at the classics, where I was unable to get a win but finished in the top ten at Milan–San Remo, Gent–Wevelgem, and the Tour of Flanders, and even managed to get on the podium at a hilly race like Amstel Gold. I was being asked if becoming a classics specialist was blunting my sprint, but that was just daft. Sprinting to win a stage of a race where most of the combatants’ first priority is to get through to the next day unscathed is an entirely different proposition to taking a Monument like Flanders or Roubaix home with you. For a start, it’s a case of “shit or bust.” You win, or you go home; there’s no second chance waiting tomorrow, meaning that crazy do-or-die efforts are the order of the day. Add to that the distance of each race. Milan–San Remo can be 300 kilometers long, and the bunch smashes it out of Milan and over the Turchino Pass like greyhounds out of the traps. The stamina that’s needed to be strong after seven hours of racing is not the same as the stamina a track cyclist needs to blast past somebody on the Olympic Velodrome after a couple of laps. Suddenly “sprinter” is a much more complicated term than it would originally appear.
The last tool in the locker that you need for classics success is experience. The classics are steeped in history, with every berg, corner, or stretch of cobbles known like the streets around their homes by the men, like Cancellara or Boonen, who have been winning them for many years. In contrast, most stage races are a moveable feast. When you come to a finish in the Tour de France, you’ll be trying to remember the roadbook from when you looked at it in the team bus for the first and last time that morning. Is there a bend? Was that corner a left- or a right-hander? How far from there to the line? Is it uphill? Will there be a headwind?
Put all that together and you just need one thing: all the luck in the world.
I got an opportunity to show the world that I could sprint in July when I went to the Tour de France for the first time.
On a night out in Žilina with Milan and all my old friends, for some reason—and that reason is probably beer—we were all doing a chicken dance: elbows out, knees out, waddling round the bar like the overgrown teenagers we were. Now, as Gabriele Uboldi, my road manager, will be the first to tell you, seeing as he is so often on the wrong end of them, I am always motivated by a wager. When the first stage of the Tour hit the Côte de Seraing, one of the steep ramps that Liège–Bastogne–Liège goes over each year, all I could think of was that if I hit the top first, I could do the chicken dance over the finish line like I’d promised the guys at home.
Fabian Cancellara went for broke on the lower slopes, and I nearly popped my eyeballs out to get on his wheel. He was wearing the yellow jersey by virtue of winning the prologue the previous day and was determined to make it two wins out of two. As I got up to him on the steepest bit of the climb, I looked back and saw that only Edvald Boasson Hagen had made it with us. The rest of the Tour was stuck to the lower slopes. As we reached the top, with a few hundred meters left, Cancellara tried hard to get me to do a turn, but I kept my head down on his wheel, knowing that if I could get him to lead out, I fancied my chances of coming around him. Boasson Hagen was similarly glued to my
