mode. To be fair to him, he has only ever tried to support me in what I want to do. There was no pressure to get me out there, no anger or disappointment, only concern that I was OK, and worry that I wouldn’t go and do something stupid.
I was a few months into one of the most lucrative contracts the sport had ever seen, and it ran for three years. Turn up, ride, do my best, play my part, and after three years I could retire and support my family comfortably for life. Don’t worry about Bobby, don’t worry about Oleg, don’t worry about the team, don’t worry about anything. That was Lomba’s job. Surely, wasn’t that the point of Team Peter? Relax, man. Why so serious?
In the end, Giovanni’s solution was the most sensible one. It was clear I was going to need a new coach, and that man was about to become the next key member of Team Peter. Patxi Vila was already on the staff at Tinkoff, but he was a different type of guy than Bobby. He was a Basque who’d been a pro until pretty recently, without hitting the heights that Bobby had. But perhaps that was a strength for him as a coach. Winners are often so driven that they’re not so good at listening to others’ needs. A good domestique has to know what his leader wants or he’ll never make a good career. Maybe that’s a better base for being a coach?
Patxi was very smart at the beginning. “I realized straightaway that you knew what you were doing,” he told me. “You ate well, your weight didn’t fluctuate much, you had a strong constitution that didn’t need a lot of attention. Most of all, you’d won a shed-load of races without ever having a coach.”
I liked him. He let me get on with it.
“The training plan I worked out with you at the start was just so we had something written down, really,” says Patxi now. We’re all sitting around remembering these days in the Sierra Nevada where BORA-hansgrohe is doing our customary February training camp before the start of the 2018 classics. It’s after dark, it’s freezing outside, and the Wi-Fi is terrible, so we might as well sit and talk. “It was clear you had an accurate understanding of your body. I saw my role to support that rather than dismantle it. If you told me that you’d only done one hour instead of four because you felt shitty, I’d know it was the right decision. It was easy.”
With Patxi as my coach, I slowly began to relax. In my head, I was already done. I started to think about what was important: health, happiness, being myself, having fun. It’s good to have a plan because it points you in the right direction, but you can’t expect it to work 100 percent of the time. That’s not racing. That’s not life. Say you have a plan to be in the first 10 riders with 7 kilometers to go in a race because there’s a narrow bit of road and a little hill up ahead. But a hundred other riders have that plan, too. That’s 90 people who are going to be disappointed, but what are they going to do? Get off and walk home? You have to adapt. Find another way. Accept what is in front of you and find another way. There are some things that you just can’t change, like punctures and crashes. I decided from that point on that I would do my best but accept the results whether good or bad. If I win, I win. If I crash, I crash. If I come in 30th, I come in 30th. I’ll still be Peter at the finish, and the sky won’t fall.
That’s how it was when I first started out. Then you start winning, start leading, the pressure builds, and one day, somewhere along the way, you lose what it was that helped you win in the first place. Thinking back to my debut at the Tour Down Under, I remembered thinking, I could win one of these. Five years on, I’d lost that feeling. It wasn’t just the overtraining, it was the contract negotiations, the uncertainty, the pressure. And then, as if to reassure me that I wasn’t completely losing my mind, amid all the tests at Tinkoff, the team doctor said the results showed I’d had a virus slowing me down for much of the previous season. Thank you! It wasn’t all me, then. Had Cannondale known? Did they decide not to tell me because they needed me on the start line week in, week out, knowing that I was leaving at the end of the year? I don’t know. But they either knew and kept it from me or their medical testing was shit. One of those scenarios had to be true.
I still talked to Patxi most days and filled him in on what I was doing, but the pressure was off completely. All I had to do was get through the 2015 season. I was quitting soon. Why so serious?
By now, I knew how much I liked the Tour of California. I’d been there five times and come back with five green jerseys. The people were always pleased to see you, but they were never in your face. The air smelled clean and held the scent of oranges. The roads were good, the racing was fast but laid-back . . . what wasn’t to like?
My road manager, Gabriele, always says that there is something to remind me of Giovanni there, too: The biggest climb was called Mount Baldy. Thanks, Gabriele. Don’t worry, I’m sure Lomba will never read this.
Oleg, Bjarne, and Bobby were a world away, as were the disappointments of Roubaix, Flanders, and San Remo.
Mark Cavendish was here, though, and he was on fire, sprinting in that explosive way that only he can and reminding me what a pure sprinter looks like. He showed me a clean pair of heels on the first two stages, and I began to think that my green jersey count would be likely to stick on five. Never mind. It’s good to have a plan, but when your plan doesn’t work out, you find another way.
Stage 3 was 170 kilometers with six king of the mountain primes and over 3,000 meters of climbing around San Jose. Not a Sagan kind of day at all. So it felt pretty fine to win the kick for second spot; a great long solo effort from a Latvian guy, Toms Skujinš, held us all off for the win.
The next day I was too quick for Cav for once, and I bounced my wheel off the road a couple of times as I crossed the line then pulled a big wheelie to show how pleased I was. Now that I didn’t care if I won, I was winning again, and I remembered that I liked it.
After Cav turned the tables again on the next stage, I surprised everyone, including myself, by pulling out a win in the next stage. No surprises in that, you might think, Sagan, you greedy bastard, but hold your horses . . . it was a time trial. In my new mode of not giving a shit, I smashed it round the flat 10-kilometer course to not only take the victory, but also the yellow jersey. Not my usual color, but I liked it.
I liked it so much that on the queen stage to Mount Giovanni, sorry, Mount Baldy, I dug in and finished in the top 10, losing less than a minute to Julian Alaphilippe and coming to the summit ski station in front of climbers like Haimar Zubeldia and Gesink. Alaphilippe had taken the jersey from me by two seconds, but with time bonuses to be won on the final stage, I was still confident.
Ahead of the final stage, we were all gathered round the start line, eagerly anticipating the starter’s gun. It was one of the tightest Tours I’ve ever been involved in, and every rider in contention had been crunching the numbers to calculate how the stage might play out to their advantage. As we were held at the start line, Lomba approached Cav and casually inquired whether he intended to challenge for the intermediate sprints and the bonus seconds that came their way. Since I was just a couple of seconds behind his teammate Alaphilippe, Cav confirmed he would be shelving his own ambitions to help the Frenchman in the G.C. No sooner had he finished answering Lomba’s inquiry than his tire exploded! Right in front of him! Surely a good omen for the rest of the day, and an exchange that would have Lomba in hysterics for the rest of the year. To be fair, Cav did storm the sprint to win the stage, and I had no qualms about that—he was flying all week—but nervously I waited to see if I’d pipped Tyler Farrar to third, as that carried a 4-second bonus. As usual, Gabriele was confident and told me not to worry, and sure enough, I’d won the Tour of California.
A retirement present, perhaps.
2015
