My World. Peter Sagan
the reclaimed lands that give the Netherlands its name, finishing on an island. I knew there would be crosswinds, and, bizarrely, the predictions about helping Alberto came true, as we were both alert enough to make sure we were in the front split. It was a good day for the team, who smashed it hard on the front in lashing rain and gale-force winds, and also for Sky, and we drove it between us for Alberto and Froome. By the finish, Quintana and Nibali had lost a minute, and I felt free to contest the sprint. It was a tight one, going to a photo, but Andre Greipel’s tire touched the line before mine, and I had my first second place.
After guiding Alberto over the pavé as promised with plenty of effort but no real incident, I finished second in the sprint again, this time to John Degenkolb, who was having an incredible season, winning both Milan–San Remo and then Paris–Roubaix on these same cobbles. Unfortunately for both of us, we were only sprinting for second place on the stage, as Tony Martin had clipped off the front of the hard-core group that remained in contention with a few kilometers to go, and we just couldn’t catch him. He took the stage and the yellow jersey with it. Another near miss for me, but I wasn’t worried. The chances would come.
Like the next day, when I was second to Andre Greipel again.
And the next day, when I was second to Zdeněk Štybar.
Actually, that one really hurt. Well, it didn’t hurt me as badly as it hurt Tony Martin, who was in a crash within sight of the line. The yellow jersey has no more padding than any other, and it couldn’t prevent his collarbone from cracking, leaving his heart as broken as his clavicle. Of course, I didn’t know he was hurt at the time; there was just a mess of riders everywhere and a chance to win a stage. But first we had to catch Štybar, who’d jumped himself into a handy lead just as the Lycra hit the tarmac. Well before that day and continuing to this, whenever there’s chasing to be done, it seems everybody looks at me. Seriously? I still don’t really get it. It had already been demonstrated on a few painful occasions in this race that there were other sprinters capable of beating me, and they had powerful teams to help them. But no, let’s wait and let Sagan chase. I was beginning to get a bit fed up, so I sat up and invited somebody else to chase Štybar. There were only a few hundred meters to go: If we didn’t get together and chase together, he would win. We didn’t. He did. And guess what? Yes, I was second. I was thinking of getting a new jersey made. Most second places. The brown jersey, maybe.
I wasn’t second the next day. I was third. Second loser, I suppose. To make up for it, I found myself second in the G.C., so I could keep my imaginary brown jersey.
Second in the sprint again the next day, stage 8, to Alejandro Valverde on the slopes of the Mur-de-Bretagne, but we were both outdone by two late attackers anyway. At least I was consistent, I suppose, but it was getting pretty frustrating. By consolation, that consistency meant that I wouldn’t have to wear my notional brown jersey the following day, as I’d nicked enough points off Greipel to get my favorite Robin Hood–colored jersey back. Rob the rich to give to the poor? The way things were going, I bet if I ran the Sheriff of Nottingham’s coach off the road, I’d get to the treasure chest and find Greipel or Cav had already helped themselves.
A week went past. We did a team time trial. We climbed the Pyrenees. I slipped out of the top 10, unsurprisingly, but I still had the green jersey. For a while, I’d also held the white jersey of best young rider overall. Some people found it hard to believe that I still qualified for this, and sometimes I felt like one of them. It was hard to believe that I was still 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