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 wheel, probably thinking the same thing, and the bunch was closing in. Just when I thought I might lose my nerve and attack, fearing we would be caught with 200 meters to go, thankfully Cancellara opened up the sprint.
He did so at the perfect moment for me, just before the pace dropped off, and I soared around him to take my first Tour de France stage win, freewheeling enough to be able to do the chicken dance all the way over the line. Cancellara wasn’t happy with me, initially because he felt I had ridden his coattails to the win, which was true, but he was a superstar, and I was a rookie. Then that celebration really got up his nose, taking it as a personal snub and a sign of disrespect.
By the time we reached Paris, I had my first Tour de France green jersey, and I’d been able to add the Incredible Hulk and the Running Man to my celebrations. I would have won more, but I’d run out of ideas for victory salutes. At least Cancellara knew by then it was nothing personal.
The 2013 season was my best year to date, picking up 22 wins in all sorts of races on all sorts of terrain, making me the most successful cyclist on the ProTour circuit that year. Or should I say the “winningest,” like the Americans? It’s a horrible word, but it’s more accurate. Who is to say that winning 22 races is more successful than winning one Tour de France and 17 other races, like Chris Froome did that year?
I’d initially thought it was going to be the year of the second place when I went through March with second at Strade Bianche, Milan–San Remo, E3 Harelbeke, and the Tour of Flanders. Planted in the middle of that run was my first classics win. At last. Belgium was bitterly cold and apparently Gent–Wevelgem was nearly cancelled, but instead it was shortened by 50 kilometers. That obviously suited me, what with stamina (in my opinion) being the older riders’ strength, and I found myself at the sharp end of the race all day. With 4 kilometers to go and my breakaway rivals wondering how they were going to beat me in the sprint, I attacked instead and won on my own, popping some wheelies to please the crowd who’d been risking hypothermia to see me win.
I suppose in retrospect, 2014 wasn’t so bad, with a third Tour de France points jersey in a row to show for my troubles and seven wins along the way, but in truth it was hellish. I was realistic enough to know that my upward trajectory to this