At the team meeting, the riders were like a cross between a bunch of old women wailing and wringing their hands at a funeral and kids in the school playground after somebody has kicked the ball over the fence into the garden. “What are we going to do? What are we going to doooooo?”
“Guys, come on,” I said. “It’s just a bike race, you know? Che cazzo? It’s not like Bjarne was going to ride our bikes for us. We get up in the morning. We put warm clothes on. We ride up over the Turchino Pass. We get down to the Riviera. We take our jackets and legwarmers off. We ride over the capi. We sprint into San Remo. It’s pretty simple.”
It was indeed pretty simple, and as we came to the finale, I was in with a big shout. Alexander Kristoff had Luca Paolini lead him out for a long sprint, as he prefers. He’s really fast when he gets rolling, but he lacks that explosive Cavendish-style punch. I tried to respond, but 290 kilometers is a hell of a long way in March, especially when you’ve been training yourself half to death, and my legs let me know loud and clear that they strongly disapproved of sprinting. Only John Degenkolb could get past Kristoff, and Michael Matthews edged me off the podium. Oh well, at least it was a short drive home.
Great. So now the guy who had brought me here had disappeared. But not after burdening me with a coach who was destroying me week by week. Bobby didn’t understand me, and I couldn’t stand his persistent interventions.
I’m lucky. I’ve never had any problem motivating myself to train. If I want to win, I have to race well. And if I want to race well, I have to train. But that is what training is to me: preparation to race. Not training for its own sake. Maybe that works for some riders: G.C. riders, for instance, like Alberto Contador or Chris Froome, who don’t race so often, need to train with structure to make sure they arrive at their goals in peak condition. Also, they can use races like the one-week stage races in Spain or the Dauphiné or Tour de Romandie to train. If you take this year, 2018, as a comparison, I won my first race in Australia in January. I’m basically trying to win twice a week pretty much from then until the world’s in September with a couple of weeks off here and there for good behavior. Or, in the case of last year, bad behavior, but we’ll come to that.
Training to say you’re in good shape. Amazing numbers. Wow. Well, as far as I’m aware, no bike race has ever been won on a power meter. Nobody ever got UCI points for wearing the maximum output jersey. Even Chris Froome has to stop looking at his computer and run up mountains in his cycling shoes sometimes. Training for its own sake. That’s exactly how it felt with Bobby. He was obsessed with my figures. I had to do exactly as he asked every day and then spend the rest of the day talking to him about it. I was absolutely exhausted and miserable with it. I’d start thinking I’d turn my phone off or pretend I was sick. It was ludicrous. I love training, but this was killing me. Death by numbers.
Every coach I’ve ever met asks me: “Do you want to be a better climber? A better sprinter? A better time trialer?” I say, why mess with nature? I am what I am. I go OK. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I believe that if you make a drastic change to improve one facet of your performance, there will be a price to pay elsewhere. Riders who have lost weight to climb better lose their kick. People who have improved their stamina become unable to sprint. Becoming more aerodynamic means losing power. The list is endless, and I’m sure you get what I’m talking about.
The basic problem was a pretty simple one. Forget resting heart rate, fat content, power outputs, and training algorithms. I was just plain knackered. Tired beyond belief. But still, I’d drag myself out of the flat in Monaco and cajole myself into riding along, sticking to whatever plan Bobby had set for me that day.
I went to the northern classics and admit I was truly shit. This was meant to be the year when I cracked it: no more second and third steps of the podium, no more near misses. Well, we got that right anyway. I was nowhere near. By the time April blew itself out, I’d forgotten what a podium looked like.
The team was not happy. All sorts of rumors were floating around about what was going wrong. I can’t say if Bobby actually said this or not, but I heard he told the team I’d been overraced so much since turning pro, that I was already burnt out. Any results I would ever achieve in my career had already been won. I was finished at 25. A busted flush. A racehorse whose knees had gone.
“That’s it,” I said. “Fuck it, I quit.”
In my mind I was already an ex-professional cyclist on the beach with Katarina. Well, I’d still have some stories to tell about the times I’d had. Maybe I’d write a book one day.
Giovanni activated crisis-management 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,