My World. Peter Sagan

there’s a good chance you’ll get Katarina and me pretending to be Olivia Newton John and John Travolta as Sandy and Danny in Grease. We did it as a promotional thing for Sunroot, but we also did it for a laugh. Why so serious? We’ve always had silly ideas. One of the benefits of being UCI World Champion is that you can get away with doing them. Actually, that’s not quite right . . . we still would have done it, but doing our own private lip sync battle in the kitchen isn’t quite as much fun as getting a crew in to recreate the fairground set for “You’re the One That I Want” and getting it edited shot-by-shot to match the original.

      Katarina and I met at my house in Žilina. Actually, let me backtrack a little bit. When Juraj and I managed to start getting paid to ride bikes and when we weren’t at the Liquigas flat in Italy, we found ourselves a house in between the motorway and the huge bend in the River Vah as it widens into the Hricov Lake. They started building a bridge across it there shortly before we got the house. I was there recently, and they’ve just finished the bridge 10 years on. I love Slovakia, but it makes me smile.

      I had the bit of land that adjoined it too, and I was starting to earn a bit more money. I had a couple of cars by then, so I thought I’d build a garage for them on this land. That’s all. Then I thought I might like my own place to sleep, so it should have a bedroom above the cars. That’s all I’d need. Then, often when I come back to Slovakia, I’ll have a friend traveling with me, so I should get a guest room. That’d be enough. But then, if I was back in the winter, which can be pretty dark and cold in Žilina, I might want a gym and a sauna in the loft to keep fit. That’s all a man needs.

      In the end, the whole project morphed completely, and we ended up not building a house for ourselves at all. Instead it became the basis for the sports center I’d been trying to establish. Young Slovakian athletes from all different sports can go there to live, train, and generally get the support they need to make the step from keen youngster to full-time athlete.

      But before we knew that would happen, Juraj and I put out a request for a few local companies to quote on doing the building. One guy I particularly liked ran a little construction company with his father, and they seemed pretty well organized. After meeting them in the winter of 2012, I went off for my first concerted crack at the classics and came back with a fifth, fourth, third, and second place to my name. The third was at Amstel Gold in Holland, after which Juraj and I had a spring barbecue party at our place to celebrate. As it was next to the plot where this garage/bachelor pad would be going up, I invited the construction guy to the party to hang out with us and talk about the project. He turned up with this girl who instantly made a bit of an impression on me: tall, beautiful, but with a confident way about her that seemed to suggest there was more to her world than a construction company in Žilina. I was just thinking that he was a lucky bastard, when he introduced her as his sister. Happy days.

      Things didn’t happen between us immediately, but I texted her a few times, and she texted back, and before too long, people started to realize that we were seeing each other.

      Katarina—you’d worked that out I hope—was very well traveled, having worked for DHL, and she had lived in Australia. She had friends everywhere: Belgium, Holland, the Czech Republic, Poland. Wherever I went, she seemed to know someone, so after a while I said: “If you think you might want to be with me, come and see my life. Come and see what it’s like.”

      It was a great time. In 2013 I had my best spring so far, picking up my first classic at Gent–Wevelgem and my first Monument podiums with second places at Milan–San Remo and the Tour of Flanders. Traveling with Katarina shone a new light on everything, and I felt stronger for having her point of view and support alongside me.

      The problem was the problem that all of us face at some point: time. Some of us have not enough, some too much. At that point, it was certainly the former, with the training, racing, commercial responsibilities, family, friends, and girlfriend all deserving a bigger chunk of my attention than they were getting. We started picking races to go to together, so we could enjoy a bit more: no quick turnarounds, no training camps, no long transfers. The Tour of California was a perfect place for us, providing the chilled-out lifestyle we both wanted. We could carry on and be together at a relaxed, personal altitude training camp in Utah or Tahoe. The Tour Down Under is a great place to go, too, and usually the world championships is as well as you’re in the same place for a few days and in the more informal atmosphere of the national team rather than a sponsored outfit with professional demands.

      We decided that the classics would be too much. Maybe, say, Paris–Roubaix, or Flanders, but to do the whole period together would be too intense. The same thing goes for the Tour de France. A stage here or there is fun and something to look forward to in the middle of the madness of the Tour, but you get dragged into the routine grind if you do it all the time, and that’s no good for either of us.

      There’s also the team and my teammates to think of. Togetherness is important in any team in any sport. At some point, you’ll need to rely on each other, and the unique pro-cycling system of first among equals will be put to the test. There wasn’t room on the Tour, for instance, for nine riders to bring their families along for the ride, let alone the directors’, mechanics’, and soigneurs’ families. Plus, much of the communication and planning at big races takes place when you sit around the breakfast table or dinner table. Big team training camps were not ideal places for us to go together for those reasons, too.