Peter Sagan Just Wants to “Finally Enjoy Something in Cycling.”
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Peter Sagan, 33, recently bid farewell to professional road racing. But he’s not reaching for the golf clubs just yet. He’ll be switching gears to mountain bike racing. Sagan is a former junior world and European champion on the mountain bike, and competed in the discipline at the Rio 2016 Olympics, finishing 35th.
Sagan will be racing the mountain bike with the Specialized Factory Racing Team with his sights set on the 2024 Paris Olympic Games next year. While Sagan is excited for the change of scenery and skill set, he’s also a little nervous about how much the scene has changed since he was a junior. Eurosport reported that Sagan said, “It is totally different than it was 15 years ago,” adding that the sport has changed as much and as quickly as road racing has.
Still, the Slovak has a knack for showing up and throwing down. When he was a junior he entered the 2007 Slovak Cup but found himself without a bike. According to the Olympic Games website, he had accidentally sold his own bike and so borrowed his sister’s bike, which she had purchased from the supermarket. Apparently the brakes barely worked, but he still won the race.
GCN reported that Sagan rode the Mountain Bike World Championships earlier this summer and finished 37th in the short track, and 63rd in the cross-country Olympic event. They weren’t the results he was hoping for, but he understands there’s a learning curve.
“It is definitely more fun, but also more dangerous than before,” Sagan said of his return to the sport. “It is shorter, it is very intense and I missed it for fifteen years. There has been a lot of change in mountain biking, you have to learn a lot of new things: how to adjust the suspension, ride better technically in downhills and train to perform over the short, intense performances, and then recover fast.”
While time is running out a bit for Sagan to qualify for Paris, he’s still going to give it his all. He’s scheduled to race the UCI MTB World Cups next year. And his calendar includes at least nine other mountain bike races in an effort to rack up enough UCI points to get Slovakia into the rankings.
“The thing is, I am already 14 years into my professional cycling career," Sagan told GCN. "I am a little bit tired of that and all the circus that is going around it. Every year it is the same, and new guys are coming and I don’t want to say I am not motivated anymore, I just want to say that I think my time has come.”
Anyone who has followed Sagan’s epic WorldTour career can say for sure that he’s one of the most entertaining riders to watch, and that will no doubt also be true on the trails as much as it was on the road.
“I started with mountain biking, I want to finish with mountain biking and I finally want to enjoy something in cycling,” Sagan said during the GCN interview, “...and not just to be focused on big priorities.”
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