There will be something missing from next year’s WorldTour. A Peter Sagan-shaped hole is set to open up as the enigmatic Slovak retires from top-level road racing. He won’t be gone completely though – he is staying on to target the mountain bike race in the Paris Olympics next year.
“You cannot put a lion in a cage,” says Sagan’s old boss at Bora-Hansgrohe, Ralph Denk. He was talking about letting the Slovak off the leash to enjoy mountain biking or skiing. But with Sagan’s recent retirement from the WorldTour, it feels like that metaphor has never been more apt. The ultimate uncaging.
Over the course of a wildly successful pro career Sagan, now 33, has earned the nicknames ‘Rambo’ and ‘the Terminator’, conjuring an image of someone you’d probably run a mile from before asking for an autograph.
And while as a pro rider trying to win races, Sagan was definitely not someone you would want to encounter at the sharp end of a tough one-dayer or a bunch sprint, his contemporaries paint a
