Peter Sagan (TotalEnergies) continued to diversify his ambitions on two wheels and confirmed he would participate at the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in late August in the E-MTB category, saying “It will be a party”.
A three-time world champion on the road, Sagan completed the Tour de France on July 24 but came away without a victory. The 32-year-old finished in the top 10 on five stages, including fifth place on the Champs-Élysées on the final day.
Following the Tour de France, Sagan travelled to the United States for altitude training and is expected to return to Europe to race the one-day BEMER Cyclassics in Germany on August 21 and then the Bretagne Classic in France on August 28. In between, Sagan will take part in the E-MTB Worlds.
“I won't be able to be competitive and I'm not going for that. For me it will be a party, a way to give back to the fans at least a little of the affection they give me," Sagan said in a report by La Gazzetta dello Sport.
Sagan began racing as a junior in cyclo-cross and mountain bike events, winning a junior cross-country world title in 2008. While he moved to a focus on road racing as an elite rider in 2010, taking wins at Paris-Nice, Tour de Romandie and Tour of California, a love for mountain biking saw him opt to the off-road discipline for Slovakia at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, but a puncture left him a long way from a medal.
In the past two seasons Sagan has dealt with several occurrences of COVID-19, the positive for the coronavirus coming a week prior to the 2022 Slovakian National Road Race Championships. He won the road race title for an eighth time and then lined up with his TotalEnergies squad for the Tour de France.
For training before the Tour, Sagan spent time in the US. He took part for the first time in the summer’s highly-popular gravel race, Unbound Gravel 100 in Emporia, Kansas, where he finished 13th in the pro open men’s division, 54 minutes off the winning time of 21-year-old Ethan Overson.
The Mountain Bike Worlds will take place in Les Gets, France from August 21-28, and the E-MTB competition for women and men will be held on Friday of race week.
It is the fourth year for the E-MTB category to be part of the World Championships. The first world titles for electric mountain bikes were contested in 2019 at Mont-Sainte-Anne in Québec, Canada with Alan Hatherly of South Africa taking the men’s title and Nathalie Schneitter of Switzerland taking the women’s crown. In 2020, Tom PIdcock took part in the E-MTB Worlds and soloed to victory.
