Looking relaxed and rested, with his sunglasses pushed back on top of his wavy, brown hair, Peter Sagan (Tinkoff-Saxo) took his spot in the front row of the Tour of California press conference with a familiarity he’s built over the past five years as the race’s most prolific stage winner and a five-time consecutive winner of the green points jersey.
But Sagan found himself in unfamiliar ground during the media gathering Friday in Sacramento, where he had to respond to recent public statements by team owner Oleg Tinkov, who wrote on Cyclingnews earlier this week that his star rider seems to have “lost something.”
“He’s the one who needs to find out why,” Tinkov wrote. “And he’s the one who needs to change something and start winning again. I cannot do much.”
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Sagan has won just a single race – stage 6 at Tirenno-Adriatico – so far this year after signing with the Russian squad in the offseason. The 25-year-old Slovakian has finished second four times this season, and he was fourth at both Milan-San Remo and Tour of Flanders. He finished a disappointing 23rd in his most recent outing at Paris-Roubaix in April.
Sagan’s results this year have been a far cry from the gawdy numbers he piled up in previous seasons, and Tinkov lamented publicly that he is paying Sagan a lot of money with little to show for it.
“[I’m] paying him a big cheque and he’s not performing (laughs)," Tinkov wrote. “That’s not good.”
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