"Every rider has a love-hate relationship with the Tour. I definitely do" - Peter Sagan on his relation with the Tour de France and ambitions into 2023

Peter Sagan has been one of the most successful riders in modern cycling and the Tour de France is where his career has had the biggest amount of victories. The green jersey will forever be associated with him, and he has talked about his relationships with the race as well as his thoughts coming into it for the 12th time

“The Tour de France is always too hard to get emotional about it all. You never ride the Tour for fun or as a farewell. You've got to suffer and stay focused every day to get through the Tour and do as well as you can," Sagan said in an extensive interview with Cyclingnews. "I’ll perhaps get emotional when we get to Paris but there’s a long way to go before then. The Tour creates some special, intense emotions but you have to suffer for the magic to happen."

Sagan, now in TotalEnergies, has passed the peak of his career, where he has achieved almost incomparable achievements such as the 7 green jerseys (which were almost completely consecutive from 2012 to 2019, as he was disqualified back in 2017), the 12 stage wins and hundreds of days leading classifications and being a rockstar in the peloton. He was at the highest level of cycling, and although he has won so much outside of it, the Tour is where his story developed the most.

“Of course I’m grateful to the Tour, it changed my life. Winning stages and winning seven green jerseys changed my life. Every rider dreams about riding the Tour de France and of winning a stage, but I think every rider has a love-hate relationship with the Tour. I definitely do," he admits.

Recent years have been more difficult, also due to the emergence of even more talented generations, but the former World Champion has not resigned or given up on the idea of returning to the top step on it. His last win came in 2019, the year he also won green for the final time. He will however continue to pursue that, as well as the points classification where he will be an outsider, but a rider more experienced than any other who will contest for the jersey.

“I want to do my best, do the best I can. I hope to win a stage and be in the thick of the racing. It’s becoming harder and harder to win the green jersey and I know I can’t turn back the tide of time, but you never know what can happen," he says. His positioning skills remain just as strong, he will continue to be an outsider for the bunch sprints, and hopefully for him he'll have good form and can also be present in some hilly stages.

"To have a chance of victory, you have to be up there and in the fight every day. We’ll see where the roads of France take us day by day. The most important thing is to finish the Tour in Paris, to ride onto the Champs Elysees safely, to celebrate finishing my last Tour. That’ll be the best way to end my career at the Tour de France, that will make me happy, satisfied and proud of what I’ve achieved," he concluded.