With the schedule I created for myself, I saw a lot of times that others copied what I did. And if you copy somebody, you are always too late. And that was always my luck, that I never copied somebody, that I developed something new. And they were always one step behind.
I was the strongest during my career, and that helped me a lot, definitely in the beginning, when I needed to race against riders who were much older than me and had the power and the experience. I could beat them with my technique. At a certain moment I not only had the technique but then the power came and the experience, and then you are on the best level that you ever can reach. But then the explosivity starts to go down, you're more afraid, and the technique goes down a bit. But it's OK, because it never goes completely down.
If you see that your sport is changing, you need to change yourself and think about it and work with people around you who are really smart in what they do, whether as a coach or as a managing director.
After 20 years of racing career the most important lessons I learned is that you need to have the passion and really love to ride your bike every day at the highest level. Also, for me personally, my goal was to always try to beat another generation, to try to beat the sport again. Trying to develop myself even when I was 37 years old.
In 1997, when I started as a professional athlete, my sport was not like it is now. I needed to develop myself to beat the next generation, but things also changed in the sport. Bikes have changed, the sport has gotten faster, and it's becoming more professional. But my goal always was to try to be one step in front of all the others. That was my motivation. That helped me to work every day during the year, and very hard. And it never stopped.
At the end of my career, I was, most of the time, a rider who came out of the background and won races just like that. I stayed calm and used my experience. So if you can feel that, if you know how to handle that, then yeah, that's really nice.
I don't miss racing, but I miss the time to train every day, to do the workouts, because I'm busy with a lot of things now. But if I have space during my day, I want to have a good workout, because my main goal right now is to give all the experience I've had in my career back to young riders, to companies.
