There are five riders older than Peter Sagan competing in the 2026 Tour de France. There’s even a 35-year-old debutant, New Zealander Aaron Gate, but Sagan, for a decade one of the Tour’s star attractions and headline names, is not racing. He quit the sport three years ago and has no regrets about his decision to retire at an age – 33 – that some perceived as early.“People ask me a lot: ‘Why did you stop?’,” the Slovakian tells The Athletic three days out from the Tour, where he’s in Barcelona for an event with his longtime sponsor Sportful. “I say to them: ‘Living in this world for 14 years wasn’t enough?’ You can’t do it forever.“When I saw the moment that I was going to be a domestique (helper) for someone, I said: ‘It’s my life. I don’t want to ride for someone and to pull the sprint for them. It’s not my style’. I said: ‘It’s enough’.”What a sterling career Sagan drew the curtain on. A record seven green jerseys in the Tour, three successive road World Championships, and wins in Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. There were 12 Tour stage victories, four in the Vuelta a España, and 18 in the Tour de Suisse. All in all, he was victorious as a pro 121 times. He is an eternal great.He was much more than a bike rider. His long, wavy hair in his mid-20s was more reminiscent of a guitarist in a rock band, he tried his hand at acting in promo videos, while he would wheelie up Alpine climbs and bunny hop to avoid crashes — or simply because he was bored.In a sport where media shyness is the norm, Sagan stood out for being different. He was an icon for many, a fan favourite to most, and Slovakia’s biggest representative on the international stage.“I am proud of having the nickname ‘The Rockstar’ because nobody else was called that in cycling before,” he says.But all of that attention came with its drawbacks. Pressure, fame and fatigue took its toll.Sagan’s style in his 2010s heyday was different to most cyclists (Chris Graythen/Getty Images)Hanging his racing wheels up wasn’t a hard decision for Sagan. The wins began to dry up post-Covid — though there were two stage victories and a points jersey at the Giro d’Italia — and a 2022 move to French team TotalEnergies from Bora-hansgrohe failed to reverse a (relative) late-career malaise.He was just done with being a professional athlete. “I was tired of it and I wanted to stop. It was easy,” he states.Unlike many of his peers, though, he didn’t find the transition to normal life difficult.“A lot of professional athletes stop and they don’t know what to do. They find themselves in a black hole,” he says.“It’s very hard because you’ve been doing a sport since you were seven or 15, and you’ve always been in a routine. And then afterwards, when you have nothing to do, it’s hard.“But for me, it wasn’t like that because I had a plan of what to do and this reputation as the rockstar of the peloton has helped me with what I’m doing now with my sponsors. I’m even busier now than when I was a rider.”Sagan has several ambassadorial roles: he has a long-time partnership with American bike brand Specialized, pops up during cycling coverage’s advert breaks riding an indoor bike for MyWhoosh, and recently, he launched his own non-alcoholic beer with Slovakia’s biggest brewery, Zlatý Bažant.He’s found plenty of time for other activities, not least partaking in a primetime dance show in Slovakia last spring, eventually getting knocked out in the semi-finals with his dance partner Eliška Lenčešová.Sagan on ‘Let’s Dance’ in 2025 (Photo: Peter Sagan)“It was a very nice experience,” he says of appearing on Let’s Dance. “I have to say thanks to my (dance) partner because my dancing maybe looked better on television than it was in real life. She saw how I was dancing at the start and tried different methods to make me better.“We were training all kinds of dancing — classic, Latin American, cha-cha-cha — from January to March just to learn the basics. Then, during Let’s Dance, we had a week to learn a (specific) dance and the choreography, spending eight hours a day in the dance room.”Did it give him a similar buzz to the one he had as a professional athlete? “Even more. I did cycling for years and I knew what to do, but dance was really something new.”That Sagan took to dancing perhaps wasn’t a surprise. The most-watched video on his Facebook page is of him doing the splits in 2017, with his legs stretched out to the side and his bottom resting on the floor. It’s flexibility that is more associated with gymnasts, not cyclists.“There was a lot of hard work behind that. I could do it now as I have some methods of stretching to do it, but I’d be f—ed up for two weeks!” he laughs.His appearance on Let’s Dance reasserted him as Slovakia’s darling; the son they’re most proud of. But being his country’s most famous man is a burden he wears heavily — even if he’s spent most of his adult life living in Monaco, four countries and 700 miles from the Slovakian border.