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These things are true to a certain extent. You need a whole new set of skills to ride mountain bikes and BMX. But I had a lot of those skills before I even started doing those things. In my opinion, the most useful education for being a professional athlete, pretty much any sport, is a childhood spent outdoors, and as a youngster I was given free rein to explore and play in the Slovakian countryside. Other families probably thought I was wild . . . climbing trees, hiking out through the forests, swimming in the lakes and rivers, and building dens and camps in summer. Then in winter we would be skiing, sledding, and organizing the world’s largest snowball fights.

While you think you’re just having fun and being a tearaway, you’re learning crafts and skills. Coordination is probably the most obvious one, but you’re building your strength, finding out what your body can do, discovering your limits, and then trying to reset them to a higher level. You’re training, really, whether you want to be a soccer player, an ice hockey player, or a cyclist. Often, when I’m hurtling down a mountainside or testing my nerves in a fiercely contested bunch sprint, I’m drawing on childhood experiences with my big brothers in the Slovakian countryside.