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That’s how it was when I first started out. Then you start winning, start leading, the pressure builds, and one day, somewhere along the way, you lose what it was that helped you win in the first place. Thinking back to my debut at the Tour Down Under, I remembered thinking, I could win one of these. Five years on, I’d lost that feeling. It wasn’t just the overtraining, it was the contract negotiations, the uncertainty, the pressure. And then, as if to reassure me that I wasn’t completely losing my mind, amid all the tests at Tinkoff, the team doctor said the results showed I’d had a virus slowing me down for much of the previous season. Thank you! It wasn’t all me, then. Had Cannondale known? Did they decide not to tell me because they needed me on the start line week in, week out, knowing that I was leaving at the end of the year? I don’t know. But they either knew and kept it from me or their medical testing was shit. One of those scenarios had to be true.

I still talked to Patxi most days and filled him in on what I was doing, but the pressure was off completely. All I had to do was get through the 2015 season. I was quitting soon. Why so serious?