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The other thing sunroot does is grow like wildfire, so much so that it can take over if you don’t keep an eye on it, a bit like rhododendron does in parts of Europe. Like rhododendron, it looks pretty, so people don’t clear it. This got up the nose of one particular Slovak politician to such a degree that he got a law passed to have it banned. Can you see a pattern emerging here? Naturally, that would have been Katarina’s business down the drain without a backward glance, but fortunately there are a lot of farmers, growers, and sellers of sunroot in Slovakia, so he eventually backed down. The politician probably proposed the law because his neighbor’s garden was overgrown. As you know by now, that’s how things tend to work over in Slovakia.

If you put “Jerusalem artichoke” into Google, you’ll get the description I gave you at the top of this chapter. If you put “sunroot” into Google, there’s a good chance you’ll get Katarina and me pretending to be Olivia Newton John and John Travolta as Sandy and Danny in Grease. We did it as a promotional thing for Sunroot, but we also did it for a laugh. Why so serious? We’ve always had silly ideas. One of the benefits of being UCI World Champion is that you can get away with doing them. Actually, that’s not quite right . . . we still would have done it, but doing our own private lip sync battle in the kitchen isn’t quite as much fun as getting a crew in to recreate the fairground set for “You’re the One That I Want” and getting it edited shot-by-shot to match the original.