Zdeněk Štybar has been competing in cycling for more than half his life. He knows when his body just doesn’t feel right. “For the past three years, I was underperforming and could always explain why,” the Czech tells me. “First there was Covid, and then I had a heart issue.” In April 2021, he had surgery to fix cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat. “And then in the past year, I was training well, hitting good numbers and should have been in the best shape of my life, but I just couldn’t perform in races. My legs were so tired, so sore. When we hit a climb, I was immediately dropped, and could no longer do the numbers. I didn’t understand. It was such a weird feeling. I felt lost.”
Naturally, Štybar, a three-time cyclo- cross world champion, former winner of Strade Bianche and twice runner-up at Paris-Roubaix, began to surmise that his age, 37 at the time, was catching up with him. “I said to my daughter, ‘do you think after all these years of suffering, my body just won’t let me go deep again?’ I told myself it’s time to stop my career and refocus on something else.”
