Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  Rod Ellingworth had been given the task of looking after me when I arrived at Sky; Rod is fantastic but he wasn’t right for me. I felt bad about Rod because I’m not the easiest person to look after. We’d raced together in the past, but we hadn’t built up the right sort of relationship as rider and coach. I think I knew Rod too well. Sometimes he’d ring me and I’d think, ‘I don’t want to speak to Rod at the moment.’ On the other hand, I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself in terms of training to win the Tour. That was partly where I had gone wrong that season.

  There was only one person I knew who could put me on the right footing, who could tell me the things I didn’t necessarily want to hear at times when I might not want to hear them. Only one guy would make me listen. I went into that office and I said to them, ‘You know what, the only person who really understands me and knows me inside out as a person is you, Shane, and I’d like you to coach me.’

  That took Shane a little aback. He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that’, but Dave immediately answered with, ‘That’s a really good idea, you know.’

  Shane’s first concern was that he didn’t really have the time. His worry was that he was trying to run the track programme for British Cycling, and if he coached me on a personal basis then all his lead riders – Vicky Pendleton, Sir Chris Hoy – would want him as well. I left the ball in his court for a few minutes, so he could think about it. Eventually, he said he liked the idea so we came out of that office in a really positive frame of mind; we’d really sorted a few things out.

  That day, Cath had dropped me off at the velodrome because I hadn’t been on my bike for two and a half weeks. I was going to do a four-hour ride home, so I got changed at the track, got my kit on, and Shane said, ‘I’ll ride with you for a bit.’ We left the track together and pedalled along for a couple of hours talking.

  ‘What do you think about it?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, I’m really excited. I just need to think a lot about it and how we go about the process because it’s not something I want to take on lightly.’

  His conclusion was that he would coach me on a full-time basis, but with the support of the sports scientist Tim Kerrison. Tim had been working at Sky that year, he knew relatively little about cycling, having only just begun to explore the sport, but he had revolutionised training in Australian swimming. I said I would hand the two of them my body: ‘Train me,’ I said. ‘Get the machine working for next July.’ I had unfinished business with the Tour de France.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  TIME FOR TRUTH

  ‘I know I’ve been an absolute fucking c*** this year but this is what I want to do in 2011: I want to start enjoying my racing again. I want to do Paris—Roubaix and I want to get back to finishing top ten in the Tour. And I want to start here.’

  IT WAS THE end of November 2010 and I was sitting in the massive meeting room at the Savill Court Hotel near Windsor. Gathered around me were the Sky management: Rod, Shane, Dave, Carsten, directeurs sportifs such as Sean Yates. This was our first get-together to build for 2011. I had really thought hard about what I wanted to do on day one at the first training camp of the new season, and this room, in front of all these people, was where it began. ‘Right, Brad,’ someone said. And off I went. I ran through the whole thing, outlining my plan and how I was going to execute it. I wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  Showing I was serious about 2011 meant doing more than merely stating my intentions to the guys who ran the team. I had brought a mountain bike to Windsor with me to use on the road, all set up with lights and mudguards, and I was out early every morning on it in the freezing cold. That was partly to make it clear I was showing willing, partly to make it clear that nothing was going to stop me doing my winter training in any conditions. The biggest gesture came at the end of the camp, when we had a big party. Everyone got absolutely blind drunk, except for me. I went to bed. The whole team knew I was happy to have a drink if the time was right, but on this occasion I made sure I didn’t touch a drop and just went to bed. I had one idea in my head: I’m going to start leading this team and the first step is that I don’t want to be paralytic in front of everyone.

  Given what had happened in 2010, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that when the team were handing out mock awards at the party on the last night, I won the one for the biggest media blooper of the season. It’s not every day you give an answer like the one I’d given to Eurosport during the Tour.

  ‘You know what, it’s not that much of a disappointment,’ I had replied in an attempt to be defensive, which backfired a little. ‘I’m 21st overall in the Tour at the moment, you know, if I’d been lying 21st a year ago everyone would have been masturbating.’

  It was still a bit embarrassing but I went up and said, ‘Thanks, I’d like to dedicate this award to Brian Nygaard.’ That raised a laugh or two, at least. Brian had been our media manager until he left suddenly in mid-season to found the Leopard-Trek team.

  What I had said and done had worked, in the sense that everyone seemed excited by the new season. Most of all, I remember one thing. When the camp was over, I was driving home and Dave called me: ‘Great work this week, Brad. You know, everyone says you’ve changed.’ After that, I knew I was on my way.

  I had begun to make a bit more of an attempt to behave like a leader once the 2010 season was done. The place to start was when I got to the winter break, the only time you can start looking ahead to the next year. With Lombardy out of the way, I had four or five weeks off. Cath, the kids and I moved into our new house and I did some work on it. We bought two dogs and I ended up walking them a lot, which helped to get my head right. Meanwhile, Shane was away thinking about the coaching, how we could improve. I remember thinking, ‘This is it now. Even if I don’t perform on the bike I’m going to try and lead a little bit. I’m going to answer my phone and be more proactive with the press.’

  Initially when I started the process of trying to change, trying to be more communicative, trying to lead the team, it was mainly to please everyone else. If I was asked to do something, I did it. That in turn was because I felt threatened; there was a chance that I was going to lose my job. But as time went on I started getting results. People responded well to me. I’d give an interview, it would be really upbeat, the interviewer would enjoy it too, they might tell me how much they’d liked working with me and I’d feel fantastic about it. I began to realise that in helping other people I’d helped myself.

  I came away from that first team meeting feeling good, but it wasn’t just down to the way I’d behaved. I’d had a meeting with Shane. Clearly he and the others had done a lot of thinking too and had worked out what approach we needed to take. Tim Kerrison had agreed to start helping us as a sports scientist, which was critical, because Shane didn’t feel 100 per cent confident that he could cover everything on his own. Tim had some good ideas; he wanted to bring in some of his knowledge. On that basis, they wrote me a winter’s training programme.

  The summer of 2010 had left me determined to change, but it had also left me at my lowest ebb in terms of self-confidence, wondering if I could really make it. Could I ever get back to the heights of 2009? Because of this it was important not to ramp up the pressure too much. So Tim, Shane and I sat down and deliberately didn’t set the bar too high. We were not going to win the Tour de France in 2011. However, a place in the top ten would go some way towards getting back to being a yellow jersey contender in the biggest race in the world. I knew that getting in the top ten would be a fantastic achievement, although it had tended to be overlooked a bit, as people talked about winning the Tour or getting on the podium. This was where Tim came in. He had started looking at what it takes to get in the top ten and from what he told me I began to realise that physically I was more than capable of it.

  Between the three of us we had a breakthrough, a complete change of approach. It came about when Tim looked at the margins and the percentages from the 2010 Tour de France. I had had
a ‘disastrous’ race, yet had still finished 24th; a lot of people would give their right arm for 24th. We realised that if I had lost a minute or so less on a lot of my worst days I would have been up to 11th. So then we started looking at the data, thinking about how I could avoid losing time.

  What we realised was that I would be better off riding my own race rather than trying to go with Andy Schleck or Alberto Contador when they attacked on a climb. My riding style is not explosive, but what my body is good at is riding at high intensity for a long time, without ever going completely into the red. Basically, I had to avoid blowing up. That meant I should drop off the back of the lead group if necessary, when the climbers began pushing up the intensity, because if I rode at my own tempo I would limit my losses maybe to forty seconds rather than trying to stay with the pure climbers and losing two minutes, as I did on Morzine in the 2010 Tour. With that in mind, top ten in the Tour became an achievable goal. But in order to achieve that, we began working to a rather unusual philosophy: I had to forget competing for 1st place. I had to put all Sky’s long-term goals and my achievement of 2009 to one side. I had to ride my own race. Call it blue-sky thinking, call it thinking outside the box, it was Tim’s way of working and it turned into the basis of how we approached the next two years.

  I believed this could work mainly because I was certain that Shane Sutton was the one person who was not just going to tell me what I wanted to hear. If Shane felt this was a sound idea, he really meant it. The two of us have a lot of shared history. We go back to the days when I was a schoolboy. Shane retired from racing at the end of 1995, and at the end of the next year he became Welsh national coach. He was at the old outdoor velodrome at Leicester – it’s fallen out of use now – with his squad at the 1996 national track championships. I finished 3rd in the junior points race and after I’d come down off the podium, he was crouched there having a fag, in his usual fashion, and he began chatting away, ‘Oh, I used to ride with your dad’, and so on. Shane and Gary had raced together in Australia and knew each other, but I don’t think they got on very well when they were racing. Shane was a tough little nut and Gary was the same so they never saw eye to eye.

  In 2002 Shane came on board at British Cycling to help us with the Madison – the two-man relay race in which I’d got close to a medal in Sydney. We were always struggling to qualify teams for the World Track Championships in that event, so I saw more of him. After the Commonwealth Games that year I hooked up with Cath. We’d met years before when we were both on the junior track squad, but August 2002 was when we got together; it was not long afterwards that I went to live with her in Manchester, where she was studying at university and still riding the track. By then, Shane was more than just another coach to me, he had become a friend. I came back to Manchester at the end of the 2002 season, which I’d spent racing with the French team Française des Jeux, and Cath would be at university all day. We had a whole routine of our own. I’d call up Shane and say, ‘Do you want to go down the pub?’ and we’d sit in the pub in Didsbury all day drinking. We’d have seven or eight pints and then Cath would finish uni, I’d pick her up, we’d go home and Shane would stay in the pub. Cath would go and do a track session at the velodrome and I would go back and meet Shane for another couple of hours. Then Cath would finish at the track, pick me up and drive me home. And the next day Cath would go back to uni and I’d go and meet Shane again. Every day it was the same during that off-season. We were mates, talking all the time. That winter, I rode some of the German Six Day races, on the tracks at Dortmund and Munich. Shane came with me as my mechanic and we had a massive laugh, not to mention some big drinking sessions; there’s a bit of that culture in the Six-Days.

  This might sound like a lot of drinking for an elite athlete, but I’m not exaggerating. For one thing, there was more of a drinking culture within the sport back then, certainly in the UK. The other point is that I was only twenty-two; people say to me, ‘You were in the gruppetto with us six years ago and now look how far you’ve come’, but they don’t fully appreciate what I used to be like. Marc Madiot, who managed me in 2002 and 2003, said recently that he would never have imagined me as a Tour contender; he didn’t really know me, he had no idea what I got up to in the winter. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I had another drinking winter in 2004 when I was trying to figure out my future after taking my first Olympic gold medal at Athens. In spite of the gold medals and even though I got close to the podium of the Tour in 2009, I’d say it was only in 2011 that I completely understood how much you need to work to get to the very top, what hard training is, and how much of a lifestyle change is involved. I simply didn’t train as much back then. I just never did the work. I’ve now realised what I’m capable of and I’ve done something about it.

  Shane was the mate I’d go down the pub with, but sometime in 2003 he stopped drinking and that was it: he hasn’t touched a drop since. He was working with British Cycling, but not on the track-endurance squad of which I was a part; he was quite heavily involved with the team sprinters, Chris Hoy and the others. I guess in a lot of ways it was like having a father who worked at British Cycling. He always looked out for me, although initially he wasn’t in charge of me or my programme. It was always Shane I’d ring if I had any problems. The thing with Shane is that from the minute we became mates this guy would do anything for me, literally anything. Then again, if you get on the wrong side of him you’ve got an enemy for life. But if you’re on the right side, he’ll take a bullet for you.

  Typically for Shane, he had established contact of a kind with Gary even though they hadn’t got on together in their racing days. After the winter of 2002, when we were drinking together and became friends, Shane went off to Australia for a training camp with the team sprinters. I hadn’t had contact with my dad for a couple of years but while he was out there Shane bumped into him at the Tasmanian carnivals. He came home from that winter break and said, ‘I met Gary out there, he’s living in Taz.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘He was in a really bad way, mate, he didn’t look so well. I bought him a drink one night and we talked through a few things and he asked a lot after you, you know.’

  Shane had looked after Gary because he was my dad, helped him out a bit and gave him a thousand dollars out of his own pocket and that was it; I think it was the last time Shane saw Gary, and pretty much the last I heard of him.

  Six years later, when Gary died in January 2008, it was Shane who phoned me at 4 a.m. to tell me he had heard from a mate in Australia that my dad was in hospital and it wasn’t looking good for him.

  Later I spoke with Shane a bit more about him and he said, ‘Fuck, Gary was talented, very talented, but he just didn’t put the work in. And he was a big drinker.’ I never knew my father as well as I know Shane; I do know he’s far more loyal than Gary ever was. Shane has been my role model for the last ten years and he says I’m like his son.

  When Simon Jones, my coach since 1998, left British Cycling in early 2007, Shane was brought in by Dave Brailsford to oversee the team pursuit squad. Simon had wanted us all to go on a massive training camp in Australia that winter, but I’d refused to go because Cath was pregnant with Isabella. Simon was fairly annoyed at me, and told the guys when they arrived Down Under that I would never race with them again, something that I had no option but to accept. At the start of 2007, Dave told me he was letting Simon go, and said, ‘Shane’s going to take over, and I’m going to bring this guy Matt Parker in, he’s got some good ideas; he’s going to be the sports scientist.’

  Shane’s first words were, ‘You’ve got to start getting some enjoyment back into this programme.’ He asked me to lead the group. And he said, ‘We need to start loving our athletes a bit more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you need?’

  He bought me a phone and a SIM card, and said, ‘See this? This is the backbone. If you ever need anything just ring me and you’re not paying for this out of your pocket.’
Three months before I had thought I was out of the squad after I’d refused to go to Australia; suddenly I was being made to feel like a million dollars.

  It can be infuriating being trained by Shane, because everything in his life is so hectic. He’s got a lot going on and he really struggles when he feels as if he’s not in control. He will ring me at times: ‘What you doing?’

  And I’ll say: ‘I’m having a day off.’

  ‘What the fuck you having a day off for? You should be out on your bike.’

  But he hasn’t seen that I’ve been training for the last five days. When he’s not in control and he comes in and just sees what’s in front of his eyes, he can find it tough. It’s just the way he is and the way he operates. He’s constantly thinking about his athletes, often to the detriment of himself and his own family. There are times when you think, ‘For Pete’s sake, Shane, go and see your own family, don’t worry about us for once.’ His approach can seem extreme. For instance, he apologised to me at the start of the Dauphiné in 2012; he was really upset because he felt he had let me down. He had wanted to be at the race with me, but he’d had to go on holiday with his family to Center Parcs after being away at the World Track Championships in Australia. At times he expects you to show the same commitment as him. I’ll say, ‘I need to spend some time at home’, and he will say, ‘I haven’t seen my own family for three years.’ It can be infuriating. All you can say is, ‘No, Shane, we’re all different.’

  Shane is incredibly observant as well. He’s always watching and thinking. He looks at little details, like the way I am pedalling, and he’ll say to me, ‘You didn’t look comfortable on that climb’, or ‘You were pushing too big a gear.’ He is great at knowing when to make an athlete stop and rest. He’s always saying, ‘You need to recruit now.’ By which he means letting the work soak in. His argument is: you need to do all this training but you also need to take the time off to let your body recover and adapt. Not a lot of athletes do this, but you need to recruit all the effort and repair all the muscle damage for the training to have any effect. If you don’t rest, you don’t recruit. For example, before winning the Dauphiné in 2012 I had two days off. I wasn’t sure about taking two days without riding the bike but he was determined I spend some time with my family. That’s what he’s like. As a coach he is incredibly good at the human side of it. He knows how it feels because he’s been there; he knows what six hours in the saddle feels like and he knows the mental effort it takes to ride for that length of time two days after a race.