I never felt my position was threatened by Cav coming to Sky. I could understand that he was coming to the team as world champion, so he was in a much stronger position than me. I’d crashed out of the Tour in 2011 and perhaps that had been my one opportunity to do something. There was a part of me that thought it was bound to happen at some point. It was always inevitable Cav would end up at Sky; now he was world champion and he had won the green jersey last year so I couldn’t blame them for wanting a piece of that. I just reminded myself to put my head down, concentrate on what I was doing and get the training in. July was a long way away.
I had several goals for the early season, so there was no point in expecting the managers at Sky to come up with a strategy for the Tour back in January. What I had to do was concentrate on performing in those races I’d picked, do my job and see where we ended up. All I had to do was make sure I was ready for the Tour when they started picking the team. I spoke to Cav a lot on training camps and there was no friction; it was always pretty clear that we would have separate programmes for much of the season. He was actually very encouraging whenever I spoke to him, saying that he thought I could win the Tour. There was never a point where he seemed to think it was not going to happen. He was probably one of the most supportive riders around me in 2012. But that’s just him, that’s a sign of our relationship. It’s the kind of champion he is. He came into Sky as world champion and winner of the green jersey in the Tour, yet he was still ready to sacrifice some of his results for what he thought I could achieve. What really sticks in my mind was the first time I met him after he’d signed for Sky, at the training camp in December in Majorca. I’d last seen him perhaps two months before that when he’d just won the rainbow jersey and it suddenly felt like we were still in Copenhagen. I remember talking to him about the World’s. We said to each other, ‘God, that was good.’
Part Two
Little By Little
CHAPTER 7
* * *
TEARING UP TRADITION
THERE’S A STIFF breeze blowing in central France as we head towards Orléans on the second stage of Paris–Nice, but I’m already on cloud nine. I’m lying 2nd overall after the prologue time trial. I was storming there, would have won quite easily, but Gustav Larsson of Sweden went off in the dry and I went off in the rain. From the moment I finished that I thought, ‘Bloody hell, this is looking good.’ We know the race is going to split in the crosswind at some point today, so this stage is about sustained vigilance. I have to keep my eyes open and not get caught if it happens.
Sure enough, not long after the feed, the gaps begin to open at the front. We’ve got about 100km to race, we’re on a typical French route nationale, dead straight, with trees perfectly spaced every 20m, and a farm building every couple of kilometres. Vacansoleil are the team who commit first, driving at the front. Almost the whole peloton goes into the left-hand gutter to try and keep out of the wind. As most of the guys immediately dive left, those who’ve got the strength try and go into the wind down the right to get into the first group. There are about twenty or twenty-five pulling clear, the next echelon not closing on them. If I want to win Paris–Nice, I need to be in that front group. I’m about forty riders back; I’d rather go up the outside even if I’m fighting against the wind, it’s better than trying to hide in a wheel. I go right to find the open road.
I’m sprinting up to the back of the front group, across the gap to the back of the line; keep looking at those wheels a few yards in front of me, and that’s it, I’m there. Next up, Tom Boonen appears; he’s come from twice as far back in the main bunch as me. I can’t help thinking, ‘Bloody hell, Tom’s going well,’ and sure enough, he wins the stage, then goes on to land a bunch of Classics later in the spring. It’s not easy at first in the group; in fact it feels really hard for twenty minutes as my body recovers from the effort I’ve just made. But I’m where I need to be.
On a windy day, once you’re in the front group it’s simple, it’s making it there that’s the hardest bit. When you’re in the lead group it’s just a case of going through and doing your bit, team time trialling the last 100km. G has made it as well, and then I know: with his help I’m going to take the leader’s jersey. I’m not thinking about the stage win, I’m just keen to contribute to the work and drive the group if need be. I know I’m going well, better than most, when I pull off after a turn at the front of the line and no one is there to come through, in fact there’s a gap behind me, even though I haven’t been pushing myself flat out.
The last intermediate sprint comes up, and I get myself in the right place to start sprinting for it; I don’t quite know why. Whether I get that sprint or not, I can take the jersey at the end of the stage, and there is still the time trial up the Col d’Eze to come on the last day. That’s six stages away, but it’s my insurance policy. The sprint comes into view; no one else is going for it, so I give it a push, and that’s a useful two-second time bonus in the bag. I was wondering how I’d sprint after all that explosive training this winter, to develop the top-end power for the climbs when the guys like Contador attack. Now I know. I feel confident, with good reason. The winter I’ve had, the tests I’ve been doing, the numbers we’ve been crunching: everything has been telling Shane, Tim and me that my form is better than it has ever been. But we’re working towards July. I haven’t peaked for Paris–Nice. This is all part of the process. After all, I’m still in a building phase.
The ‘Race to the Sun’ was where the winning streak of 2012 began, but the process of getting there started five months earlier, on 1 November 2011. After the world championships in Copenhagen, I took five weeks off. I didn’t ride my bike: I worked in the gym a little, did a bit of walking with the dogs, didn’t drink loads of beer and only put on a couple of kilos, which wasn’t a huge amount. On 1 November I was ready to train and it was no effort: first week fifteen hours’ riding; second week, eighteen hours; third week, twenty-one. Before I knew it, we’d got to Christmas and I’d put in nine weeks of good, consistent, on-the-ball training. Sky went to Majorca the week before Christmas for the team training camp and I turned the wick up a bit: forty hours in seven days out there, six hours a day with Eddie Boasson Hagen. For someone who works in an office, that’s like pedalling every hour of the working day. It’s not the kind of week you can do off the cuff; you have to build into it, which was what I had been doing over the previous six weeks.
I didn’t just spend that winter on the bike. I made sure to be in the gym three days a week from 6 a.m., working to a strength programme devised for me by Mark Simpson, British Cycling’s conditioning coach at the time. One of the things that had been flagged up at the Vuelta, specifically at the climb of the Angliru, was that because I’d broken my collarbone, my left arm was very weak. That meant I couldn’t work hard enough when climbing out of the saddle. All-round, I didn’t have enough upper-body strength to deal with the steepest climbs. It’s always been known that steep climbs aren’t for me; I struggle on them.
Tim and Shane’s view was that at some point I was going to have to perform on those climbs if I wanted to win the biggest race. My answer was that I’ve never been great at it; my core strength has never been that fantastic; my upper-body strength has been poor at times and I’ve never worked on it. I had always been known for my good pedalling speed on the track, but to perform on some of these steep climbs, you have to work on your power and your torque, producing that power at a lower cadence. That was why we had started looking into torque sessions for time trialling, and that was why I had to get to the gym. It was not only to get the power back in my left arm but also just to increase my general physical fitness and strength. I had to do it without bulking up, without ending up looking like a panel beater, becoming stronger physically without putting any muscle on. I felt a huge difference straight away.
The gym work was a classic case of the three of us working out where I had a weakness and refusing to be reconciled to it. A lot of athletes will simply acc
ept that they aren’t so good in certain areas rather than trying to do anything about it. You can’t just say for the rest of your career, ‘Well, actually, you know what? I’m not that good at climbing.’ If that’s the case you have to work on climbing. The art is to work on your weak areas without losing what you’re good at, and that’s very much what we achieved in 2012. Personally, I used to really struggle when the climbers started attacking at the foot of a mountain. I lacked the explosive power to deal with it. That and my lack of power on the steep climbs; these are all weaknesses you show in public – ‘Ah Brad, he likes a consistent pace on these climbs, he does struggle when they start attacking.’ They’re things that everyone knows about, so why not deal with them?
This change in attitude came partly from Tim asking all his questions as a non-cyclist coming in from another sport. Cycling is very traditional and set in its ways about how you train. Since I was a kid it had always been the same: cyclists had October and November off, we would start training on 1 December, and that would be runs to café stops – the social side of cycling – using fixed wheel if need be. On 1 January you up the miles and intensity a little; you start doing longer rides to cafés, sprinting for road signs. In February and March you enter your first races; you know it’s going to be bloody hard to blow out the cobwebs. It’s always been the same. That is the tradition of cycling. Tim came along and asked why we didn’t train at the same high level for twelve months of the year. Swimmers do it and rowers do it. People in cycling say you shouldn’t be doing interval training in December, you’ll be blown out by July. Why? It’s just tradition.
The attitude I took to my training had changed significantly as well. I specifically said to Shane and Tim at the end of 2011, ‘I don’t care what you ask me to do, I have a lot of faith in you because we’ve come on a lot this year, I just want to win the Tour de France.’ I told them that I didn’t know how long I would be able to go on training for the Tour and living the life it demands. It’s too intense and it takes too big a toll on your life and on everyone else around you. I felt I was willing to give it a shot in 2012 because I had a decent chance to win the Tour and I might never win it again. This might be my one opportunity.
I’d always led my programmes in the past; I had always said I want to win this, I want to win that, win this prologue time trial here because it gives me a bit of security if the main event goes wrong. For 2012 I told them, sod it, I want to win the Tour, I’m the gerbil on the wheel. I want to be uncompromising, so you guys write down what you think. You work out the training programme; you know I trust you, just do it.
Using TrainingPeaks, Tim would work out my training for the day – times, power outputs, cadences – he would upload it, and I would get a notification telling me to go and read it in an email. It’s a far cry from the mileage chart that they used to print on the Cycling Weekly centre-spread at Christmas every year, which I coloured in religiously until I was about sixteen.
So the schedules came in, week by week. I just did exactly what I was asked, then each day I downloaded the SRM file from the box on the handlebars – the little computer that records power output from our cranks, pulse rate, cadence and so on – and put it into TrainingPeaks for Tim to look at. For once I wasn’t interested in the details. I had 100 per cent faith in what Tim and Shane put down on paper. I gave them total responsibility. That in turn made them think about it, and that is where a lot of my faith in them came from. I knew that they had put a lot of brainpower into it; they hadn’t just written it up sitting on the toilet.
In the midst of all that we came up with a race programme as well. I remember sitting in the office in Manchester with Tim next to me, saying, ‘You know, I think I can train harder than I race sometimes.’ It was something that we’d realised the previous August when I rode well in the Vuelta after six weeks with no racing. That’s why I decided to race less in 2012. We decided to include two Tenerife training blocks because training there had worked so well in 2011; that took up four weeks, because they have to be at the right times and there are only so many times in a year you can go there. We worked back from the Tour. We considered doing the Tour of Switzerland but I wanted to go back to the Dauphiné. That’s a race I really like; after it there is a nice gap up to the Tour, so you can tweak things if you need to. Before the Dauphiné there was Tenerife; before that camp I liked the idea of going to the Tour of Romandie. I hadn’t been to Romandie for a few years; it normally comes down to the time trials. I could probably win those so would have a good chance. Before that we had originally put in the Tour of the Basque Country, but I said I would rather go and do another training camp in Tenerife, so we did that before Romandie; before that was the Tour of Catalonia, Paris–Nice and the Tour of Algarve.
So then they said, what are your goals in those races? Working from the start, at Algarve the aim was to play a team role but try and win the time trial; as for Paris–Nice I said, ‘Well, I was 3rd last year. I’d really like to have a crack at that and go for the overall classification because the last few days finish with a time trial so I’ve got a good chance of placing well or maybe winning that, so I’ll accept responsibility as leader.’ At Catalonia I wanted to play a team role again; Romandie I wanted to win; Dauphiné as well. Those were the goals for the year.
One of the biggest things for us was to move away from the cycling tradition of racing yourself fit, riding races purely as training. So going to those races, and taking the responsibility as leader was part of the process; race practice, you could call it. Paris–Nice, Romandie and Dauphiné are all only five, six or seven days long, so it’s not as if you’ve got to lead for three weeks each time. The idea was to go to those races, perform, treat each one as if it were a Tour de France in miniature, lead the race and get the team around me to do the job as they would in the Tour. When it came to July, getting it right would not be just a matter of being in perfect form; it was as much about leading the team and getting used to leading overall and all that went with it. It was also important not to disrupt the build-up for the Tour; what that meant was that, although I might have only been at Paris–Nice at 95 per cent of the form I went to the Tour in, we still went there as if I was at 100 per cent and raced with that.
At Algarve I won the time trial – by less than a second – from Tony Martin; Richie Porte from Sky won the overall, and I was 3rd. It was key to help the other guys like Richie and Eddie win in their own right. Their sacrifice was going to be a huge part of me winning the Tour de France. The competitive part of me wanted to race for the win in the Algarve but I had to think of the bigger picture. If I said I was in a team role, I had to act like it; my teammates had to realise that if I said I would ride in a certain way, that’s what I would do. I had had a great winter, starting training early on, so I was still in better form than most of my rivals, even though I was still building, gradually, towards the Tour. It’s not as if I was winning those races by minutes – I was winning by a few seconds, certainly at Paris–Nice and the Tour of Romandie. I kept telling people, ‘You don’t realise what’s still to come, this is just the start of it.’
Paris–Nice was more than just a physical test. There were other things that I was worried about more than the climbing and the time trials. The route wasn’t the problem; the issue was that I really struggle in cold weather, and on some days, like the fifth stage to Mende, it didn’t get above zero all day. Simply staying warm enough so that I didn’t crack was a bigger challenge than the physical demands of racing. The cold and wet is something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve no idea why. Some people prefer it but I find it affects my legs more than anything; once they go cold, or they get wet from the rain, they just shut down.
Paris–Nice was everything to me at the time. I was racing for those six or seven days with no thought about the Tour. Once we were in the race there was never any question of thinking, ‘Whatever happens here, if it goes wrong, it doesn’t matter because we’re training for July.’ I wanted to win
Paris–Nice that week, and that was that. I thought, ‘All this crap about saving it and not showing your aces too early, you could still be in the same position physically, not show the world how you are, yet you’ve still got to manage that form on the first of July, so why not just race and try to win?’
At Paris–Nice I was in slightly different form compared to the Tour. I was still two or three kilos over the weight I wanted to be in July; that gave me a little more explosiveness, and the weight I was at that time was good for the weather. Having the extra kilos on meant I wasn’t getting as cold and it didn’t matter because we didn’t have to go up climbs for thirty, forty, fifty minutes on end. The Paris–Nice climbs were more explosive, short, 2 or 3km like the one at Mende.
As usual in a stage race, once I’d got the lead it was just a matter of going day by day, the team taking the strain, then I was finishing it off at the end; keeping in touch on the bunch finishes, hanging in on the big climb at the end of the stage to Mende. Perhaps what I didn’t expect was having to answer so many questions about what I was doing. Time after time I was asked whether I had peaked too early; time after time I had to explain it all. Trying to convince people how we were going about it turned out to be harder than the race itself. It really was a strain. It felt like dealing with a five-year-old, telling them why they can’t go in the garden when it’s raining. It was like talking to someone who doesn’t speak your language and you don’t speak theirs, and you’re trying to ask how to get to the toilet, ‘le toilet?’ I was continually trying to explain that we were training for July and it was possible to race to a high level all year, but it was like talking to a brick wall at times.
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 8