Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  It was a new experience. I’d never won a road stage at a major race. I was always expected to do the business in the time trials. Generally, I can’t stand bunch sprints. I’m one for racing in a straight line – which is funny, because on the track in a Madison I find it easy to manoeuvre. But when you win in that fashion there’s an element of adrenaline, a real rush, because it all happens so quickly. You don’t know you’re going to win until a few metres before the line, whereas in a time trial you’ve got a long time to think, ‘I’m going to win this, I’m still the fastest time, I’m going to win this.’ In that one, the cut-and-thrust meant I had much more of the feeling of racing my bike; the race was on for the last 20 or 30km, and I won it. It felt like being a junior again.

  There were other things to take home from Romandie. This was the only race that Mark Cavendish and I would ride before the Tour de France, so it should have been a test outing to see how we worked together. It didn’t quite end up like that, because it was an extremely hilly Tour and there was no stage flat enough to be a sprint finish for Mark. He was struggling a bit at that time – he was training hard for the Giro so he came to the race quite tired – and he had a tough time in the hills.

  However, there’s always teamwork to be done. The duties for our team riders, the domestiques, include carrying bottles for everyone from the team car, carrying clothing to and fro as the weather changes or the race hots up, waiting for the leader when he punctures or stops for a piss, or simply sitting at the head of the peloton, forming a ‘train’ together to keep the pace high. The first day I had the yellow jersey, Mark wanted to work with the rest, in spite of the fact that he was wearing the rainbow stripes as world champion. So he came up with bottles first, then he started riding on the front with the other guys. I went up to Graham Watson, the photographer who is always in among us on his motorbike at the races, and I said, ‘Got to get a picture of this, Graham, I want to show the kids one day, the world champion riding for me.’

  Romandie was Sky’s best performance as a unit in any stage race since we had started out as a team. There was one point where I was sitting in the line, watching Richie Porte, Mick Rogers, Cav and G driving along ahead of me. The quality of the riders helping me out made me look twice: a triple world time trial champion, an Olympic track champion, the world road race champion, and one of the best young cyclists Australia could produce; all up there, all on the front, all putting their necks on the line for me. As a team, we dominated all week; G won the prologue, I won two stages, and Richie and Mick finished 3rd and 5th overall behind me.

  The five days were a good test for a rider preparing to go for the overall at the Tour de France: an uphill time trial, a prologue and some hilly stages. It wasn’t just a matter of putting the team on the front and controlling it; I had to nail the final time trial as well to regain the lead from Luis León Sánchez of Rabobank, who had won the penultimate stage to take the jersey from me. The time trial was 16.5km around the resort of Crans-Montana, but it wasn’t flat. On paper I had a good chance of taking back the 10sec I needed to win overall, but nothing can be taken for granted. The climb up towards the finish was a tough one, and my chain came off at the bottom, as I shifted from the big chain ring to the little one to get into a lower gear. I tried to flick the chain back on by hand, but it wouldn’t go, so I had to stop and let the mechanic do it. In the past I’d have lost my temper and bunged the bike into the ravine by the road, but this was different. In 2009 at the World Time Trial Championship in Switzerland exactly the same thing happened: my chain went and I chucked the bike away in disgust. Here, I remember thinking, ‘This could happen in the Tour, deal with it.’ So I did; I went on to beat Luis León by 1min23sec, which is a big margin in 16.5km, and it earned me my second major stage race of the season.

  It was a bit like the first stage I won; I punctured, a few guys in the field were attacking while I was getting the wheel changed; I may have been annoyed but I didn’t start blaming anyone. I came back and got on to the front, and thought, ‘Right: I’m going to win this stage.’ That wasn’t a conscious thing; it just happened and I dealt with it. In those situations it’s not as if you are expecting an incident of this kind, thinking, ‘Right, if this happens I’m going to count to ten.’ You just deal with it on the spur of the moment; it’s not rehearsed. Both those little events were unexpected, and you either react to them in the way that I did, or you lose it. And that’s a mindset, a pathway. Keeping an eye on the bigger picture shows your focus and confidence. There’s a bit of everything happening as you gain maturity as a leader. Age comes into it, a sense of security as well, but there’s an element of taking responsibility for everything you do. After the work the team had done, paying them back by throwing my bike on the ground wouldn’t have gone down well. The chain derailing was a small incident at the time but, looking back, it seems like a significant milestone.

  During all the races that I won, there was no huge adulation from those around me. There were no great big pats on the back from Tim and Shane. Shane would always say, ‘Good job that, this week you need to look after yourself, you know you need to do this that or the other,’ and Tim would just say, ‘Good job, Brad’, and that would be it. There was no stating that this was a landmark, no sense of what a huge milestone one particular win or another might be. It’s amazing to think now, but at the time it all seemed as if it was meant to be. That time trial was typical. I remember finishing it and expecting Tim and the others to be saying, ‘Bloody hell, that’s good’, but it wasn’t like that.

  After that time trial, I said something to Tim about how I could have done without the chain coming off, and his answer was, ‘Well, you’ve got to give them a bit of a chance.’ There was no big deal made of any of the wins; it all just felt as if it was meant to be. It was like being in a football team in midseason: great victory, but we’re playing Manchester United next week. If you compare my cycling season to winning the Premiership, getting to 22 July in the yellow jersey was the equivalent of hitting the end of May with 100 points to Manchester United’s 95. If you beat Chelsea along the way that’s fantastic, but you don’t dwell on it. You go on to the next one. It’s only when you look back that you think, ‘Bloody hell, that was good.’

  I was pretty tired after Romandie. We’d had a massive April; we’d done a lot of hours, and I had had only five days at home to recover before we travelled there. As a result, I didn’t feel great in Switzerland even though it went so well. I wasn’t comfortable and had to dig deep at times, for example to win that first road stage. I’m not used to being out of my comfort zone like that. But that was the plan: the early season wasn’t about winning Romandie, it was about building to be at my best at the Tour. So Romandie was part of the workload; the good thing was that, in spite of the fatigue, we still won the race. It showed how far we had moved on.

  I had a massive downer after Romandie. I felt like packing it all in, simply because I looked at Twitter for the first time in a long while. While social media is a great way to keep in touch on the net, it has a downside that most people in the public eye experience: users can say pretty much whatever they like about you under the cover of a pseudonym. They can target you, but you don’t know who they are. It was about this time that a group of people ‘out there’ began making insinuations about drugs. What was being said made me begin to think, ‘What I’m doing at the moment, I’m quite dominant here; I’m winning bunch sprints and it does look a bit suspicious, I guess.’ I started thinking that I didn’t want to win the Dauphiné Libéré, because if I did win it they would say that I was doping for sure. Then I began thinking: imagine if I win the Tour – what will they come up with then? I started saying to Cath, ‘Forget this, I can’t be bothered. I don’t want to win the Tour because I can see what’s coming.’ So I had a week off the bike after Romandie. I spoke to Shane; he got pretty annoyed and said to me – among other things – ‘You have just got to ignore those people.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m human. I
can’t just take it on the chin all of the time.’

  I spent a week in Majorca with the family, and started riding my bike a bit, and then I went to Tenerife. I hadn’t done much for two weeks and I had begun to feel really guilty. When I got there, I thought, ‘It’s been so perfect up to now; perhaps this is when I’m going to lose the Tour.’ It was hard to deal with at the time, and I spoke to Tim about it. Tim’s view was, ‘You’re gonna get this, you’re gonna get this.’

  When that little crisis came I didn’t deal with it by taking to drink or anything like that – that was a phase I’d gone through back in 2004 and it was very much a phase. Instead I immersed myself in time with the family. As usual it was Cath who took the brunt of it. She’s on Twitter, so she’s vulnerable – people think they can have a go at her too. And at home my being unhappy and angry impacts on her, so it’s a big strain. We began to realise that it was part of dealing with success. You don’t expect it but there is a lot of other stuff that comes with winning bike races. It wasn’t nice at the time, but I look back now and I think, well maybe that’s part of the process, maybe it’s not just about leading races but about dealing with all the other hassle that comes with it. So I thought, ‘To hell with it, I’m not looking at the computer.’ I got to Tenerife and I threw myself into the training there. You’re cut off, you’re remote and that is probably the best environment. You’re among like-minded people and you get down to business again.

  That period in Tenerife at the end of May was the last big spell of work we were going to put in before July and the Tour. We were doing back-to-back days of heavy training, putting in six-hour rides, climbing at specific power outputs, working hard all round. We then had nine days until the Dauphiné to back off and freshen up, to let the training work through. Six weeks was still a long time until the Tour, but in terms of building a base, which we had been doing since the start of November 2011, those two weeks in Tenerife at the end of May were the last big block of work we could do, because of the time it takes for the work to be absorbed. During that fortnight our workload was getting on for the equivalent of fourteen days’ racing at the Giro or the Tour, but in controlled conditions.

  The Critérium du Dauphiné, or Dauphiné Libéré as cycling traditionalists call it, was not quite like the other events I’d raced in 2012. It was the moment when the season became truly serious. We came to the start in Grenoble having done that Tenerife camp, so that was all the work done apart from fine-tuning. We all realised that now we were into the last period before the Tour. We had won Romandie and Paris–Nice; at that stage the season had been perfect and I was already the Tour favourite, but the other Tour big names for July – Cadel Evans, Vincenzo Nibali and Andy Schleck – were all going to be riding at the Dauphiné. It was the first showdown close to the Tour where what happened really mattered. Up to that point nothing had been particularly significant because Cadel had had a different schedule; you couldn’t read too much into the racing he had done. He was sure to have improved since Romandie and would be getting into his Tour form.

  This all put the Dauphiné at a different level compared to the other races. At Paris–Nice or the Tour of Romandie, if something happened, no matter how disappointing it might be on the day, in the long term it didn’t matter because the season was all about the Tour, whereas this was the race where you needed to show off a little bit. In addition, for the first time in my career on the road I was going back as defending champion to a stage race I had won. I certainly felt I had to step up; it felt different from the minute we started the prologue. I was last off because of being the previous year’s winner, which was a different experience altogether. As had been the case in the prologues at Romandie and Paris–Nice, the conditions were changing all the time during the day. There were thunderstorms, and although I had a dry run the wind had changed quite a bit, so in the circumstances finishing 2nd by 1sec to Luke Durbridge of Australia was a good enough ride, considering he had started ninety minutes earlier than me. I’d gone considerably faster than everyone who’d started around me; as at Paris–Nice and Romandie, it was another sign that I probably would have won had I gone off with the fastest guys.

  The minute I’d finished I began thinking, ‘I haven’t got the race leader’s jersey, it’s the perfect position to be in.’ I did manage to take 5sec out of Cadel, who had chosen to start earlier and went out at the fastest time of the day. Ever since we all got it so wrong at the prologue of the 2010 Tour, when I went off early because we thought the weather would change, I’ve opted to accept the responsibility of starting last man in the team, no matter what the conditions. You accept who you are and you take what you get.

  The next day was a little different: Cadel won the stage after getting away close to the end, but he wasn’t far ahead and I took the jersey. It sounds strange, but I was a bit gutted. It meant the team had to ride on the front for two days more than we had wanted, and I was not keen to be wearing the jersey going into the long time trial on day five because I didn’t want to have to wear the race leader’s skinsuit.

  That sounds fussy but it’s a good example of how the smallest things can affect you when you race. As is the case in all the races run by ASO, the company that runs the Tour, Paris–Nice and most of the biggest races in France, the leader’s kit is supplied by Le Coq Sportif. Their skinsuits don’t suit me, because they have panels on the arms where the logo of Le Crédit Lyonnais, the race sponsor, is printed. The logo has to be printed a certain way so they put in the panel, which is stitched across the top of the biceps. I had noticed it after the Paris–Nice time trial; it’s uncomfortable, because when I get into my tuck position the stitching pulls my arms and I get a lot of cuts right into the flesh. It’s purely down to my body shape.

  I knew that my time-trialling form was there from the prologue. I was even more certain after day five, the 42.5km contre-la-montre to Bourg-en-Bresse. I nearly caught Cadel, who had started two minutes ahead of me, and that felt like the first time I had really put the hammer down before the Tour. As far as the time trial itself went, it was ridiculously windy, the worst I’ve ever done. At times it was touch and go – I was right on the limit of being blown off. Andy Schleck did come unstuck in the wind, breaking his pelvis, which put him out of the Tour. It wasn’t a shock to me that he lost control, because you didn’t dare take your hands off the bars to take a drink, and there were times when you had to come off the tri-bars to keep command of the bike. I’d ridden a couple of shorter time trials, 10-milers, in horrendous winds in England – including one just before the 2009 Tour – which were good practice as it turned out.

  I didn’t set out to catch Cadel: I always expect to catch the rider in front of me, but that simply reflects the state of mind I have for every time trial I ride. There were some lovely long straights on the course, rolling straights on the run-in to the finish, so I knew I’d get within sight of him. I expected to be at least a minute faster than him on that day, having taken 5sec out of him in a short prologue, so to get him in sight and nearly catch him meant it was job done. I tried not to get too fixated on it though. If you were watching it, you might wonder why I didn’t catch him, as I had him in sight for so long in those final kilometres. I kept to my rhythm, I didn’t want to take too many risks on the corners and he finished strongly. It’s not a case of thinking, ‘Oh yes, I’ll catch him now’; at that point you are both trying to empty the tank, you’re an hour into the stage and all you can do is to ride your own race.

  It was every bit as important to have beaten Tony Martin by 34sec; I’d only very rarely got past him before he became world champion in 2011; in 2012 I’d beaten him just the once, at the Tour of Algarve, but that was by milliseconds. We’d been chasing him since he had raised the bar at the World’s the previous September and putting over 30sec into him meant it was paying off. There was another side to this win: I had to be careful how I dealt with beating Cadel by such a large margin. I know I’m not that good with the media, but on this occasi
on I may have got it right. The journalists were trying to turn our sporting rivalry into a personal battle, and they were asking me whether this was making a point or not, a big statement that I was better than the defending Tour champion. It was important to make sure I was very respectful of him in all the interviews I did. It was also vital to keep in mind that things can change: at a similar time trial in 2011 I put a fair amount of time into him, but he pulled the best time trial of his career out of the bag to win the Tour six weeks later.

  After that we had only to defend the jersey. Compared to the previous year, when I had been a bundle of nerves, I was far more confident, and the team was better prepared after the training camps. The real statement for the Tour came on the second-to-last stage, a full-scale day in the Alps culminating in the Col de Joux Plane, a brute of a climb which is shorter than the usual Alpine col at just over seven miles, but hits one-in-nine in places. The bottom of the mountain was almost impossibly hard, with Eddie setting an incredible pace. For the first 600m I didn’t drop below 500 watts. After that it was a matter of the team riding as they had done in training in Tenerife, where we had practised this: hitting a climb, three guys in front of me, each of them doing 3km as hard and as long as they’re capable of, and then peeling off.

  I didn’t look around a lot and I remember Sean saying through the radio, ‘Nibali’s gone’ and ‘Vanendert’s gone.’ He was just talking me through all the riders who were going out the back as our guys set the pace, and eventually there were only eight left in the group. On those climbs you’re concentrating so much, but even then the little doubts come in. You think, ‘Right, what if Cadel attacks now at this pace?’ but then I look back and realise I was doing 450, 460 watts, so if someone was going to attack at that pace it would have been ridiculous, they would have had to be going so hard to open even a tiny gap.