Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  WORKING CLASS HERO

  AS THE TOUR approached, I was having similar feelings to those I remembered from before the Beijing Olympics. I really felt this could be my year. It was simply the way I’d felt all season; that was how it had been back in 2008, in the weeks leading up to the Great Britain cycling team’s epic medal haul in Beijing, with my personal gold medals in the individual and team pursuits.

  Four years on, there was a similar feeling of momentum gathering. There had been no upsets, no major setbacks, barely a day’s training lost for any reason, which is rare when you are pushing your body hard for nine months. There had been two glitches, but they were not big ones. At Paris–Nice I had started getting a cold because of the freezing conditions there. My body just let go and when I got home it felt as if I was going to get really ill, but then I went to Catalonia and I was fine. I came back from Spain having pulled out because of the heavy snow on the hardest mountain stage, thinking, ‘Shit, I’m going to miss a couple of days’ racing.’ Tim and Shane simply said, ‘No worries, you can train harder than that.’ So we put two or three days together, and I actually trained harder than I would have raced.

  Shane is always saying, ‘Don’t make the small things into big things, and don’t let the big things become small things.’ What that means is that you just deal with what comes at you along the way, never getting too carried away with the highs and never getting overwhelmed by the lows. All year I had been trying to hover along in a stable state without making a big issue of anything. So everyone was saying, ‘Sky look amazingly strong, with a team like that Wiggins is going to win the Tour’; but that didn’t create any more pressure. I’d built up to the point where it wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t news to my ears because we’d been training all year as a team to be in a position to go to the Tour as favourites. The feeling was simply that we were on track.

  That didn’t mean we took anything for granted. There is so much more involved in the Tour than with any other bike race. There were all the problems that could arise in the first week and there was the question of how much more Cadel might improve. That mattered because I had been close to my best in the Dauphiné. In the three weeks before I travelled to Liège to start the Tour, it was just a case of sustaining the form, dropping a tiny bit more weight, backing up a bit in the training and letting the effect of all the work come through. During the Dauphiné we still hadn’t seen the effects of the last training camp in Tenerife. Clearly I was in the ballpark and we’d done all the work; I had got the team I needed around me, and that meant we were in a position to win the Tour de France. But we were all too well aware of what had happened in 2011. I couldn’t just sit in the bunch and wait until the mountains and assume it would all go perfectly.

  Before the Tour, eight or nine days out, I had to do a big media day while I was putting in my last training in Majorca. At a time like that, I see those things as just getting in my way. I had five and a half hours’ riding to do that day in the mountains, and we had to start the press conference at lunchtime, so I had to go out at 7 a.m. and do my training. I was on the go for twelve hours, speaking to what seemed like every man and his dog: the BBC, Sky, Sky Sports, ITV, l’Equipe and two teleconferences for the newspapers. I was out of the hotel at 6.45 a.m., with five or six camera crews following me, got back at 1.30 and was full-on until 7 p.m. with interviews. Then the next morning I was down at the beach at 8 a.m. doing a photo shoot for l’Equipe.

  But I was very confident. All the data was suggesting I was in a great place, the family were in Majorca with me and I was really enjoying it. Shane is very good at preventing me from ‘testing myself’ in training. The big risk is making efforts that you think will reassure you of your form, but which can actually be quite damaging. Instead, it was a matter of ‘putting the hundreds and thousands on top of the cake’, as he likes to say. There is always a little fear that something is going to go wrong at the last minute, but then you think, ‘What if that did happen? I can’t control that.’ You have to have the confidence to keep up the momentum. The Tour was just another race, exactly the same thing as I’d done all year. I’d just gone through one phase of training and racing after another and now we were finally there. My win in the Dauphiné didn’t tell me that all I would have to do was turn up at the Tour and I could win, but it was proof that I was going to be able to dig deep physically as a result of all the work we had done since last November.

  Before Beijing, in the Great Britain team we had been aware of the expectation, we knew we were the favourites, but we also knew that we had to keep concentrating on what we had to do. I felt poised for the Tour, hopefully to make history.

  After the Dauphiné finished we spent a night in Châtel and drove part of a couple of Tour stages: the route of the first long time trial from Arc-et-Senans to Besançon and the first summit finish at La Planche des Belles Filles. By now I had seen most of the Tour route, but it was a bit of a blur. I didn’t see the use in having the route for stage 10 or 11 at the front of my mind because it was too much information. There was no need to know yet. It was too far away, and the race was simply too vast.

  There was one thing I did have in my mind all through the spring and early summer: stage 20 of the Tour was a 53.5km time trial from Bonneval to Chartres, which we had looked at before Paris–Nice. That was a key stage for me. But as of mid-June, I was looking no further than the prologue time trial in Liège, rather than worrying about what was beyond that. The fact that I take the race from day to day means that I only remember the stages we have previously looked at when we actually get to them. When I finish a day’s stage in the Tour, I look at the route and see what we’ve got tomorrow, and Sean Yates will say, ‘That’s the climb we did when you had to change the wheel at the bottom’ or ‘That’s the stage we rode a hundred kilometres of the day after the Dauphiné finished’, and that helps me put the pieces in the jigsaw. That’s how I deal with it.

  Sean has been the lead directeur sportif at Sky since midway through 2010 but he and I go back a long, long way. That was underlined by something I put in the post to him between the Dauphiné and the Tour. Back in 1997, when I was fifteen years old, I made the trip to the British Cycling Federation dinner during the off-season, to be presented with the trophy for the juvenile points race. It was Sean who was handing out the prizes; I still had the photo of us together at the dinner. I made a point of sending Sean that picture after the Dauphiné and I said to him, ‘I bet you never thought that kid would become a contender one day.’ He laughed, but that’s just his way.

  As is the case with Shane Sutton, Sean and I share a lot of history. At the Tour of Flanders in 1996, when I was just fourteen, I went up to him at the start and asked him for his autograph. He was one of my heroes as a kid; I grew up watching him. Back then, Robert Millar, Chris Boardman and Sean Yates were the Brits in the professional peloton, and for various reasons Sean was the fans’ choice. He wasn’t a big winner, although he won a lot of decent races: the GP Eddy Merckx time trial, the Tour of Belgium, a time-trial stage in the Tour de France at a record average speed and he wore the yellow jersey for a day in the Tour in 1994. He wasn’t a Chris Boardman, who was picking up prologue time trials left, right and centre. No, he was Sean Yates, a working-class hero. At that time cycling wasn’t mainstream, so he wasn’t a house-hold name, whereas Chris had a higher profile, thanks to his Olympic gold medal. Sean was dearly loved within the cycling world though, I think because he was someone the British cycling public could associate with; he’d come from where they were, their world of club time trials and winter runs. I liked the fact that he was ordinary and unpretentious. By the time I knew him he drove an old Land Rover – the flash motorbike from his younger days had gone – and he was still competing in events like the North Road Hardriders ‘25’, a classic grassroots time trial in Hertfordshire, simply because he loved to race. He’d ridden the Tour de France a dozen times but had no airs or grac
es.

  Sean’s last season as a full-on professional was 1996, but he has never properly stopped racing since then. By 1999, when we raced together at the Good Friday Meeting at Herne Hill – the old Olympic track in south-east London – he was competing again. He had made a comeback in 1998 to ride the Tour of Britain for the Linda McCartney team – sponsored by the vegetarian food company owned by the late wife of the former Beatle, and the last serious attempt to get a British team in the Tour before Sky came along – where he ended up as directeur sportif. They were the coming team in Britain, with high ambitions for the Tour de France; I was the junior world pursuit champion by then. At Herne Hill we raced together in the team pursuit. The teams were a mix of young riders and stars of the past like Phil Bayton, Ron Keeble and Ian Hallam – all names that are mainly forgotten now but which will mean a lot to British fans over a certain age – so I was in Sean’s team. I remember he said to me afterwards, ‘I was really struggling to hold your wheel.’ He was lovely. He wasn’t behaving like a lot of old pros when you’re that age, who seem to be trying to put you down a bit: ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, this means nothing in the juniors, you’ve still got to break through.’ He was really praising me: ‘You’re going to be really good one day.’ And I was thinking, ‘This is Sean Yates telling me this.’ I remember it really sinking in: Sean Yates said to me I’m going to be really good one day.

  At the end of 1998 after I won the Junior World’s, he asked me if I would like to join McCartney for ’99. I said no, I’d love to, thanks, but I was going to stay with British Cycling. Peter Keen had started the World Class Performance Programme and I was going to go with them. In 2000 McCartney had grown, with Sean hiring the Olympic bronze medallist and Tour stage winner Max Sciandri. I heard that Sean wanted to ask me to join, but he didn’t because he knew I was on the Olympic squad and wanted to ride the team pursuit in Sydney. After the Olympics that summer, where I got a bronze medal in the team pursuit and came close to a medal in the Madison, he rang me on the landline at my mum’s, because we didn’t have mobile phones.

  ‘Right: do you want to go pro with us next year? We’re going even bigger and we’ve signed Íñigo Cuesta, Kevin Livingston and all these other guys. We can pay you thirty-five grand.’ I just thought, ‘Wow, thirty-five grand and a pro contract. Flipping great, I get to be with Sean Yates!’ and that was that. I signed with Linda McCartney. They sent my race programme through, saying, ‘This is what we think you should do next year.’ On 4 January 2001, I loaded my Fiesta up at my mum’s and drove to their base in Toulouse. I drove down there with one wing mirror because someone had wiped the other one off when it was parked in London, but it didn’t matter because the front-left passenger seat was full of stuff anyway. I took bedding, pictures, virtually everything I owned, left at six in the morning, went via the Eurotunnel across to France, drove down and arrived there at ten at night. Julian Clark, who ran the team, took me to my apartment, installed me in there and that was it: I was a pro in the Linda McCartney team. Although I never got as far as actually being paid.

  I trained down there for a couple of weeks and in late January we flew back to London for the team launch. We were staying at a hotel in Cobham; that was the first time I saw Sean again and that was where it all came unstuck. He’d just got back from the Tour Down Under in Australia, found out there was no money because the expected sponsorship hadn’t come through, and the team was dead in the water.

  Luckily for me, the GB squad took me back, but I didn’t see Sean again until April when we went to the Circuit des Mines in France; he was with a little squad called iteamNova and I remember chatting with him about McCartney.

  In 2003 he signed with CSC as directeur sportif, and I saw him at Paris–Roubaix; I told him I’d finished 49th the week before in the Tour of Flanders. I remember him saying to me, ‘That’s a good ride. If you’ve got the legs to do that in Flanders you’ve definitely got the legs to do that in Paris–Roubaix.’ I started drifting a bit really between about 2004 and 2005 when I had my years at Crédit Agricole, not doing much in terms of results, but I’d chat and have a laugh with him all the time when I’d see him at races. I never asked him, but I remember feeling almost embarrassed about myself and my performances. I’d be there going out the back of the bunch in the Tour of Germany and he would come past in the team car and I’d think, ‘I wonder what he thinks of me now.’ So we’ve gone full circle: from this kid he says is going to be good one day, through those years when I was massively underperforming, having been an Olympic champion, and then to being favourite for the Tour de France and the Olympic time trial, all in the space of ten or twelve years. It’s phenomenal. It’s been an epic cycle.

  But Sean hasn’t changed through all those years. He’s still the same as a directeur sportif as he was when he was a rider. He never talks about himself. He was legendary as one of the hard men of the sport, but if someone’s pulled out of a race because they’ve got cold or it was too hard, he’ll never say, ‘Oh, when I was riding, I would never have done that.’ He’s always sympathetic. He’ll say, ‘OK, you know how you feel.’ He’s always got a lot of empathy with everyone.

  It’s a big job being a directeur sportif; in the old days the DS ran everything at a team, from budgets to training and tactics. Now, mainly, a DS has to plan the tactics beforehand, make sure the riders are fully supported while the race is on – that means keeping them fed and watered on the move – and figure out the tactics on the hoof as the race unfolds. I remember talking to Dave Brailsford about Sean; I said, ‘He’s bloody good at his job’ and Dave replied, ‘He’s unbelievable. You don’t realise how good he is until you are in the car with him on one of these stages.’ Sean is capable of doing everything at once: driving the car, talking to us on the radio, talking to someone else on the phone, handing out bottles and gels as the guys come back for them. In a time trial he has a list of things you’re coming up to, he’s got this all written down: ‘Descending through a village, there’s a sharp right-hander, eighty, a hundred metres to go before this village there’s a slight pothole on the left.’ He’s like a vocal GPS system for the riders.

  Sean is the best DS I’ve ever had. He’s unbelievable. He goes to extremes for us, taking time out to go and look over the stages like he did with me in 2012. He shows as much attention to detail in what he does as we do in what we’re doing on the bike. He absolutely loves it so I can’t imagine what he felt being a British DS in a British team with a British rider going for the Tour de France this year, and following me in the race that he loves the most, those time trial stages. I think he really gets a kick out of it, because time trialling has been his passion for the last forty years or more.

  As a DS, he’s just completely on the ball. There are times when crucial decisions need to be made on the road – such as, shall we ride behind a break or not? – and there might be a disagreement. At times like this, Sean will make the call and put his balls on the line. It’s never about him. There was one occasion I saw a while back, in a race where he made the snap decision not to stop for a rider after a puncture; Sean felt he needed to be up the road with the front group as soon as possible because we had a rider there who looked good for the overall, but who had no support. He took a lot of flak from the one who had punctured, because the rider felt he could have won the stage, but in the meeting Sean stood up and said, ‘I know you’re pissed off at me but I did what I thought I had to do at the time. You’re going to have to deal with that, and you can continue to be pissed off with me, but I made a decision at the time in the middle of all this madness and I think I did the right thing.’ Where a lot of people would have apologised, he didn’t give a monkey’s whether the rider liked him or not. He just wanted to do his job. The episode was over and it was time to move on.

  There are a lot of DSs who will stand behind the finish line jumping up and down when one of their riders wins something, but you won’t even see Sean. He is happy to spend three extra days on th
e road driving home from a Dauphiné or a Paris–Nice, to check out three of the Tour stages that are in that area. He’ll stay locally, ride the stages on his bike, and then he’s got all that information for us. But he’ll never tell you he’s done all that. There are times when he hardly sees his own family for months, but his life is cycling and he loves it.

  There are so many stories about Sean: he has a massive reputation. Someone told me how when Lance Armstrong first rode with Motorola in the early 1990s he was terrified of Sean. Our time trial coach at Sky, Bobby Julich, told me another one like that. He turned up at Motorola, newly turned pro, and they were at the Tour of the Mediterranean. It must have been ’95 or ’96 and he was rooming with Sean. He was so scared of Sean – you know, the legendary Sean Yates. Bobby was reading his book in the hotel room and Sean was eating garlic, which was one of the things he was reputed to do. Nothing to do with Dracula; it’s supposed to ward off colds. Bobby was frightened to do anything, so he was lying there in his tracksuit, with his book, at ten o’clock at night, and Sean decided to go to bed all of a sudden: ‘Goodnight’, and he turned the telly and the lights off. Bobby was lying there and he hadn’t even got his pyjamas on or brushed his teeth. Sean had just turned all the lights off and Bobby was still reading and was terrified; he had no idea what to do. So he put his book down and lay there for a few minutes and thought, ‘What shall I do, put a light on, wake this guy up?’ He said he scrabbled around in the dark, got his pyjamas on, went into the toilet, slowly shut the door, brushed his teeth, came back out and got into bed, all as quietly as he could, and lay there trying to go to sleep for an hour because he wasn’t tired. He said he expected Sean to get up as abruptly in the morning as he’d turned the lights out at night. He thought it would be ‘Get up, out of bed, lights all on, I’m getting up,’ but he woke up and all he noticed was the hotel-room door quietly shutting. He realised that Sean had just gone to breakfast and then it dawned on him: Sean had got up really quietly, gone to the bathroom, got dressed in total silence and gone out. He said it was just bizarre. There he was, petrified of Sean and yet out Sean had gone, clearly making a massive effort not to wake him up.