This is only sport we are talking about. Sport does not mean more to me than all those other things I have. Winning the Tour de France at any cost is not worth the risk. That boils down to why I race a bike. I do it because I love it, and I love doing my best and working hard. I don’t do it for a power trip. At the end of the day, I’m a shy bloke looking forward to taking my son rugby training after the Tour, perhaps bumping into my lad’s hero Sam Tomkins. That thought in my head, what I would be able to do after the Tour, was what was keeping me going through those weeks. If I felt I had to take drugs, I would rather stop tomorrow, go and ride club ten-mile time trials, ride to the café on Sundays, and work in Tesco stacking shelves.
Another issue that came up during the Tour was that Geert Leinders, a doctor who had been working at Rabobank in 2007 when Michael Rasmussen was sacked for doping and Thomas Dekker failed a drugs test, had been employed by Sky for eighty days a year in 2011 and 2012. I’d rather have him with the team than a doctor fresh out of medical school who has come straight into it. I’ve had no sense of anything untoward with him. He is totally committed to what we believe in: a clean sport. He was there simply as a doctor for us because he’s been around cycling a long time and he knows the sport from top to bottom.
It’s vital that people like that are involved now because they have seen how it used to be and they can remind today’s riders of how cycling was. He’s seen the problems that were there in the past; he never agreed with what was going on, and was one of the sane people who were in the sport at that time. We need guys like Geert Leinders because on top of being a bloody good doctor with a heap of experience, guys like him can play a role, explaining to riders like Ben Swift, Luke Rowe and Peter Kennaugh – young lads who are determined to race clean – what it was like in the past and how lucky they are to be racing now.
It came out during the 2012 Vuelta that Lance Armstrong was being stripped of his titles and immediately there were people in touch with me wanting to know what I thought.
I haven’t followed all the ins and outs of the Lance Armstrong case, but I know the broad lines: he’s not contesting the doping charges against him (although he’s still protesting his innocence); as it stands his Tour titles have been taken away from him; there is Tyler Hamilton’s book, which is pretty damning; the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) report on the US Postal case makes it clear that he was doping in a sophisticated way. Regardless of what I’ve said over the years I’ve always had my suspicions about him. When the news broke it was like when you’re a kid and you find out Father Christmas doesn’t exist. It’s shocking still, but not a huge surprise. When he made his comeback in 2009 it became more relevant to me because I was actually racing against him, whereas during his earlier reign I think I only came up against him once, in the Critérium International in 2004.
By 2009 it had become clear that many of the top guys weren’t clean at the time Lance was at his best – a lot of the guys who finished 2nd to him were subsequently caught, and quite a few of those who finished 3rd, 4th or 5th – but when he came back to the sport I quite liked him. He seemed much more relaxed, he seemed to be returning for reasons other than winning. He was quite gracious in defeat in some of those races; he was quite respectful, encouraging of what I was trying to do. I thought whatever had happened in the past had happened; it hadn’t affected me in all those years. I wasn’t surprised about him. I’ve heard stories from people, like my old boss and Lance’s former US Postal teammate Jonathan Vaughters, who were there at the time about what they’d seen Lance do but it wasn’t something I was going to go bleating about in the press.
In 2008 I gave an interview to Paul Kimmage in which he asked me why I thought it was good that Lance was coming back to the sport. It was difficult because when Paul interviews you, you are being scrutinised constantly. It’s not a relaxed, informal chat; you feel very self-conscious, wary of each word you say and how it can be interpreted. I felt I was being set up a little bit as a voice for his beliefs – it was something I’d felt from doing interviews with him from 2006 onwards. I thought I was in danger of getting in a position with Paul where I was telling him what he wanted to hear, because he could be quite aggressive at times when you didn’t say what he wanted you to. So I stuck to my line that Lance’s return was a good thing for the sport.
I was also asked on Radio Five Live at the time what I thought about Armstrong coming back. I said you had to look at what he had done for the sport. Without Armstrong and the work he had done for cycling in America, American teams like the team I had just signed for, Garmin, probably wouldn’t exist, and the financial backing that has come in from guys like Doug Ellis, who backs Garmin, wouldn’t be available. Without Lance’s achievement in the Tour, Livestrong, his cancer charity, wouldn’t have such a high profile and perhaps wouldn’t be able to do the work it does. Without Lance, cycling mightn’t be as popular – he made it cool in a way. I said the fact alone that he was coming back to the sport had raised cycling’s profile; he announced his comeback on the cover of Vanity Fair, not a cycling magazine, which shows how he had given the sport its current broad appeal. That was where I was coming from; that was why I said it was good for the sport.
I didn’t know of course that eight or nine months down the line I was going to go toe-to-toe with him for a place on the podium in the Tour de France. With hindsight, I’m glad I never criticised him. I had to go and race with the guy and everyone around him. I know what Lance is like if you make an enemy of him. We’ve seen it in the past. He could have made my life very difficult.
But if it were confirmed that he was doping in 2009–10 then he can get fucked, completely. Before, he wouldn’t have been alone in what he was doing, but the sport has changed since he retired the first time. After 2009, what Lance was or was not doing directly affected everybody, because the sport was making a real effort; Garmin and other teams were being pretty vocal about riding clean. At the time Lance was saying things about his coming back to prove a point, that he would publish his blood profiles: but if he was doping after 2009, he was treating us all like idiots. Ultimately I finished 4th in the Tour that year, by 38sec to Armstrong who was in 3rd place; getting on the podium of the Tour would have been something I would have had for the rest of my life. It might have been my only chance.
On a personal level, the way I look at it now is that, as the yellow jersey, the pressure is on me to answer all the questions about doping – even though I’ve never doped. I was asked the questions in the Tour and I gave the answers I did. I don’t like talking about doping, but during the Tour, as the race leader, I had no choice. So I’m pissed off that Lance has done what he did; it feels as if he’s disappeared and I have to answer all the questions. That really, really annoys me. And where is he? Halfway around the world, doing this that and the other. But we are the ones in this sport today who have got to answer all the questions.
It feels like Lance has dumped on the sport and we’ve got to clean it up because he’s not around any more: he’s not managing a team, he’s not at the races like other riders from the past – Sean Kelly, Eddy Merckx – he’s out there carrying on as he was before. He’s still giving statements saying he’s standing by this, it’s a vendetta, everything that’s been said out there is all rubbish. But as things stand today, I’ve won more Tours de France than he has.
If I’m asked what I feel about it, there is a lot of anger. We are the ones here, in this sport, right now, who have to pick up the pieces. We are the ones trying to race our bikes, the ones sitting there in front of the press trying to convince them of our innocence, continuing to do things in the right way; they’ve trashed the office and left; we’re the ones trying to tidy it all up. I’m doing what I do. I just hope that by conducting myself as I have done this year, by winning the races I have and doing what we’re doing clean, we’re creating a legacy for the next lot of riders who come along.
CHAPTER 13
* * *
THE OTHER
TEAM
THE MORNING OF the time trial in Besançon was exactly the same as for any other time trial I’ve ever ridden. I was in the old, familiar routine, which I relish so much. But one thing sticks out.
I finished my warm-up and was getting on the bus and putting all my kit on, when Tim asked me, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Amazing, Tim. I feel great.’
He just smiled at me. I got on my bike and followed the soigneur through the crowd to the start. When we got there, I sat on the chair by the ramp and all the cameras came in front of me: flash, flash, flash. At that point I’ve got my eyes shut; I don’t look at them. I just sit like that with my eyes closed under the visor but I can still see all those flashing things through my eyelids.
I remember thinking, ‘I wish they’d stop doing that’, so I made a conscious mental note about it: when I got to Chartres eleven days later, and I went to the start, I would turn my chair around so that I could sit with my back to all the cameras. It wasn’t a distraction, it was just that I was in such control of my emotions that I could take note of it and think, ‘I don’t like that, I’m going to change that next time.’ I shifted it to a different part of my head, whereas when I was younger I’d have thought, ‘For Pete’s sake, get out of my flipping way’, or something like that.
As the announcer introduced Cadel Evans, who was lying 2nd overall and was the second-last rider off, three minutes in front of me, my mind went back to waiting on the bus before the race. I was sitting there at the start, listening to the voice saying, ‘This is Cadel Evans, the winner of last year’s Tour de France; he’s second overall only ten seconds behind Bradley Wiggins,’ but in my mind I had gone back two and a half or three hours before. As usual, I was waiting for my warm-up time, doing my stretching. When I was lying in the back of the bus being taped up, they had the television on – that’s where Dave sits and watches the race – and it was showing British Eurosport. I remember Tony Gibb saying some stuff; that the time trials I’d won this year were all uphill on a road bike with triathlon bars – skis as we call them – attached, and because of that it would be interesting to see how I would go in a long flat time trial today. He said that all the work I’d done in training was for the mountains, and so it would be interesting to see if my time trials on the flat suffered.
In actual fact, I was undefeated in longer time trials in 2012 – as opposed to the short prologues where I’d tended to come 2nd – and in the Dauphiné a few weeks earlier I’d won the long flat time trial by a street. So I was a bit annoyed about that.
Then they interviewed Alexander Vinokourov, who’d just finished the stage: ‘How do you see it going today?’
‘It’s quite tough out there.’
‘What do you think about Wiggins’s and Evans’s battle? Who do you think will be the faster of the two?’
‘I think Wiggins will get the better of Cadel, but I don’t see him taking a lot of time. I only see him taking ten, twenty seconds maximum on Cadel today, but as Wiggins has proved he’s good on all types of course this year.’
I remember sitting there thinking, ‘You’ve got a cheek – twenty seconds!’ It really wound me up. ‘Twenty seconds my arse!’
I fuel off those little things.
Back at the start, the announcer was talking about Cadel, and the crowd was getting hyped up, really hyped up, and eventually he came down the ramp. There was that massive crowd noise you hear when a rider starts, and that noise was following him up the road. I was wearing a thin little jersey over my skinsuit; the second he started I unzipped it, took it off and threw it on the floor to show I was really ready. I slapped my hands together and went to the ramp.
Usually, when you have that long to wait before a time trial, you sit down below in the chair for two minutes then go up on to the start ramp; here, I was desperate to get into the start house on top of the ramp so that I could watch him. In that time trial there was about a 3km straight from the start before a left-hand bend; I went up the ramp at once, sideways on with my bike, and then I stood in the entrance to the start house, watching his car going down that straight. I rested my arms on my skis and I was just watching the car going further and further away. I was talking to myself: ‘I’m coming after you. I’m coming after you.’
Then they said, ‘One minute to go’, so I rolled up, clicked into the pedals, got myself ready, watching Cadel’s car all the time. It was still in sight, like a pinprick in the distance and then it was suddenly gone. Then I heard the thirty seconds to go call, and the announcer said, ‘Bradley Wiggins, winner of the Dauphiné Libéré, Paris–Nice, Tour of Romandie, this that and the other’. Ten seconds to go, the crowd were making a huge noise, and I could hear that count: five, four, three … I pushed back, and straight away I was out hard for the first ten or twelve seconds, then down on to the saddle and into my pace.
Sean started the dialogue: ‘OK, Brad, you know what you’ve got to do today, you’ve got three kilometres straight here, then you’ve got a left-hander do what you do best.’ So I settled down into my 460 watts. It felt really good, really strong, around a left-hander, then there was the first drag. I was sitting at 500 watts up that one, and Sean said to me, ‘Looking good, Brad, this is good, you come to a little village here. Descend hard left-hander then you’re away, you’re on open road.’
We got out of that first 5km, then it was out on to a bigger, wider road that dragged up for about 1.5–2km. I remember Sean saying, ‘You’re twenty seconds ahead of Cadel.’ It was after about 5km and I thought, ‘What?’ I hadn’t even started pushing on at that point. On the GPS on the television they had me twenty seconds ahead. Fucking hell.
We went into a super-fast section, speeding round the sweeping bends, doing about 65km per hour. I put my head down and the visor flew off my helmet. It hadn’t been stuck on properly; the magnet on the right-hand side had come undone, so it just whizzed off. And I had to deal with it. My eyes had got used to having the visor in front of them, so they started watering a lot in the wind; that’s always the way when you take your glasses off on a bike: to begin with your eyes fill with water and then you get used to it. I was blinking continually at first but my eyes adapted. All that time the gap kept going up. All the checks until close to the end had been on Cadel; I remember getting to the last one, at 10km to go, and Sean said: ‘You’ve got one-nineteen on Cadel, and you’re sixteen seconds ahead of Froomie; he’s got the best time.’ I had been just thinking about Cadel the whole time until then, but I suddenly thought, ‘Wow, Froomie, sixteen seconds, that’s quite a good ride from him.’
Towards the end, the course was flat for about 6km, then there was a left-hander, up a climb and Sean said, ‘This is where you’re going to make the difference, this is all for you, Brad, this is like the track days.’ I remember thinking, ‘Forget Cadel, this is where I win the stage and I need to put a bit more time into Froomie.’ I was motoring. I remember taking the effort up another level through the flat section; I didn’t drop below 470 watts the whole way, and then I had to empty it on the last climb.
In the end I took 1min43sec on Cadel but the thing that struck me most when I finished was that I’d won a stage in the Tour de France. A couple of days before I had been thinking, ‘I’ve taken the yellow jersey in the Tour de France’, now I had won a stage. I just kept thinking back to when I was a kid when winning a stage seemed really something: ‘You took the yellow jersey and now you’ve won a stage in the Tour de France.’ That evening I was given the little glass bottle that you get for a stage win.
I remember talking to the press after that; the question they were all asking was: ‘Is the Tour over now?’ It felt strange to be asked that. I’d won a stage in the Tour and no one said, ‘You’re the stage winner, how does it feel?’ They just kept asking if I’d won the Tour. What didn’t really get through to me was that I had 1min53sec overall lead on Cadel and 2min05sec on Froomie. What was in my mind was that I had won a stage in the Tour and I had beaten Fabian Cancellara,
Tony Martin and the other top time triallists.
That felt like a major achievement in itself so I hadn’t had time to think of the bigger picture: at the start of the Tour, all I had told myself I needed was to be within thirty seconds of Cadel going into the last time trial at Chartres. After Besançon, nine days in, I had got the best part of two minutes lead on him.
On the Tour you become institutionalised. You do the same thing day in, day out, as a matter of routine for the best part of four weeks – the race is three weeks but you’re there several days before it starts – and you only ever see the same people around you. Apart from the fans and the media who follow the race, you almost forget what’s going on in the outside world. I don’t know how it feels to be behind bars but seeing Cath on the rest day of the Tour de France always makes me wonder if this is what it’s like getting a visitor when you’re in prison.
I’m not sure Cath knew what to make of it either, being catapulted into the middle of the Tour for about twenty-four hours. From my point of view, it’s just nice when you’ve been in the thick of it for two weeks to have someone come in from the outside to talk about some things other than cycling. It’s a reality check. On the Tour you almost forget what’s going on in the world, which is why it feels the way I imagine it must when you get a visitor in prison: you catch up on what the kids have been doing, how the Jubilee party in the village went. Here are the clean pants you wanted, and some clean socks, those yellow Adidas trainers you asked for – just little things like that. It’s a rapid glance into the world back home, bits and pieces that were going on before you went to the Tour, that you’ve almost forgotten about: how’s that thing with your mum? Oh, that’s sorted now. Did you pay the bill for the council tax? And then she goes and that’s it, the rest day is done, and you’re left with the realisation that you’ve got another twelve days to go.
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 16