Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  Cath’s visit was brief; she was off home the next day. But seeing her was vital; throughout the whole of 2012 she was my most important influence. She’s the constant one, the one who is always there, and she’s been there for me for ten years. We’ve known each other since I was about fifteen and we were on the junior national squad together. She’s seen me through the good times, the bad times, the ups, the downs and the great times. Since we got together in 2002 we’ve been a team. The little things that she helps me with are as much a part of the big picture as the training and the planning I do with Shane and Tim. The difference is that Shane goes home every day, and Tim goes home every day, but Cath comes home every day with me. It’s a very hard, very selfish life that I live, and Cath, Ben and Isabella are completely there with me.

  Cath knows when I am on it, not on it, skiving, not skiving or when I’m making excuses. Because I’ve been through all those phases in my life with her, she knows me better than anyone. She’ll always stand by me and support me. She gets on very well with Shane as well. If he is like a father to me, he’s like a brother to her. And he’s always calling her and they talk about things on the phone together that I’m not even aware of. He’ll ring her up just to see that she’s all right, so they have their own relationship. They fall out and make up. She is the keeper of everything for me, because she is the last point of protection. She is also my biggest fan, so even in that whole 2010 period she was always standing by me. She would just say, ‘Forget it, they don’t know, they haven’t got a clue about all this.’ In her eyes I can never do any wrong, but she will tell me pretty quick if I have done wrong in other people’s.

  I cannot say this often enough or loudly enough: when it comes to winning Olympic gold medals and yellow jerseys, there is as much sacrifice from my family, Cath and Isabella and Ben, as there is from me, if not more. I wasn’t home much in 2012. I think it was five weeks between 1 January and 1 August. There were periods of that time when the family were with me, but I was in a training environment somewhere, usually Majorca. When we are doing that, I just go out on my bike for five or six hours a day and they go and do stuff, the best they can, but then I get back and I need to rest, so it’s not as if we all go down the beach together.

  In a way, in that environment, it can be harder than being at home. The kids just want to play with me when I get back from training. Two weeks before the Tour we were in Majorca, and I was training, obviously, four, five, six hours of the day. I’d have a split day – a time trial in the morning, time trial in the evening – and I’d come back in between and have food and a sleep. We’d nip down the beach with them at lunchtime and I’d have a coffee, but I’d have to sit in the shade. Cath and the kids would be outside; they’d all be on the beach and they’d run up and say, ‘Come on, come in the sea with us, come on the lilo’ and I would have to say, ‘I can’t, I’ve got to stay here, I’ve got to go out training again later.’

  Where Cath and the kids have made a difference is in their willingness to give things up for me, enabling me to live the way you have to if you are riding for the overall in the Tour. It is a special lifestyle and everybody around you has to adapt to it. You have to live as much like a monk when you’re at home as you would when you are actually racing in the Tour, but obviously when you are at home you are still going about your daily business in between training and resting. That’s really hard to do but it’s become almost like routine to me. It’s twelve months of the year. There is no question of taking two months off and then we’ll see how we are and we’ll start back on it. It’s a constant thing. It involves everything you do on a daily basis in your life. You’ve got to do it.

  For example, in 2012 I was ill only once or twice with minor colds, and I barely lost a day’s training from it. That comes down to the way you live: it is just a matter of looking after myself, being healthy constantly, looking at the little things, never letting my hair down. So I’m always washing my hands.

  It can seem extreme, but there’s thinking behind everything I do. I try never to walk any further than I have to. It’s OK if you have to walk a little bit, but when we go to Majorca for training, for example, and we go and eat at a restaurant which is a fifteen-minute walk away, I normally ride my bike to get there. I have a shopping bike that I use. It means that if I’ve got a session the next day my legs don’t stiffen up.

  A lot has been made of my diet. We don’t have sugar, bread or biscuits in the house and neither do we have the usual nonos like fizzy drinks. Shane is always on at me about it. ‘Remember,’ he’ll say when I go home after a race, ‘remember your eating this week. It’s like owning a car. You don’t need to put more fuel in it if you’re not driving it.’ He’s always saying that to me. The dieting is like keeping a car on nearly empty all the time, and if you’re going to drive that car to the supermarket – in other words, if you’re using energy for training or something – you only put five-quid’s-worth of fuel in it so that you can only just drive there and back. You don’t ever put forty-quid’s-worth in because you’re not going to use the car for most of the week and the fuel would just sit there inside it. However, if you are going to drive to London – in other words, take part in a major race – you fill the car up, then fill the car up again to drive back. Once home, and the car is nearly empty again, you have to keep it like that, only putting in a little fuel when you have to go to the supermarket. I guess that’s the best analogy to use. So the diet is just a constant daily thing. I fill up only as much as is absolutely necessary. That’s the principle I live by.

  It doesn’t mean weighing my food. It’s not quite as bad as that. You get to know what a portion contains. You have to be very careful you don’t become extreme with it. I’ve learned over the years to accept that you have to have some moderation in your life. It’s a bit like when Shane told me to have that weekend off before the Dauphiné. It’s not just to go out on your bike and ride steady: ‘Let’s just go and turn the legs for two hours.’ The weekend off is not a physical thing, it’s more for your mind. You go and spend the time with your family. Some athletes couldn’t envisage having a weekend off the week before a big event. So it’s someone’s birthday, it’s April, you’ve got three months to the Tour, you’ll have a glass of wine. That is not going to lose you the Tour de France. You have to avoid getting into that obsessive stage where you’re weighing your food and you’re saying, ‘Oh, I can’t have a boiled sweet because that might affect me.’ It’s just realising the boundaries and staying sane. You have to keep that sanity and that’s what I’ve managed really well in 2012. There is a bit of balance and a lot of common sense with everything.

  Living the way I do involves a whole lot of little things, such as not putting your suitcase into the car when you go to the airport before a race, and not taking your suitcase out of the car coming back. Cath does all that. She won’t let me pick stuff up. The thinking is this: it just seems funny how you do all this training, all this preparation, all this work, all the fine-tuning for a race, the Dauphiné or whatever, and then, with two days to go, you’ve got to lift a twenty-five-kilogramme suitcase in and out of the back of your car, lug it around an airport, take it off the conveyer belt and chuck it in the back of the taxi. You could do yourself an injury, and all that work would be for nothing. To me, not lifting the luggage is a part of the race. I almost take it for granted now. When I had finished at the Olympics and we were loading up the car to come back, I was waiting for Cath to put the cases in as usual and she said I could do it for myself now: ‘Come on, you ain’t got that excuse no more.’ All those things make a difference and Cath accepts every bit of it without a second thought; other women might just say, ‘You can pick that up yourself’, or they simply would not put up with never having their husband around the house.

  The problem is that when I am at home, the UK isn’t ideal for specific training to win the Tour de France, so I only really go home to rest and ride my bike. Then there comes a point where I have to go away
and train again. That’s the biggest sacrifice with Cath, Isabella and Ben: being out of their lives, missing their birthdays. But they all realise why I’m doing it, and the reward for doing something like this is worth the sacrifice. I always look at it this way: I could be doing other things in my life that mean a sacrifice. I could be in the army in Afghanistan, be there for years on end and never know when or if I was coming home. At least I get to go home. And I’m doing all this by choice.

  Cath and I are both in it together, that’s how I’ve always viewed it. That’s how we deal with it as a family. It’s not a matter of, ‘I’m doing this, you’re going to have to get on with it.’ I’ve always said to her, ‘So long as you’re happy for me to do this, I’ll carry on.’ It’s teamwork and she has been happy for me to do it, for ten years. It’s hard, though, getting some of the phone calls when things are tough at home. I feel massively guilty. I feel like a terrible father to my children, that I’m not there for them. I feel like a terrible husband at times, because I’m not there to support Cath in things that are going on in her life. But I’m not going to do it for ever. It’s now or never.

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  UNDER ATTACK

  IT WAS A really satisfying rest day in spite of the fatigue after the time trial the day before. I remember being really pleased at having a day off; we had a few moments to chill out and briefly savour the stage wins and the yellow jersey. It was as if the first part of the race was over.

  You have to be careful when you have that break in the race that you don’t make the classic mistake of forgetting the next day. You can’t sit there and just think about what you’ve won already. As well as relaxing, there was also a sense of making sure I did all the little things right, paying attention to those details: ‘OK what are we doing tomorrow? Ten o’clock on the bikes; plan the route, we want two hours – we’re doing it because we’ve got to go up the Grand Colombier tomorrow.’ Everyone’s attention is already turning to the following stage – what wheels to use, the gearing – and there’s very little time to stop and think, ‘Oh, wasn’t it great yesterday?’ That’s how the Tour functions; you have to constantly look ahead. That’s why you forget very quickly what you’ve done before, and it’s only some time afterwards that you can look back and reflect on how you felt at the time.

  The next obstacle was made up of a pair of Alpine stages. The first, to Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, took us over the Col du Grand Colombier, super-steep in places but, as it turned out, a climb where the problem was less the ascent than the descent. This was where Vincenzo Nibali attacked in what seemed to be a pre-planned move, with Peter Sagan further up the road waiting to help him a bit. His margin was never that threatening – only a minute at the foot of the climb – and we reeled him in well before the finish. The only GC contender to gain anything on me was Jurgen Van Den Broeck, who attacked before Nibali; I could afford to drop 32sec to him, as he was well down the order after his problems at La Planche des Belles Filles.

  The following day, over the Col de la Madeleine and the Glandon/Croix de Fer en route to La Toussuire, the race took a more worrying turn, with Cadel making his most serious attack of the whole three weeks. It was a long-range move, and clearly had been planned; BMC had sent Tejay van Garderen up the road earlier on, the idea being, I imagine, that he and Cadel could link up and put us under pressure. So Cadel went for it on the Glandon with 75km to go, maybe 10km from the top, on quite a steep section before you turn on to the Col du Croix de Fer. It looked as if he’d attacked from quite a long way back in the group because when he came past us he wasn’t accelerating, he was in full flight, as if he was sprinting for a finish line 400m away.

  We had felt in control for most of the stage already, with Eddie doing a fantastic job over the Madeleine, and when Cadel put his foot down we were setting quite a decent tempo: 400 watts on the SRM screen. Our road captain Mick Rogers took it straight up to 450 and sat at that. So the feeling was: this is getting hard, we’re on a really solid tempo here. Cadel pulled out to maybe 300 or 400m ahead straight away, and then he just hovered there. We were determined not to panic, but just kept riding at our own tempo. When you are riding at that kind of rhythm, not far off the limit, if someone is going to attack on a mountain and sustain it to the summit, they have to be extremely good to get away, let alone to open a decent gap. We were conscious that there was still a long way to go: down the Croix de Fer, up another ramp to the Col du Mollard, a second category climb, another descent to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, then the 17km climb to the finish.

  So we slowly reeled in Cadel about a couple of kilometres before the summit of the Croix de Fer; you could see he was struggling. At that point, if we’d just turned it up a notch he would have gone, but I knew then that was it, he was finished. Any doubt had been removed. There was no need to worry about Cadel any more; I knew he would not be able to back it up on La Toussuire when we got up there. That was exactly what happened: he dropped almost 90sec and slipped to 4th overall. Later that day, when Tejay and I were behind the podium – Tejay was waiting to receive the white jersey for best young rider while I was being given yellow – he said to me, ‘Hats off to you guys today.’ BMC had done all that in an attempt to get us to panic, but it hadn’t worked. The Glandon was the point in the race when I saw Cadel had laid himself open. There was no need for him to do a long-range attack of that kind.

  That morning someone had said to me, ‘I think Cadel’s going to attack today’, and I had thought, ‘I can’t see it. If I was him why would I attack?’ We’d had the time trial by then, so he was nearly two minutes behind me in the Alps. I thought it would be a big gamble; he was 2nd overall in the Tour with the best part of ten days to go, which wasn’t a bad defence of his Tour title this far. I thought he’d be a bit crazy to throw it all against the wall in a big Alpine attack to try and get two minutes back. I thought he would just stay with us; if he was going to try anything he would do it in the Pyrenees, when we would all be that much more fatigued. So my first thought was, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ It was bizarre. Straight away, I thought it was a sign of weakness.

  Most of the stage to La Toussuire was a simple matter of attack and defence. Cadel threw down the gauntlet; we picked it up and threw it back. The rest wasn’t so straight-forward: by that evening I wanted to go home. I simply felt the Tour involved too much stress for me.

  We had a plan: control the race all day, then make the pace and do the peel-offs on the last climb in the same way that we had done at La Planche des Belles Filles. The idea was to put the opposition on the back foot and keep them there. Mick did an incredible job that day; he had already worked a fair bit on the Glandon when Cadel made his move, but when he hit the foot of La Toussuire he rode for the first kilometre and a half; then he was done for the day. Next Richie took over; he did 5km or so, he peeled off, and then Nibali attacked. Because Richie was done there was only one rider left to take over and that was Froomie, so he took up the job of setting the pace. He brought back Nibali’s first attack and then once he’d got him back he stopped riding.

  I assumed that he was finished, that the effort had taken its toll on him, but he kept pressing on for a little bit more and then Nibali attacked again, over the top of him, with Van Den Broeck taking it up with him. At this point Froomie seemed to dither a bit; I thought, ‘He hasn’t got enough in the tank to bring it back a second time.’ Chris really slowed down, so I took it up. We had less than 10km to go, and I thought, ‘Right, now I’m really going to have to pace this if I’m going to ride all the way to the summit on my own.’ I was ready to calculate my effort: I would have to ride what amounted to a time trial so that when I hit the finish line I’d have got everything out. I knew Cadel was behind me and I didn’t look back; I just assumed Froomie had gone. I thought, ‘I’m on my own now; this is where I take responsibility for the Tour.’

  I heard almost nothing through the radio earpiece. All I was getting was bits and bobs, because of
the crowd making so much noise around us. I think I heard Sean saying, ‘Pace your effort, Brad, you’re the only one left, it’s all down to you now, Brad,’ or something like that. So I started riding hard, in time-trial mode; I’d been on the front for about 2km, then we went up again as the road steepened coming into the village of Toussuire, just on the outskirts. At that point, Chris came hurtling past me, using the speed from going into the dip; he went straight to the front and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ I jumped on his wheel; he lifted the tempo quite a bit. I’d already been pushing hard for 2km, so his initial acceleration put me in the red slightly. I hung on to him, hung on to him and shouted at him to back off: ‘Whoa, Chris, whoa.’

  I could now hear Sean on the radio, saying ‘Cadel’s swinging, Cadel’s swinging, he’s going to go, you’ve got him, you’ve got him, he’s gone.’ Because of that, Froomie began pushing on a bit more, and by that point we’d closed in on Nibali and Van Den Broeck quite considerably, along with Janez Brajkovic, who had jumped away at the foot of the climb. Through another couple of hairpins, we’d got rid of Cadel but I was shouting to Froomie to slow down.

  ‘You’ve got to let me recover a little bit.’

  ‘No, I want to go again, I want to go again, I want to get rid of Nibali.’

  So then we got on to the back of the Nibali group, and Froomie attacked again and I just thought, ‘I’m not going to put myself even more in the red so I’ll just ride at my own tempo.’ Chris was doing his own thing; I let him go and he attacked through the group. I’d got on to Van Den Broeck and the others, and that’s when Sean said on the radio, ‘What are you doing?’ We were right in among all the crowds so I couldn’t really hear. There was a lot of confusion at that time. I was thinking, ‘What on earth’s he doing? I’m leading this race by two minutes.’ So he stopped, we got back to him and then we rode the tempo that we’d planned to ride all day, up to the finish.