Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  But the next thing I heard was Sean saying over the radio that a lot of guys seemed to have punctured. What followed was just chaos. I had been having problems with my gears as well on that climb, so I told Sean that I needed to change my bike. He said, ‘We’re miles behind, we’re miles behind, we’ll tell you when we’re there.’ Eventually he caught the bunch up and I changed bikes; just after that, people started coming up to me, saying, ‘Something’s wrong, about fifteen guys have punctured all at once: Cadel, Frank Schleck, all these guys.’ I knew something had happened. So I went to the front and told our boys to stop and shut it down; there was no point racing if everyone had punctured. We’d got over that climb and nothing had happened so slowing everyone down to wait for the guys who’d punctured seemed the right thing to do. The stage win had gone in any case as the break was fifteen minutes clear. There was a crash or two, the worst one involving Levi Leipheimer and Robert Kiserlovski of Astana; I still didn’t quite understand what was happening.

  As we tried to figure it out, Pierre Rolland of Europcar attacked and I remember trying to go after him. I thought, ‘Hold on, what are you trying to gain here?’ There’s no point in trying to gain time from someone else’s misfortune; that’s why I was annoyed at him. I thought: if he’d gone on the climb, and was away before it all happened then that would be fair enough, but to do it knowing everyone’s punctured just seems ridiculous. Someone came up to me, Richie perhaps, and said, ‘Let him go, let him go’, so we stopped again. Then Liquigas started riding – they said, ‘Right, we’re not waiting any more’ – and Lotto joined in, so we ended up going full gas; because Cadel was still coming back we did about 10km full on. Eventually they stopped, Cadel came back and then BMC were pissed off because Lotto and Liquigas hadn’t shown them respect. The race was all over the place.

  People read quite a lot into the way I acted. It was said that stopping the field at a time like that showed that I was behaving like the new patron of the peloton. It’s not quite that simple. I could never become a patron in the Bernard Hinault sense, a dominant senior figure telling the bunch how to race when it suited him. Sean Yates has told me about how in Hinault’s Tours, he was always super-aggressive; they would be scared to attack when he was on the front. He’d ride on the front of the peloton and if you went past him he’d just flip; he ruled by fear. I did end up becoming a bit of a leader for the peloton on that day through my actions, not through being vocal.

  At the time I wasn’t aware of what was going on. A lot of the support cars had disappeared, stuck behind us on the climb, stopped to change wheels, or having punctured themselves. There were no motorbikes or anything; you’re going down this hill with all the other bike riders you race with all year round, so you don’t realise you’re being watched by the world. You don’t do things for show, you just do what you do instinctively at the time. And then you get to the finish and find that all of a sudden your actions have kind of taken on a life of their own. It reminded me of the whole thing in 2010 between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck – the attack Contador made when Schleck’s chain came off. So much was made of that.

  There was one little event to savour when we reached the final rest day in Pau, with only three more days of racing before that final time trial. I had mentioned in an interview on the day I took the yellow jersey that I remembered watching the Tour as a kid and had never envisaged that one day I’d be taking the jersey; I said in that interview that my childhood hero in the Tour de France was Miguel Indurain, because he won every Tour from when I was eleven to the age of fifteen. It was the most influential period of my teenage years, and Indurain was the mainstay.

  It must have got back to him somehow, and so on the rest day in Pau, Spanish television came to us and said, ‘We want to do a piece with Brad, we’ve got something quite special for him.’ They said it was from Indurain and that is how they got me to do the interview, otherwise I would have said no. It was a message from him, on the television screen; they translated it to me and it was basically him saying, ‘Hello, Brad, I heard that you were a fan of mine, I think you’re strong in the time trials like me’ and various other things. I was honoured just to think that he knew who I was; they said, ‘He’s also sent you this.’ They gave me an envelope with a red scarf in it, one of the ones that they wear during the bull run in Pamplona. This particular one was a very sacred thing, with his family emblem on it. They explained: you can’t buy it in the shops and it’s a massive honour that he’s given it to you. He’d signed it ‘To my friend Bradley.’ It was recognition from someone who had been my childhood idol, something that I simply hadn’t expected, and it meant all the more for that.

  All through this, my philosophy was to take it day by day. There’s enough stress on the Tour without wondering how the other guys are doing, and worrying about who might do what, when and where. Because of that I never think too much about any one rider in a race. Initially you just worry about yourself. You never assume anything. You never really expect anything because then it doesn’t come as a surprise. People would ask me, for example, how worried I was about Cadel, how did I think he felt on the stage, would I be looking at him tomorrow? Whereas in fact he might not be the person I had to worry about. You never anticipate that a rider might do this, or you might do that, or think, ‘Cadel looks good today.’ In fact, he might be suffering. You just don’t know.

  With me, some of this inward focus comes from the track. There are times when you sit in the track centre and watch another heat going on – during qualifying for example – or you might be there on a training day when you can’t help looking at the other riders. You’ll be sitting waiting until it’s time for your effort, and a rider like Brad McGee – the Australian who was my big rival for the pursuit at the Athens Olympics – might be floating effortlessly around the track. That might begin to get to you, but someone in the team will have a stopwatch on him and they’ll take his times and say, ‘He’s only doing 61 [seconds per kilometre] laps’, although to you he looks as if he’s going faster. You end up realising that people are very quick to make assumptions about how a rider looks on any given day, and those assumptions can be totally wrong.

  There was a classic case of this with Vincenzo Nibali in 2012 on the run in to Luchon, a long, brutal stage through the Pyrenees over four big cols: Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. He was obviously trying to put us under pressure on that stage; it was hard and we got him back. We came into Luchon, finished the stage, and the next day we assumed, ‘Bloody hell, he’s going to try that again for sure, because that was tough yesterday.’

  On the next stage, the last one in the Pyrenees, Nibali put his boys on the front on the first big climb, Port de Balès; they made it hard there and lost some riders. So I sat behind Nibali the whole way up the climb and, towards the top of it, I got a sense of his body language, the way he was pedalling. That gave me the notion that actually he might be struggling a little bit. I always watch people’s pedalling action and I’ve learned that Nibali drops his heels when he’s suffering. He doesn’t give a lot away when you ride beside him. He’s very good at bluffing, he’s conscious of that all the time, but he does have some tells. You’re on a descent and he’ll get out of the saddle and stretch his neck, little things like that that you do if you’re conscious that someone’s watching you and you want to make them think.

  Nibali started dropping his heels towards the top of the Port de Balès. His pedal stroke made it look as if he might be a bit over-geared. His teammate Ivan Basso, the Giro winner back in 2005, hit the front towards the summit, set quite a strong tempo and we descended off Port de Balès to climb the Peyresourde, the last major ascent of the whole Tour, with the finish at the top at the Peyragudes ski station. Again Basso went to the front, again he set a really strong tempo, but about a kilometre and a half from the summit, the other riders started attacking and Nibali just couldn’t respond. Straight away we realised he was actually on a bad day. He just hadn’t backed up the
efforts he’d made the day before. That was a classic case of concentrating on someone, expecting them to do something because of how they looked the day before, when in actual fact they haven’t got the legs for it.

  When you are leading the Tour, there are hard decisions to be made. It’s not always a nice business and during that Tour I couldn’t help feeling at times that Mark Cavendish deserved better than he got. Right from when he and Bernie had been selected for the Tour in June, I think he had been very conscious of what people thought. From day one in Liège he had said in team meetings that he recognised that we were going for yellow and that he was determined to be part of it in the same way that I had been part of the picture at the World’s the September before.

  His line was: ‘I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be in a British team going for the yellow jersey even if that means I’m not going to get a full lead out in the sprint.’ It was difficult listening to him say that, because the nice part of me wanted to stand up and say, ‘Sod it, Cav, we’ll lead you out at those stage finishes. I’ll try and ride for the yellow as well as support you when it comes down to a sprint.’ But the coward in me had to say, ‘Well, you know how this is, we can’t ride for the sprint every day; we had a goal at the start of the Tour and that has to be the priority.’

  Throughout the Tour, Cav was keen to feel that he had played his part in trying to have a British Tour winner for the first time. I got the sense that he was feeling a bit self-conscious, that he felt we might all be thinking we could have had someone else in the team instead of him. That’s why he was coming back for bottles on the stages when it wasn’t going to be a sprint, and that’s why on the first day in the Pyrenees he rode on the front most of the way up the climb of the Mur de Péguère – the day of the tacks and the punctures. There was only so much of a role he could play, because he’s restricted in his climbing, but a lot of the time his presence was enough to make a difference. Cav is a larger-than-life character, and sometimes in a team the things someone says and does are enough. All through the three and a half weeks, just having him around was a boost: he was brilliant, good at the dinner table, good with the other riders.

  There were various flatter stages that Cav had picked out as ones he wanted to win. Bernie was his main helper on those days and Eddie was going to join in; the plan was that between them they were going to try to work off the other teams a bit so that Sky didn’t have to take control for too long and use up too much energy.

  Cav understood why we were in that position but that can’t have made it any easier for him. There were some days where it was quite clear he could win the stage but in the team meeting Sean would say, ‘Look, it’s a bit of a day off for us all today; sit there and look after Brad.’ I could see Cav thinking, ‘We just need two guys to ride on the front and we could win this.’ So there were stages when we had to let groups get ahead to contest the victory where Cav might have won it if it had come down to a bunch sprint.

  When I felt the most guilty about Cav was the day after he put that work in up Péguère; stage 15 into Pau. At just under 160km it was a short run and it was basically flat, but the break took 60km to get established. Until we let it go, we had some of the hardest racing of the whole Tour; constantly flat-out in one long line, with everyone’s legs screaming. When the break did eventually get away, there was a feeling in the team that we should ride for Cav, out of respect for him and for the rainbow jersey. So we decided to put two guys on the front and start chasing a little; later other teams would be likely to join in, most probably Lotto, who would want a bunch sprint for André Greipel. Our two guys had to push quite hard because the gap was five minutes and there were some strong lads in front: Thomas Voeckler, Nicki Sørensen, Christian Vande Velde – my old team leader at Garmin – and Pierrick Fédrigo, who won the stage.

  As soon as Christian and Bernie had gone to the front, Mick Rogers came to me straight away and said, ‘This is wrong, I don’t agree with it, we shouldn’t be doing this.’ Mick’s thinking was that we’d been racing full-pelt for nearly an hour and a half and we didn’t need to put our guys on the front. They’d already had some hard days in the mountains, and we had two big stages in the Pyrenees still to come. Something had to give. We couldn’t chase everything, we couldn’t treat our bodies as if they were indestructible; we could either roll along for the last 100km and get through the stage, or we could potentially ride our backsides off to bring this back for the sprint.

  Mick was saying this for about 5km, and then he got really annoyed. Eventually he said, ‘This is fucking wrong, I am not happy about this.’ So he went back to the car, and said to Sean: ‘Look, this is the wrong decision, here, now.’ He truly put his balls on the line, Mick did, because potentially he was risking the wrath of Cav. So the decision was made and Sean put the word out: ‘OK, we’re not going to ride. Stop riding, boys, that’s it, Mick’s right.’ And that was that.

  I remember talking to Cav on the road at the time; I could only say, ‘Sorry, mate.’ He was gutted that day because he really felt that he could win, but that was one of those situations where you have to play it safe. We may have won the Tour that day because we saved two pairs of legs: Christian’s for sure, and probably Bernie’s. When we got into the Pyrenees after the rest day, it was Bernie who made the pace all the way up the Aubisque and along the valley, and Christian was able to ride a fair bit of the way up the Tourmalet. I take my hat off to Mick because it takes a rider of huge experience and courage to make the call he did when he did, and particularly when you’ve got a sprinter of the quality of Mark Cavendish in the team. I wanted Mark to win but we had to be brutal at times and Mick took that decision. Although I was thinking the same thing, I didn’t really have the guts to say it.

  In our attempt to win the yellow jersey, Mark was the rider within Sky who lost out the most. So that helps to explain what happened coming into Brive on the last Friday of the Tour. It was a long stage, 230km, up and down; the break went early and the peloton never seemed to be happy with it. It was the last chance for a lot of riders to win a stage so people kept chasing; the break would come back, another one would go, someone wouldn’t like it and they’d pull it back. Eventually twenty-odd riders went away and a few teams rode behind all day. It was a tough day for everybody and when it became clear that a bunch kick was on the cards, I gave it everything in the final kilometre and a half to get Cav within reach of those last few breakaways.

  I like the satisfaction you get from being part of a lead-out train, having that open road in front of you, doing your job, swinging off, watching someone like Cav win. It’s a better feeling sometimes than winning yourself. But the time leading up to when you get in the position to do the lead out is the tough one; it’s not something I enjoy doing. As I’ve got older I’ve wanted to take fewer risks.

  I knew that the following day I would have to go all out in the time trial and finish off the job of winning the Tour. But I had always wanted to be in yellow leading out the rainbow jersey for the sprint; it had been something I had thought about since the start of the Tour, and finally I got the chance to do it. I used the speed that I’d built up from that training on my core muscles, the little extra kick that had come through from the track, and pulled Cav until the final metres, when he produced one of the best sprints of his life to go past Luis León Sánchez and Nicolas Roche as if they were standing still. That was four stage wins in the bag for Sky. And two more stages to go.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  OPEN ROAD: II

  Saturday 21 July, 16:36 European Summer Time

  Avenue Jean Mermoz, Chartres

  Stage 19, 2012 Tour de France

  IT WAS NINE months since the 2012 route had been confirmed with the long time trial on the last Saturday; in all that time I would never have imagined, or perhaps only in my wildest dreams, that I would go into that stage with a two-minute lead on my rivals. I had my mind set on that day from long before the Tour started, but
the ideal scenario had always looked quite different. It had seemed that if I could be within thirty or forty seconds of someone like Cadel Evans going into that last time trial I would be capable of taking the yellow jersey off him and winning the Tour.

  Looking at the way the 2012 Tour was structured, we had always worked on the assumption that if I could avoid dropping too much time on the climbs to Cadel Evans and the others, I might be able to take the jersey on that day. I’ve never considered myself that good in the mountains at the Tour but I knew I could limit my losses on the best climbers at the summit finishes. The strategy we had worked on in the previous couple of years was simple: empty myself to the summit on every mountain stage of the Tour, but never with a view of winning up there or leading the race, just concentrate on losing as little time as possible. The improvements we made in climbing in 2012 had meant that I was always riding with the lead groups on the summit finishes in races such as Paris–Nice and the Dauphiné, so that made it a lot easier; in those races I was able to stretch my lead in the time trials. The Tour had ended up being exactly the same.

  It was during the stage before, the stage into Brive, that I started thinking about that time trial. We had got the last two Pyrenean stages out of the way without any great damage, so then my thoughts immediately turned to Bonneval. About then, I began thinking, ‘What if you can win the stage to seal the Tour?’ That was the main thing. The stage to Brive was a long one; it turned out to be actually quite a tough stage, we came into the finish and obviously we had a job to do for Cav. At that point there were no thoughts about the day after; it was just, ‘Let’s do this for Mark.’ But once he’d won, my thoughts turned to the time trial. I didn’t do the press conference after the stage, because I wanted to go back to the team bus to warm down properly and then we – the lead riders in the standings – had to get in helicopters to fly north for the time trial. Leading the race clearly took the pressure off. I wasn’t trying to take the yellow jersey off Cadel, I was defending it, but it wasn’t a done deal, because any serious mechanical problem, or something else like a crash could have meant the race was over.