Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  I’d finished the Tour on the Champs-Elysées three times, and I’d always ridden that stage watching the person who’s won the Tour, imagining the delight he must be feeling: Floyd Landis in 2006, Alberto Contador in 2009 and 2010. I remember sitting at home in 2011 looking at the television and seeing Cadel doing it, thinking, ‘God, that must be incredible, knowing the whole race is finished and you’ve won it.’ It is quite ceremonial, the whole parade from the start to the suburbs of Paris, with other riders coming up and congratulating you as you ride along. We got all the Sky guys riding abreast across the road for photographs; I posed on the front of the bunch with Peter Sagan, who had won the points jersey and Thomas Voeckler, who was King of the Mountains. As we were riding in, there were some guys – particularly the French lads – coming up to me and saying, ‘Is it all right if I have my photo taken with you?’ And they’d arranged it with one of the photographers on the motorbikes, so they would come up and take the photo. That felt like the ultimate accolade from your work colleagues: they respect you and what you’ve done so much that they actually want a photo taken to mark the occasion, perhaps so they can show their kids and tell them, ‘One day I raced the 2012 Tour and made it to Paris with Bradley Wiggins; he’s that bloke in the yellow jersey with the long sideburns.’

  Every minute of that final stage was as sweet as I had expected, as good as it had always looked when I was watching it on television as a kid. There was a little moment on the outskirts of Paris when we went through Saint-Rémylès-Chevreuse, where the Paris–Nice prologue had finished; I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I was back here in March when it all started, we went over all those roads, in the freezing cold, and now here we are in July, it’s thirty degrees and it’s completely different.’ As we began riding through the suburbs of Paris, there was a lot of talk through the radio earpieces, with Mick calling the shots about when we were going to get to the front. It’s a matter of protocol: if you are the Tour winner, your team leads the race into Paris, with you sitting behind them. We started riding and that was it, there I was sitting 8th wheel, doing what I’d seen all those other guys do.

  The noise hit me as we turned by the Arc de Triomphe and from that moment on I expected it every lap. You go so fast around the eight laps up and down the Champs-Elysées that you wish it could last for ever, but at the same time you wish it wouldn’t because it’s quite hard. Relatively speaking, I had a straightforward ride being in yellow, with the other guys giving us a fair bit of road space and letting us get on with it. But even then you know the judges don’t stop the clocks until you get to 3km to go – and 6km out there was a serious crash with Danilo Hondo in it. It could, in theory, still be all over at that point.

  I’d always wanted to lead Cav out on the Champs-Elysées in the rainbow stripes; at times in the last three weeks it had crossed my mind I might end up doing it in the yellow jersey. I was just concentrating so hard the closer we got to the finish. I knew the job I had to do: after we came out of the first tunnel I had to take up the running and pull Eddie to about 800 or 700m to go so that he could unleash Cav. It was a phenomenal feeling; turning on the power, seeing Cav come past tucked in safely on Eddie’s wheel, then pedalling up the Avenue next to Mick and Richie. I knew Cav would win; I knew I’d done the job.

  I had been so focused on what I was doing for Cav that by the last lap I had forgotten that I had the yellow jersey on. There was no thinking, ‘This is the last lap, I’ve done it, I’ve won the Tour.’ It was, ‘It’s 3k to go, 2k to go – I’m going to hit the front; 1k – after this tunnel that’s it, we’re going.’ That was the whole thought process for the last couple of laps; then peeling off after I’d done my job for Cav, I was thinking, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done what I needed to do for him’, rolling across the Place de la Concorde, turning right up the Champs-Elysées and then I thought, ‘Oh fuck, I’ve won the Tour de France.’ It came on me very suddenly because I’d been thinking only about doing that job for Mark.

  The finish was a mad rush. Being given the yellow jersey for the last time was strange; I got up on the podium to accept it, shook someone’s hand, a young lad; next thing Bernard Hinault is flying across, and he’s chucked this fella off the podium. It’s six foot high, and he’s just thrown him off the side. I’d shaken this guy’s hand, thinking he was the president or somebody and it turned out he had just got in there; the police grabbed him.

  With every race I won in 2012 I was thinking that if I never did anything else again, I would always be the winner of Paris–Nice, then the winner of Romandie, then the Dauphiné, twice; then I’d taken the yellow jersey in the Tour, then I’d won a stage, then I’d won the Tour. There was an element of counting up the victories, trying to savour a little bit of the moment with each one, because this might be my last.

  I was conscious of all the British fans being there, so on the podium I made a point of turning towards them. You can look up the Champs-Elysées and see a sea of Union Jacks waving right up to the Arc de Triomphe so that is where all the fans were. I guess they felt more important to me than the president of France, although at the time I didn’t think about it.

  It was bizarre. I don’t have many memories of it. I just did what I had to do. At that point I was still feeling like a bit of a fraud. Part of me was thinking, ‘I’m not supposed to win the Tour de France.’ I never, ever considered myself in the same bracket as people like Hinault and Merckx, people like Miguel Indurain who I’d watched winning the Tour. Now I was standing up there as the winner. I suppose if I ever look at the video of me on the podium with the Arc de Triomphe in the background, the way I behave on the podium pretty much sums up how I felt. When Lesley Garrett sang ‘God Save the Queen’ it felt a bit embarrassing being up there – that’s why I made a little crack about picking the raffle prizes, like I’ve done at dozens of British cycling club dinners over the years. Then I wished them a safe journey home, ‘and don’t get too drunk’. As a fan of the sport, part of me will always feel, ‘Nah, I’m not supposed to win the Tour de France. I’m still only Brad, not Hinault or Indurain.’ Although I believe in myself as an athlete, that part of me that’s a fan of the sport will never believe I’m comparable with them.

  All that while, Cath and the kids and our families were down to the left of the podium; I did the media stuff, dope control, rode down the Champs with Ben on his little yellow Pinarello, with Isabella behind in the car. That was surreal again; I remember taking the yellow jersey off after the podium. That’s when I jumped on the team car in my Sky kit. It was a bit weird because everyone was looking at me, and it was a bit quiet and I couldn’t think what to do, so I jumped on top of the car. I didn’t want to wear the yellow jersey on the lap of honour, but Dave and the others said you’ve got to. I didn’t want to be singled out as the yellow jersey; I wanted to be with the team, as they were. There was an element of me going back a few years, feeling a little bit shy, not wanting to be seen as the leader, I’d rather be at the back of the group. I didn’t really like it when they picked me up on their shoulders at the other end of the Champs; we’d done it together, I couldn’t have done it without them, and I didn’t want it to be just about me. That part of me will never change.

  Then we were all whisked off to the Ritz to have a little reception, after which it was a mad rush. I think Dave Brailsford or James Murdoch made a short speech, but to be honest I was so hungry at that point I can’t remember. We had to sprint off and get our bags together; it was a bit surreal being in the Ritz and then at home six hours later. It was all done.

  It’s curious thinking about the moment when Cath and I walked in through the front door of the house, having just won the Tour de France. It was emotional, and strange. It was the point when we had to start dealing with it, and we were both a little stressed out. I was simultaneously trying to come to terms with the fact I’d just won the Tour and trying to get myself organised with only five days before the Olympic road race. I had to start thinking of the Olympics the very n
ext day. There were things to sort out: have I got a bike here yet? Where was the one that had been dropped off last week?

  I’d won the Tour de France, but I felt as if I would be the last person to take it on board; it reminded me a little of how I felt when I won the Olympic pursuit for the first time in 2004. It’s almost a kind of disbelief that this is happening; it’s little things like seeing the front page of l’Equipe, with my picture on it in the yellow jersey. You don’t realise it’s you on there. It’s strange. And there are messages like the one I had from Sir Chris Hoy, who said he thought the Tour win was the greatest achievement ever in British sport: it’s humbling to hear praise of that kind. The biggest accolade is respect from your peers, people I look up to.

  The build-up all through 2012 was not just about the Tour de France. We had been thinking about the Olympic road race and in particular the time trial from the moment we started planning, because the silver medal in the World’s at Copenhagen had made it clear that I was in the ballpark. All the training from 1 November 2011 had been about backing up, being able to work hard day after day, back to back, being fit enough to sustain the workload to win the Tour. With that under my belt, if I stayed healthy, the one-hour Olympic time trial nine days after the Tour was going to be a doddle in comparison. The issue we identified was not actually getting fit for the time trial, but what we were going to do in the nine days between the Tour finishing on the Champs-Elysées and rolling down the ramp in Hampton Court. It boiled down to how you recover, but the Olympics are what Dave and his team do best so there was plenty of accumulated knowledge to tap into.

  There was definitely no question of simply seeing what happened when we got to the end of the Tour. The plans for 22 July and afterwards were put in place well before the Dauphiné. We knew that if I did manage to win the Tour de France it would be hard to leave Paris on the Sunday night and forget about it; even so, I would have to be out of Paris quickly and I would probably go home. We had to take all that into account, because you very rarely ask the question of yourself: if you win what are you going to do? How are you going to handle the media and concentrate on winning the Olympics? We accounted for every scenario, even to the point of figuring out how it was going to work in terms of building up to the Olympics if I were to crash out of the Tour again, God forbid. We weren’t taking anything for granted.

  I’d insisted on going home. It was what I had wanted and had looked forward to throughout the Tour, but in spite of all the thought we’d put into it, being back in Lancashire wasn’t quite what I expected. The very next day people started knocking on the door. That Monday morning, there were cars parked for half a mile down the road. We woke up to find a mass of press and other people outside, so it felt as if we were under siege. On my first day home, we went to Wigan. The photographers were all taking pictures of us as we drove out, which felt very strange: what were they all doing? What do they want? It was all bizarre, coming back four weeks later to what I’d left. All of a sudden a lot had changed. I’d under-estimated quite how big the whole thing would be. By the evening I was saying, ‘I’ve got to go out on my bike for an hour’, so I went for a quick spin, but at first I couldn’t get through the mass of people, and I had to give the journalists a few minutes.

  There was a line of cars following me as I rode, people taking photographs, people wanting me to sign things – some of them piles of pictures that they were going to sell on eBay I suspect – and the next day when I went out to the Co-op for a pint of milk and a loaf of bread I was mobbed. The same thing happened when I took Ben to a rugby-league training day; all the rugby people kept coming over, which you don’t expect because cycling isn’t their thing. We met Sam Tomkins, a Wigan hero, and there he was praising me.

  Cycling is a sport that levels people out. When you go on a club run, if you puncture you repair it yourself. You don’t get someone else to do it for you. I still wash my own bike when I’m at home and it gets covered in shit – I did that the Monday after the Tour. I spent several years getting laughed at and called names when I was a kid wearing Lycra, which wasn’t the thing to do in the 1990s. As cyclists we become famous in our own little world, but we don’t usually become celebrities. It all takes a bit of getting used to.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  LONDON CALLING

  ON THE THURSDAY after the Tour finished, I was down in Surrey at the Great Britain team hotel. The GB squad is an environment that I love. Being with them feels like coming home. That’s because there are people there who have been constant presences since I joined them in 1998, senior staff like Doug Dailey, a former top amateur rider who was the national team head all through the 1990s and was working for them as a logistics manager up to the end of 2012. He had been at every Games I had ridden: Sydney, Athens, Beijing, and now London. I only really see Doug every four years; every time I’ve progressed a little bit, and every time he says to me, ‘You’ve done a bit better since I saw you last.’ Seeing him again brought home that this was it: we were definitely at the Olympics.

  I’d been a member of the British Cycling team since July 1998, when Peter Keen called me into his office in the Manchester velodrome and signed me up to what was initially known as the World Class Performance Programme. Back then, his vision was for Britain to be the number one cycling nation, but it was all about the Olympics, rather than in professional road cycling. You have to remember where the Tour de France was in 1998. It was on its knees after the Festina drug scandal. At that time could you ever have envisaged a British Tour winner? But eleven years after that I came 4th and now I’ve won it, fourteen years on from that moment when Peter Keen had that vision of what he wanted to do. We’ve had our successful London Olympics and I’ve won the Tour de France and we’ve had a British world champion on the road. Clearly we’ve achieved what he foresaw; perhaps we’ve achieved even more. I sometimes wonder what he makes of all that has happened in the last four or five years.

  Credit for the British Cycling team’s recent success is rightly given to Dave Brailsford, and it’s an amusing thought that he joined World Class at the same time as me. Since I was eighteen and walked into the Manchester velodrome and saw Dave for the first time, he’s been a bit like a mischievous older brother to me. If Cav is like my younger brother, Dave is the one who is a lot older, not just a couple of years older, but maybe a ten- or fifteen-year age gap. We’ve not always got on; I sometimes think, ‘Oh hell, Dave, honestly!’, and I know there are times when he thinks, ‘Brad, I wish you wouldn’t do that.’ But through our time together we’ve always been successful and he’s always been there.

  Dave was in charge when I won in Athens and Beijing; he’s always been incredibly supportive. There are two things with Dave. One is that he has always said, ‘Whatever it takes, Brad, whatever you need’, and he has given me whatever I’ve needed to succeed, be it bikes, coaching, racing. The other thing with Dave is that I’ve never had a bollocking face to face from him. He might have sent me a damning text here or there, or Shane might ring me and say, ‘Dave’s fuming about you’, but then I’ll see Dave and it’s different.

  I think what happens is that he gets het up about me when I’m not there, but when he sees me walk into his office he sees me as a person. I think he really likes me and he always has done, but he understands me as well. So at times when I’m a bit low, such as when I was in that vulnerable state at the end of 2010, he feels sorry for me. Because of that, instead of having a go at me, he’ll think, ‘Oh well, I want to help this lad.’

  For example, towards the end of 2012, after the London Olympics, when a newspaper had printed photographs of me in Majorca sitting on a wall and smoking a cigarette, he rang me the very next day. I had a missed call from him, I was at Wigan Warriors training pitch, and I thought, ‘Uh oh, Dave’s called me, I bet it’s about that. I wonder what he thinks.’ I was fairly worried, so I rang him straight back: ‘Are you all right, Dave?’

  ‘Are you all right? I’m at the s
tart of the Vuelta. I just wanted to see how you were finding it all since London.’

  ‘Obviously it’s been a bit hard, you know, I’m struggling with all the attention. You saw the papers yesterday. I can’t really go out any more without someone taking a picture.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought that. That’s why I thought I’d ring you and see if you’re all right, just so you know there are people here to help you. We’ve been in this position before but I just wanted to tell you that if you ever feel like that or anything else, just give Chris Hoy a ring because he went through exactly the same thing as you are now.’ He was so supportive, he didn’t give a monkey’s about the photo because he’s a man of the world. He doesn’t claim to be perfect. He understands. He has a lot of empathy. He might slap you on the wrist and say, ‘Come on, you know, people are expecting you to behave like this’, but it always feels as if he’s giving advice like an older brother.

  If you look for the secret of his success, I think you have to remember that Dave is not a coach. He’s raced a bike but never at a high level. He’s a hard worker. He’s a grafter. He’ll sit in that velodrome for five, six, seven days and not see his own family for weeks on end. If you look at his man-management skills, I would describe him as being like a football team manager in the Alex Ferguson sense of the word. He runs British Cycling from top to bottom. He’s in budget meetings, rider-selection meetings, equipment meetings and he’s in the workshop deciding which mechanics they need to hire. He knows every in and out of it: who, where and what. He’s not this chief executive figure that you never see, who’s just there in the board meetings.