Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  We looked closely at the TSS scores that are such an integral part of my training. Some days in the Tour register only 120 TSS, meaning that although you’ve been out there for six hours, it hasn’t taken as much toll on your body as you might have thought. At Paris–Roubaix in 2011 I clocked up 450, so that was a huge day, and I remember the Olympic road race came in about 320, so that was quite a big outing too. But it was perfectly reasonable going into that time trial in the Games. If you look at the last three days before the contre-la-montre from Bonneval to Chartres in the Tour, there were the two Pyrenean stages at a TSS of 332 and 342, and the day into Brive where I led Cav out was about 290. So that had worked out at three really tough days. Tim said, ‘You’ve just had that Olympic road race at 320, so now you’ve got three days’ rest; don’t worry, you’re going to recover and you’re going to be fine.’

  During the Tour it had struck Tim, Shane and me that on each of the occasions when I had won a time trial all year Sean Yates had been there every step of the way. So I asked Sean if he wanted to be driving the car behind me in London, and he said, ‘Bloody right, I’d love to do it, will I get a tracksuit?’ So we sorted him out with a day’s accreditation and he came along, drove the course the day before, and rode it; that meant he had all that information and we had the usual dialogue in the same way that I had had in every time trial I’d ridden all season.

  The overriding thing with the time trial was that from the day before, going through that whole routine in the morning beforehand, it was the same process that I had been through at the Tour and every other time trial in recent years. So that put me in Hampton Court on the Wednesday morning knowing what I’d achieved in Chartres nine days before, feeling super-confident that I could win. I had no idea about the public out on the road at that point, because you go into a tented area at the start, and you concentrate on your warm-up. There was British support all around though, so I wasn’t sitting there in a state, saying to myself, ‘Oh God what are they all going to think?’ I was thriving off it. All I had to do was go out and put my ride together.

  That silver medal in Copenhagen had given Tim, Shane and me confidence in the approach we had taken to time trialling, where we had been looking to move closer to Fabian Cancellara in every way. It was similar to the approach Great Britain had adopted on the track. You analyse where you are and see where the rest of the world is, and you look at what they’re doing. What we used to do with the team pursuit when we were trying to catch up with the Aussies was to look at their gearing, whether they were doing lap turns or more, where each rider was placed in the line, the kind of schedules they were riding. You look at everything.

  It was the same with time trialling. The big thing we had flagged up with Fabian over the years was how much time he took out of the other riders just because he was better at cornering. That was always one area we were looking to improve in. In terms of flat speed we were very similar, but he’d always been renowned for taking a lot of risks on descents and corners. With Tony Martin after the 2011 World’s, it was more about looking at his cadence. We looked in detail at how he had managed to take 1min20secs out of me at the World’s. We worked out his average power and realised that for me to go 1min20secs faster, the power I would have had to produce would have been impossible. It would not have been human. So there must have been something else, aerodynamics maybe; there was certainly something in his cadence. I tended to spin a lower gear, partly because of my background as a track cyclist, where fast pedalling is a key element. He was turning the pedals a good 15 or 20rpm slower than me and it was something that he and another German, Bert Grabsch, tended to do. It’s a bit like driving a car in a high gear, sixth maybe, for a long time down a motorway as opposed to trying to whizz along in third.

  This was typical of how we built to 2012: not accepting how I was, but trying to change it a little bit. So we worked on torque all through the winter of 2011–12, simply putting more power into my pedalling but at lower revs. That meant riding at the same sort of power output I would have in any time trial, but doing it at 50rpm rather than the usual 90. We started with five-minute blocks and progressed through the winter – seven-and-a-half-minute blocks, fifteen-minute blocks – until before the Tour I was doing forty-minute climbs at threshold at 50rpm. So by the time we got to August, and the time trial in the London Olympic Games, I was 40secs ahead of Tony for a little bit more power, but I’d brought my cadence down by about 7rpm (Tim’s figures are that in the 2011 World’s I averaged 103rpm; at the Games, 96rpm); I was rolling along in a bigger gear rather than spinning a smaller one. I didn’t have bigger ratios on but I was using higher gears than in the past – the 11-or 12-tooth sprocket, where in the past I would have been on the 13-tooth. The thing to remember is that we knew it was going to take me a long time to build up to that kind of time and torque. That was why we had had to start in November.

  Back in Hampton Court in August 2012 I was very relaxed. I remember talking to my mechanic Diego beforehand, and him saying, ‘Brad I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘What is it, Diego?’

  ‘On the way to the start we went round this roundabout and your bike wasn’t attached properly to the roof and it fell off and it smashed your handlebars.’

  ‘What – my race bike? Oh fuck …’

  ‘No, your spare bike.’

  He had to put some other handlebars on the second bike, which weren’t the same as the ones on the race bike, but there were no toys being thrown out of the pram instead I was sitting there laughing, ‘Don’t worry about that, Diego, I’m not going to need a spare bike today.’

  That sums up the state of mind I was in at the time. In the Tour, and in the first few days after the Tour, I remember thinking that if I could just get a medal of any colour in London that would be fantastic. That depended on how I shaped up after the Tour, but the closer it got to the time trial, the more I knew that in terms of the power I could get out, I was going to be as good as I had been in Chartres; I’d been flying the day before in training. So on the day I was raring to go. I was thinking about the process: the walk up the ramp, launching myself out of the start house, not getting carried away too early on, and all the incremental steps through the ride, all the things going well, fuelling after seventeen minutes and so on. I knew I had it in the bag if I could avoid getting anything wrong.

  The minute I turned up in the start area, I couldn’t believe the roar I got. I remember sitting in the stage area next to the ramp and getting a buzz from the crowd. It wasn’t the loudest thing I’d ever heard, not quite, but then I rolled down the ramp and the sound of the crowd really hit me.

  I turned left out of the ticketed area, on to Hampton Court Bridge, and the noise was unbelievable. It was the same all the way around that course, but the bit I will always remember to the day I die was going through the last time check. It wasn’t official, it was one that the team had set up – we just made sure someone was at a certain point with a stopwatch – and it was at 9km to go, just before Kingston. Sean had been telling me I was 29secs ahead of Tony Martin: knowing that there were about five miles to go and I wasn’t dying off at that point, all I had to do was keep it together and I was going to win.

  That was inspiring me to press on even harder, and I remember going through Kingston, not taking any super risks on the couple of little corners, through a shopping precinct; then the route went left out of the shopping precinct, over Kingston Bridge and down to a roundabout, where the Sigma Sport bike shop is, which you had to take on the opposite side rather than using the race line. So I had to slow down quite a bit, coming out of the roundabout, and because I’d pulled up, I was then accelerating away almost from a standing start. The road had narrowed down so the yells and screams from the crowd were actually deafening, to the point where I got ringing in my ears. I was thinking, ‘Fuck me, the noise,’ and then it was a matter of giving it everything I had all the way to the finish.

  I turned into Bushy Park towards
the end, and I could see Tony Martin’s cars up the road, so I knew I’d beaten him. At that point you’re emptying it, you’re nailed, you’re just trying to keep it together; I kept giving more than I had to, thinking, ‘Empty it to the line’; I’d lift the pace quite a bit and then I’d bring it back down, because I knew I couldn’t sustain it. I was already fifty minutes into the ride and thinking, ‘No, no, you don’t need to do that, Brad, just hold it, hold it, you don’t need to push like that.’ I was continually doing that in those last few kilometres, and coming out across the cobbled section towards Hampton Court Palace, Sean was saying, ‘You’re not taking it too hard, don’t take any mad crazy risks.’ Even at that point, when it was clear I’d got it in the bag, he never said, ‘You’ve got this, you’ve got this, you’ve won it.’ He was just concentrating on getting me to the end.

  Coming round that last sweeping bend and up to the line, the crowd seemed to go dead silent. I was thinking, ‘Uh oh.’ Normally when you cross the line everyone cheers so I thought, ‘Shit, I’ve lost it, I must have done something to have lost it.’ Further up, towards Hampton Court Bridge, the crowd erupted. That had to be for me, with the best time, but I still wasn’t certain. I was confused, so I turned around and went back to my soigneur; I stood there and he didn’t say anything.

  I kept saying to him, ‘Have I got the fastest time?’

  And he kept saying, ‘Yeah, you got the fastest time.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘No, they are fucking lying to me.’

  I was getting really irate and saying I can’t exactly remember what. I was really confused; the fatigue was kicking in a bit. Fabian Cancellara was last off as the defending champion; he hadn’t come in yet.

  I remember saying something like, ‘Are you sure? Fabian’s not ahead of me on the road, is he?’

  ‘No, no he isn’t.’ The exhaustion began hitting me; I had to sit down for a bit.

  ‘Is Fabian in yet? Is Fabian in yet?’

  ‘No, no.’ But eventually Fabian came in and they said, ‘That’s it you’ve done it.’

  So I stood up again, went up there into the finish area; people were cheering and I was trying to soak it all in. I was still a bit confused as to what was going on. I was just looking for Cath and the kids: Where are they? Where are they? I kept trying to look in the stands for them; they directed me to the throne which they had been putting each of the leaders on as they waited for their time to be beaten; I sat there for a second, which was bizarre. It’s that picture that everyone printed; I always sit in a chair in that way, so as soon as I sat down I did a Winston Churchill victory sign.

  I spotted Dave, and said ‘Where’s Cath? Where’s Cath?’

  ‘We’ll go and find them, we’ll go and find them.’

  Down off the throne, and the chaperones started saying, ‘Come behind now, we’ve got to get ready for the podium.’

  ‘I want my wife and kids.’ I had to find them.

  So I got back on my bike, rode out and waved to the crowd for a bit – that’s where all the public were, outside the finish area which was cordoned off inside the palace gates – turned around, came back down and then went up to the finish line looking for Cath and the kids. I turned back round, waved to the crowd again, rode up to Hampton Court Bridge, went back in, and finally found Cath and the kids at the end where the start was. We all went behind the podium, I got changed and then it was time to get the medal.

  Some time later, when they were selling off the bits and pieces after the Games, I asked if I could have that throne as a memento. They wanted a hundred grand for it because there was so much interest in it, so I told them that perhaps they should find another customer. At that price! The cheek of it, you know! They did offer to do me a replica one for two grand or something but it’s not quite the same.

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  WHAT NEXT?

  THAT TIME TRIAL has to rate as my greatest Olympic moment, more than the pursuit final win against Brad McGee in Athens, and maybe even more than the team pursuit world record in the final in Beijing along with G, Ed Clancy and Paul Manning. To win that gold medal in that setting, in London, in front of Hampton Court, with all the history going back to Henry VIII; it was about as British as you can get. The time trial lasted an hour, whereas the track races I’d done in the previous Olympics had been only four minutes long. There was so much time to savour it.

  Every athlete has a defining year during their career. Sir Chris Hoy’s was Beijing when he won his three gold medals, and 2012 is probably mine. I remember when I was a kid Chris Boardman talking about his hour record in Manchester in 1996; he reckoned nothing would ever top the feeling of going round that track to the roar of the crowd for one whole hour. That may well have been the height of Chris’s career; it was probably the best he ever got physically. For the best part of an hour that Wednesday in Surrey, I was able to savour that feeling, of being at my best, with a massive crowd deafening me with their support. It was phenomenal; I am never going to experience anything like that again in my sporting life. I am not saying it is the end of my career by any means, but nothing is ever going to top that. And that’s a poignant feeling.

  Ever since, I’ve been trying to take it all in, wondering whether that time trial was my greatest sporting moment. I don’t know if it was better than the Tour de France. I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that I’ve won the Tour, so at this stage I don’t know. In my eyes, the Tour will always be phenomenal because of what the team did for me. In the last time trial from Bonneval to Chartres I had a fantastic day; I did the job, but the whole race, all twenty-two days of it, was about the team putting me in a position to win the Tour de France. After the Tour, I struggled to work out quite how to thank them. I didn’t speak to any of the riders who helped me win the Tour, other than Cav, for a fair while, because I didn’t know what to say to them. I didn’t want to send them some cheesy email saying, ‘Guys, I can’t thank you enough’, because I don’t think that was quite what was needed. In the initial aftermath of the Tour it didn’t seem to sum up what those guys did for me. It’s got to come from the heart and not just in an email. What I do know is that I will never forget it.

  Part of what drives me is the love and respect I feel for the sport and its history. That goes back to my childhood. I grew up with posters of Indurain, Museeuw and the rest on my bedroom walls, while other kids were into football: Lineker, Gascoigne and so on. In those days, a child’s dream was to go and lift the FA Cup because that was what those great players had achieved. For me when I was a kid, the dream would be to lead a race like the Dauphiné, or even the Tour for one day. So a lot of my motivation comes from the fact that I realise what the great races mean, and how many people have won those races.

  There haven’t been many Tour winners in my lifetime, perhaps a dozen, so it’s a very special list to be on. I never see myself as up there with people like Robert Millar and Tom Simpson because they were the big names when I was a child. You never imagine you will be better than them. Simpson was long gone when I was a kid but even though Millar and the others like Sean Kelly rarely raced in the UK, they were cult heroes. They lived in France, we didn’t have the Internet, you could only see them in cycling magazines, which came out once a week. You never imagine you will be up there with those names: Hinault, Merckx and so on. You never imagine that not only will you be the winner of the Tour, but you’ll also win Paris–Nice, Dauphiné and the Tour of Romandie in the same year, which is incredible.

  I’ve always loved cycling because it’s you against the machine. You apply yourself to something in your life, and then it’s all about numbers, pace judgement, putting the ride together, having it all go to plan. You do the training, you get this power; it’s very quantifiable. I love the sense of accomplishment. You come away and see if you can train harder, work harder and get a result at the end from it. It’s nice to be recognised and get respect for being
good at something, to see what your achievements mean to people. It’s incredible that sport can do that, although it is just sport and you can’t lose sight of that.

  I think the difference between the Olympic gold medal and the Tour is that the time trial was all about me. It was all about my individual performance on the day, about what I could put together nine days after the Tour. As an individual feat it was probably the best sporting performance of my career. It will stick in my mind as my greatest ride, the peak of my physical condition. Shane has said a few times that we never saw the best Bradley Wiggins on the track but maybe we saw something of that kind there. Even if I go on to Rio and win the time trial there, or even if I had won the time trial in Beijing, nothing would ever be the same as winning it in London nine days after winning the Tour de France as well.

  If I had to look at that day, getting 40secs on Tony, beating Fabian and all those guys, the margin of victory was significant, and to do it on those roads and in that atmosphere was incredible. It had been raining in the morning and it seemed as if the sun came out just for those few hours; it was a great, great occasion, it really was. I spoke to John Dower, the film-maker, and he said there was a bizarre sense of joy lasting long after I’d left with the other riders. The organisers had started taking all the barriers down, but, he said, people just hung around in the pubs and bars down there by the river, it felt almost as if a football team had won the Champions League or something and everyone was celebrating that. There was this great atmosphere down there; it was a beautiful evening and it was as if people simply didn’t want to go home, as if they wanted the day to go on for ever.

  There’s an interview we did at my house in December 2011, when I’ve got a beard because it’s midwinter. John asked me, ‘Can you imagine rolling down the Champs-Elysées and winning the Tour de France, then winning the Olympics the next week in London? Can you imagine what that is going to feel like? Would you take one over the other?’ My answer was that I couldn’t really choose, because I’m greedy and I wanted to do both. He told me that that interview is priceless now; when I said that to him back then, I didn’t believe for one second that I was going to do both. And here we are now; it’s happened.