Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Meares’s take on her relationship with Pendleton is nuanced. She feels it has been hyped up – “There’s a rivalry, but not to the extent that the media want” – acknowledges it is good for the fans, and recognises that having the British woman to aim at has been key in her career. “She went down the sprint path, I went for the [500m] time-trial. When that was axed she was well down the pathway and it took me time to deviate back towards that event. She’s been a huge motivating factor for me in that event, she’s been a huge motivator for every woman.

  “To be the best you’ve got to beat Vicky, for me to have the belief that I could contend in London I had to beat her at her own game. It took me until last year to do it. It was so emotional for me, I’d spent so long getting beaten at that event, you get frustrated with it after a while. There are times when I’ve gone, “how on earth am I going to beat her?” The British sprinters had so much speed, they didn’t need to work on tactics.” One route Meares chose was to work on her qualifying, aware that getting an easier run through would increase her chances. Pendleton tends to be a slower qualifier, top seven or eight rather than top three, which is why the pair so often have met in semi-finals over the years.

  The pair’s relationship is the more important because the personal element counts for so much in sprinting. Before Beijing Pendleton had the whip hand; since then, the momentum has swung Meares’s way but the world championships in April made it unclear who is on top. That uncertainty is what makes the tournament in London seem so enticing.

  “The sprint is a battle for control,” says Meares. “Each rider is setting the other one up to fall into a trap, whoever can set it up and capitalise on it will be the one who wins. Speed is only one aspect, decision making another. You need to be on top of your game, understand, relax, not be too tense otherwise you start thinking. If you think it takes time to make the decision and that means opening the door for your opponent. Both parties are trying to manipulate the race to suit your strength and not that of your opponent, and with Vicky that’s extra rewarding.”

  After losing the world title to Pendleton, Meares paid tribute to her rival: “For her to pick herself up after hitting the deck as hard as she did and come away with the win speaks volumes of the level of character she has. I know a lot has been said about her being fragile but I know she will bring her A-game to London for the home crowd. I know I need to work harder if I want to get that title off her. She goes to the Games as defending Olympic champion, world champion, and I want it.”

  Meares was a slow starter at bike racing, the youngest of four children, and forced to play second fiddle to her elder sister Kerry, who would snaffle the bigger bed in shared hotel rooms and grab the front seat in the car for the two hour drives to the nearest track to their Queensland home. Eventually the pair became rivals for the single sprint slot available to Australia, with the younger sister overtaking her elder sibling. It was clearly complicated.

  She speaks also of the accident in Los Angeles in early 2008 that could have left her permanently disabled. It was seven months from Beijing when she clipped a wheel in a keirin, fell at 65kph and hit the banking, with the force pushing her head back and causing her to crack a vertebrae. It was 2mm away from being a clean break which would have left her at best quadriplegic. To come back, amid massive attention from the Australian media, and gain silver to Pendleton in Beijing – Australia’s only cycling medal of that Games – was a victory in itself.

  Where Meares is most refreshing, however, is in her sense of herself as a role model in the thorny area of female body image. She speaks passionately about an adolescence in which she was not happy with her body, and how she came to terms with it, and feels strongly that her experience can help others. “I understand the position I’m in. I’ve realised how much effect I can have on people, how many kids want to contact me.

  “I love being involved in sport because it shows kids a different image of what it is to be a strong woman, a different stereotype. It’s not always about being skinny, being under pressure in your image, it’s about presentation and confidence in yourself.

  “I love the fact that the women I compete against in my sport are big, strong, powerful – they’ve got curves, muscles, confidence, courage. If that’s something I can give to young kids out there I’d be pleased. It’s difficult when you are a young girl, you see beautiful girls and women in magazines in bikinis. You don’t have that confidence. I wasn’t happy in the body I had, as I’ve grown up and matured I’ve realised I don’t have that model body physiology.” She sums up in the pithiest of terms: “I got teased a bit as a kid because I had a big butt, but I’ve put it to good use.”

  While Pendleton has told the world she is quitting after London, Meares may be on the way out too. She initially contemplated teaching or coaching as a career and has combined training with university studies, but is now moving more towards a possible career in radio journalism. She will decide after the Games, not wanting to distract herself in the run-up. Whatever the outcome, she acknowledges that together she and Pendleton have created a story of their own, “what we have brought to the table for our sport, is something which has drawn people in.” And might they have a drink after it’s all over? “I’ll have a rum, Vicky can have a beer.”

  MEARES V PENDLETON: AN ACC ELERATING RIVALRY

  World Championships

  Melbourne, April 2012

  A crash, a disqualification – possibly the most extraordinary round of the women’s sprint ever. In the first match of the semi Meares won as Pendleton fell; then the Briton pushed the Australian into error and Meares was ruled to have left her line, costing her the race. Pendleton then won in the final

  Olympic test event

  London, February 2012

  First time out on the London velodrome, the intensity built. The pair destroyed each other in their semi-final, won 2-1 by Meares in one of the fastest women’s sprint rounds in history

  World Championships

  Apeldoorn, Holland, March 2011

  Meares rocks Pendleton’s confidence with a semi-final defeat on her way to the world title. It is the first time the Briton has lost her crown since 2006

  World Cup

  Manchester, February 2011

  Pendleton appears totally out of sorts and Meares gains a vital psychological advantage

  Olympics

  Beijing, August 2008

  Pendleton humiliates Meares in the final, winning by one and a half bike lengths in the first match and sweeping through by a dozen in the second

  The Pendleton v Meares rivalry was one of the great stories of London 2012. Owen Slot of The Times and I interviewed Meares in Melbourne that April and we both left deeply impressed with her drive, her vision of life outside cycling – her views on body image were particularly arresting – and her sense of humour. I think when they met in the final that August, and Meares won, Owen and I were the only Britons in the velodrome who would have been happy to see either woman take the gold.

  Cavendish left looking grim by Vinokourov’s winning finale

  29 July 2012

  After the euphoria of the past nine months, [the men’s Olympic road race] was the reality check. We have become so used to success by British cyclists, success that is flagged up months in advance, that it is easy to forget that cycling is a sport where the random element can never be eliminated. That, after all, is the essence of the sport: man’s attempt to make sense of the unpredictable stuff thrown up by the road and the opposition.

  Mark Cavendish and his team finished this race completely spent after their attempts to control events were thwarted by concerted attacks from almost every other team in the race, with the Swiss, the Italians and the Belgians to the fore. There should be no complaints, however, although the British might perhaps regret the lack of a plan B.

  The gold medal for Alexander Vinokourov will provide the perfect retirement gift for a cyclist who has taken the sport to the heights in his native Kazakhstan while
plunging it into the grimmest depths elsewhere. Vinokourov brings with him enough baggage to keep Pickfords busy for a month, and he remains unrepentant about the blood doping that cost him two years of his career. Superb bike rider as he is in terms of tactical nous and aggression, he was not a winner who can shed any light on the sport’s past, or give it optimism for its future unless your eyes light up at the prospect of a further influx of oil cash from the Wild East.

  Cavendish crossed the line in 29th place, displaying the same grim set face he had shown in Beijing after he and Bradley Wiggins had flopped in the Madison. His quest for an Olympic gold medal will have to wait another four years. In the end – and there was no discredit in this – his four team-mates proved unable to square the tactical conundrum that came in appointing “the fastest man in the world” as their leader: they knew they would have to hold back on the Box Hill climb to keep their leader in touch, that this would allow escapees to disappear up the road, putting them on the back foot. Cavendish finished the race with a half-flat front tyre after a puncture sustained in the run-in.

  What did for British hopes was a spectacular, perfectly timed move from Fabian Cancellara on the last of the nine ascents of Box Hill, just as it looked as if the race was coming together to the final run into central London. The hulking Swiss took with him a bevy of other strongmen who had bided their time on the circuits: his team-mate Michael Albasini, the Colombian Rigoberto Uran, who would eventually take the silver medal, Vinokourov, and the Spaniards Alejandro Valverde and Luis León Sánchez.

  “It went on legs, we were always racing at Mark’s pace on the climb so we couldn’t react to those sort of things, it was never our plan,” said David Millar. “A lot of teams were launching their strongest riders up the road to tire us out, and it worked. But it backfired for a lot of those teams as well. There were a lot of good sprinters with us who had a chance of getting medals. It was coming back nicely, we’d been racing for five hours, didn’t have that extra bit.

  “All we needed was a couple of extra guys but most were exhausted or had guys up the road. It was a slim chance, but with every team racing to thrash our race up it was going to be hard to do it.” “Other teams were content that if they didn’t win, we wouldn’t win,” said Cavendish, somewhat unfairly singling out the Australian team for “negative” tactics. “We expected it. If you want to win you’ve got to take it to them. We controlled it with four guys for 250km and we couldn’t do more.”

  Cancellara and company rapidly caught up with a lead group of about 20, some survivors of a move that had gone clear before the race reached Box Hill, a group that included the veteran Australian Stuart O’Grady, who would finish sixth. They were a small peloton in their own right, 32 men united by a single goal: to evade Cavendish and avoid a sprint. The gap to the field was never more than a minute, hovering about 50sec, but that was too much, with three Spaniards and three Swiss to set the pace.

  The British worker bees – Wiggins, Chris Froome, Millar and Ian Stannard – had been at the front controlling matters since the race entered the leafy suburbs with O’Grady and 11 companions in the lead and, not surprisingly, they did not have quite enough in the tank. The only other team without a rider in the massive lead group was Germany, and they were slow to commit more than one rider to the chase. The breeze that blew on the riders’ backs as they sped at 40mph through Oxshott, Esher and Kingston upon Thames meant that the speed needed if the bunch were to close the gap was simply not sustainable.

  As, one by one, Froome, Millar and Wiggins dropped back from the front of the field, completely spent, the Swiss plan went awry on Star and Garter corner in Richmond Park when Cancellara locked his back wheel and ploughed into the barriers. He appeared to have damaged his collarbone, which will not help his chances in Wednesday’s time-trial. As the big Swiss struggled, Uran jumped clear in Upper Richmond Road, and Vino went with him, clearly determined to improve on the silver medal he took in Sydney to Jan Ullrich. His experience was always going to tell and he duly dumped Uran 250m from the line.

  This was, suggested the president of the International Cycling Union, Pat McQuaid, the biggest crowd ever seen for any Olympics, with a million people estimated to be lining the roadsides of Surrey. Apart from the strangely empty lower slopes of Box Hill – closed to crowds to conserve the natural habitat – and a handily empty stretch of wall outside the Priory where the peloton took an early natural break, the crowds exceeded those on a Tour de France stage, lining the verges and pavements four, five and six deep.

  The union flags waved in their thousands, one sign along the way read “Mod is God”, Prince Charles and Camilla turned out on the Mall to meet the riders before they left – but the swell of national optimism that had built since Cavendish won last year’s world championship, and had surged during Wiggins’s Tour de France win, was not enough to ensure the race went the way of Great Britain.

  This was the opening to the London Games, and it was the event that Cavendish was widely expected to win, following his triumph at the Worlds in 2011 and Wiggins’s Tour victory the week before. What mattered in this piece was to explain precisely how and why he and his team mates had been thwarted, and why they should not be criticised.

  Glory keeps on coming for Wiggins with his fourth gold

  2 August 2012

  The kit on his back changes but Bradley Wiggins marches on and he may keep marching on until Rio. With the yellow jersey swapped for Stella McCartney’s blue and red creation, the human machine inside remained the same, dominating the Olympic time-trial as he had done both the long contre la montre stages at the Tour de France to continue his annus mirabilis. The 32-year-old is now Britain’s most prolific Olympian, his gold medal taking his personal tally to seven, one ahead of Sir Steve Redgrave.

  “To be mentioned in the same breath as Sir Steve Redgrave or Sir Chris Hoy is an honour as it is,” Wiggins said. “It’s all about the gold medals. There’s only one colour really. It’s No 4 for me, not No 7. So I have got to carry on to Rio now and make it five.” To date, this is his fourth gold, to go with a brace in the individual pursuit, from Athens and Beijing, and the Beijing team pursuit. To that he adds a pair of bronzes, the team pursuit in Sydney – at the age of 20 – and the Madison in Athens, where he also won the silver medal in the team pursuit.

  As for what comes next, the Tour de France winner is undecided. He mentioned a vodka and tonic or two in celebration, a brief stay in London to watch his old team-mates in the team pursuit and Hoy going for gold in the keirin. After that, he has talked of riding the Tour of Britain, the world championship team time-trial, but in reality he has yet to decide. His season began on 1 November last year, when he launched into full training for the Tour, and most likely he needs a break to take in the scale of his achievements this year and to reflect on what might come next.

  Continuing his unbeaten run in full-distance time-trials this season – as opposed to briefer stage-race prologues – Wiggins finished 42sec ahead of the world champion Tony Martin of Germany, a healthy margin of almost a second per kilometre for the 44km distance, with the Tour de France runner-up, Chris Froome, taking bronze. As at the Tour, where he won one stage to Wiggins’s two, and finished second to his Sky team-mate, the Kenya-born Briton again performed above expectations but went under the radar. Between them they took the home cyclists’ tally to three medals in four events and in terms of momentum that can only bode well for the track races which start today.

  Fabian Cancellara, the defending champion, whose participation had been in doubt following a heavy crash in the road race which had left him with a heavily bruised shoulder, was far from his usual imperious self. So often Wiggins’s nemesis in the past, the Swiss was out of the picture before half the 44km had been covered. His deficit on Wiggins at the 18km mark was 31sec, which sounds minimal but represents a mountain in these circumstances. At the finish he had slumped to seventh, and he collapsed briefly afterwards clutching his shoulder.

 
“Spartacus” had been made to look very human, but he has been Wiggins’s target for years; of late it has been Martin in the sights of the Londoner and his coaching team. Vitally, last September Wiggins took Cancellara’s scalp at the world championships; this February, it was Martin’s hanging from his belt, by an infinitesimal margin – less than a second – at the Tour of Algarve. Since then, he has not looked back. Now, as he pointed out afterwards, he will be the one to aim at.

  After winning the Tour de France, Wiggins showed a healthy disregard for protocol by addressing the British fans; here, he did something similar by freewheeling from the finish area for a mini lap of honour among the crowds, who were unable to enter the Hampton Court Palace precinct where the medals were handed out. “The great thing about cycling is its accessibility, we all know about Olympic ticketing. All the real fans are out there, in here it’s a bit of a prawn sandwich fest.”

  “Wiggo, spin to win”, proclaimed the banner close to the start, along with the mod roundel that has become synonymous with the first British winner of the Tour de France, and the sideburned national hero’s legs spun smoothly enough, his back barely moving despite the effort, in contrast to Froome’s “busier” style and the fourth-placed Taylor Phinney’s imitation of a nodding dog. He lay only second to Martin at the first checkpoint but pulled ahead by the second, 18.4km into the race.

  The rest resembled his Tour de France: a seamless road to victory, with the difference that here he was cheered on by a vast crowd of mainly British support. The men’s course was based on the same loop through Cobham and Esher as the women, but two additional circuits were added: one at the start, westwards towards Walton on Thames, turning at the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir, and a second at the end north through Teddington and Strawberry Hill. The picture was the same as for the women’s event earlier in the afternoon: massive crowds thronging town centres and leafy lanes alike.