by John Deering
Bradley Wiggins:
Tour de Force
A Note on the Author
JOHN DEERING was born in Fulham in 1967. He has lived in Middlesex, Oxfordshire, Essex, Surrey, Toulouse and Edinburgh. He is the author of Team on the Run: The Inside Story of the Linda McCartney Cycling Team and 12 Months in the Saddle, and is a regular contributor to Ride Cycling Review. He lives in Richmond-upon-Thames with his Giant Defy Advanced.
This eBook edition published in 2013 by
Birlinn Limited
West Newington House
Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
This edition first published in Great Britain in
2013 by Arena Sport an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
ISBN 978 1 78027 129 3
eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 532 1
Copyright © John Deering, 2012
The right of John Deering to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The author has made every effort to clear all copyright permissions, but where this has not been possible and amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
This book is for Brad.
For always being Brad.
Contents
Prologue: Liège
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Stage 1: Liège–Seraing, 198km
Sunday, 1 July 2012
Stage 2: Visé–Tournai, 207.5km
Monday, 2 July 2012
Stage 3: Orchies–Boulogne-sur-Mer, 197km
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Stage 4: Abbeville–Rouen, 214.5km
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
Stage 5: Rouen–Saint Quentin, 196.5km
Thursday, 5 July 2012
Stage 6: Épernay–Metz, 207.5km
Friday, 6 July 2012
Stage 7: Tomblaine–La Planche des Belles Filles, 199km
Saturday, 7 July 2012
Stage 8: Belfort–Porrentruy, 157.5km
Sunday, 8 July 2012
Stage 9: Arc-et-Senans–Besançon, Time Trial, 41.5km
Monday, 9 July 2012
Stage 10: Mâcon–Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, 194.5km
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
Stage 11: Albertville–La Toussuire, 148km
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Stage 12: Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne–Annonay Davézieux, 226km
Friday, 13 July 2012
Stage 13: Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux–Le Cap d’Agde, 217km
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Stage 14: Limoux–Foix, 191km
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Stage 15: Samatan–Pau, 158.5km
Monday, 16 July 2012
Stage 16: Pau–Bagnères-de-Luchon, 197km
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Stage 17: Bagnères-de-Luchon–Peyragudes, 143.5km
Thursday, 19 July 2012
Stage 18: Blagnac–Brive-la-Gaillarde, 222.5km
Friday, 20 July 2012
Stage 19: Bonneval–Chartres, Time Trial, 53.5km
Saturday, 21 July 2012
Stage 20: Rambouillet–Paris, 120km
Sunday, 22 July 2012
Epilogue: Hampton Court
Wednesday, 1 August 2012
PROLOGUE:
Liège
Saturday, 30 June 2012
It’s approaching seven minutes past five on Saturday, 30 June 2012. The 188th rider to begin this year’s Tour de France is inhaling deeply in the small start house that will fire him on his way towards Paris. There may be 3,500km to go, 90 hours of saddle time, the Alps, the Pyrenees, a defending champion to conquer and he may have finished no higher than fourth in this race before and only ever finished it three times, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the 188th starter is the favourite to win. He’s British, too. His name is Bradley Marc Wiggins OBE.
We’re in Liège. Not France – Belgium. The Tour de France makes regular sorties beyond its natural borders (notably for the start), usually every two years or so. In 2007, Bradley stood in a similar Tour de France start house waiting for his moment to begin, but in his home city of London. As the reigning World and Olympic Pursuit Champion, the short-time trial format of the prologue made him a big favourite to take the first yellow jersey of the race and Brad’s first stage win in the Tour de France. On that day, home expectation got the better of him and he was beaten into fourth place by one of his opponents today, Switzerland’s Fabian Cancellara. But that was 2007, when Brad’s sole aim was that short sprint around the streets of Westminster. Today he has bigger fish to fry. He wants to win the Tour de France.
Behind the mirrored mask of his aero helmet visor, Brad closes his eyes and visualises the course in front of him, the corners and the bends. He knows that the Tour de France lasts three weeks and can’t be won on any one day, but it can be lost in the blink of an eye. Last year he found himself in a ditch with a broken collarbone after a week’s racing. His predecessor as World and Olympic Pursuit Champion and British Tour hope, Chris Boardman, hadn’t even made it through the 1995 prologue when a horrific crash in storm-battered Brittany ruled him out with a shattered ankle after just a few minutes of the prescribed three weeks.
It would be nice to win today, but far from essential. Laying down a marker to his rivals before the race has begun in earnest would be a good thing, but would also raise a separate conundrum: will Brad’s Team Sky want to defend the yellow jersey that he will wear as winner of the prologue for twenty more stages? Especially as they are here with the stated second objective of helping his teammate, World Champion Mark Cavendish, to win as many stages as possible. The number one priority is to get around safely without losing any time to his most significant rivals: Cadel Evans, Vincenzo Nibali, Jurgen Van Den Broeck, Denis Menchov. There is a queue of suitors for the final yellow jersey in Paris.
It’s a fine day, with no showers, high winds or thunderstorms to worry about. French time trial champion Sylvain Chavanel has held the best time since earlier this afternoon. The first serious challenger to his position is the TT specialist Tony Martin of Germany. Wearing a white skinsuit emblazoned with the rainbow bands that tell everybody he is indeed the champion of the world in this discipline, Martin certainly looks the part and sets a furious tempo around the boulevards alongside the river Meuse. Misfortune awaits him though, and his low-profile carbon time trial bike has to be replaced just after the halfway point in the 6.4km race when he picks up a puncture. He gets a superfast bike change from his Omega mechanic in the following car, but you can’t change bikes and win prologues when they’re this short. The World Champion will end up sixteen seconds behind Chavanel, near enough to feel that he could have won if his luck had been in.
Jurgen Van Den Broeck, a true threat in the mountains to come, although not one in short bursts against the clock as today, rolls down the start ramp and takes to the road. It’s time for Bradley to step up. Breathing deeply and smoothly, intent on the road ahead, his red sideburns peeking out from below the billiard ball Team Sky aero helmet, he knows that the waiting is over at last. Every day since last year’s heartbreaking crash on the road to Châteauroux, Brad has been dreaming of this day, the chance to put it all right. All the training, all the racing, all the fam
ous victories he has already strung together this season point to today in Liège. The starter raises his hand to count off the seconds. A few more deep breaths and Brad sets his jaw. Time to stand up and be counted. He’s off.
The route heads along the Meuse, often doubling back on itself to head down the opposing carriageway. Though an all-out effort is required for a shot at victory, control and caution are needed at the corners, often full 180-degree turnabouts. Brad’s awareness of his power output and what he needs to deliver to win is acute, but he also knows that his Pinarello time trial machine is a weapon built for speed in straight lines, not for zipping around city streets. He blasts along the wide boulevards but slows carefully for the tight angles, warned continuously by the calm voice in his ear, his directeur sportif (DS) Sean Yates in the car behind. Together they have been over this course many times in the past few days of preparation.
Brad is in tenth place at the first time check. Has he kept something under the bonnet? It appears that he has. The long sweeping roads of the second half of this short race see the Brit begin to open the throttle. His long illustrious history in track pursuiting has left him with an almost preternatural ability to time and judge his effort. World Junior Champion at just seventeen years of age and later World Champion at the same event no fewer than three times, Brad knows how to keep his effort steady and increase the pace relentlessly as he closes on the line.
He plunges down the boulevard d’Avroy and breaks the beam on the finish line fractions of a second quicker than the long-time leader Chavanel who smiles ruefully at his luck. It’s now Brad’s turn to wait. Just about to leave the start house a short distance away is Mr Prologue himself, Fabian Cancellara. The Swiss has brought home the prologue bacon no fewer than four times in the Tour de France, the first time being in this very city in 2004 when he consigned Lance Armstrong in his pomp to a shock defeat. The rumours among the press band in Liège were that Spartacus was on the way out, his legs not what they were, his collarbone still uncomfortable since his heavy crash in the Tour of Flanders in April, and younger riders were ready to grab his crown.
Perhaps they were a little hasty. Cancellara, despite the top ten riders home being separated by a mere handful of seconds, astonishingly thumps seven seconds into Wiggins in second. Tour de France prologue number five is his, and so is that coveted first yellow jersey.
Bradley Wiggins is quietly satisfied. He has taken a little time from every one of his rivals for the overall victory and saved his team from the effort of a fraught first week protecting the yellow jersey. He hasn’t won the battle, but in the first skirmish in the war of the Tour de France 2012, he has put fear into the hearts of his enemies.
‘I’m really calm, really relaxed. I keep taking myself back to reality by putting my headphones on and just taking myself out of this madness, because this isn’t reality at the moment. It’d be very easy to get drawn into all this,’ says Brad after his iPod-soundtracked warmdown on the rollers as he attempts to brush off the chaos that is always attendant around team buses at the Tour. ‘Bit of Otis Redding.’
STAGE 1:
Liège–Seraing, 198km
Sunday, 1 July 2012
Sky like to do things differently.
Dave Brailsford transformed British track cycling through using professional training methods and preparation, and leaving nothing to chance. His GB national set-up reached its zenith at the 2012 Olympics when they grabbed seven of the ten gold medals on offer.
Brailsford had long dreamed of transferring the success of the track squad to the road. He knew as well as anybody that success in the velodrome meant Olympic success and huge national pride, but in cycling it’s the road that matters. In 2007 he began to talk openly about establishing a pro road set-up, somewhere that the track prodigies coming through the national system could aim their sights. Riders like Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and Geraint Thomas had all been key members of the track performance programme, but all of their ultimate goals lay on the tarmac of Europe. What if Brailsford could build an umbrella organisation to keep these talents together? It would have to be a British team with a British sponsor, a national team for the country to unite behind in a way that had never happened in cycling before.
The 2007 Tour de France, after the amazing weekend in London that kicked it off, developed into one of the most exciting contests in the long history of the race. A stick-thin pale Danish boy called Michael Rasmussen and a prodigiously talented Spanish rider by the name of Alberto Contador knocked seven bells out of each other every time the course headed uphill. It was riveting viewing, and many man-hours were lost as bike fans the world over bunked off work to follow the daily drama. The battle royal raged across France with the combatants drawing on superhuman exertion to put one over each other.
But Rasmussen’s efforts were indeed superhuman. His challenge unravelled as a trail of missed drugs tests and a sorry story of ‘vampire’ dodging, during which he led the UCI testers a merry dance as they attempted to pin him down, saw him thrown off the race. The reputation of the Tour and the sport itself was once again swimming in detritus at the bottom of the world’s dirtiest sink. In fact, make that the world’s least appealing urinal, as double stage winner Alexandre Vinokourov went out the same exit door of shame after brazenly cheating the blood doping regulations.
With the French press gloomily announcing ‘le mort du Tour’ and the legacy of dozens of sordid tales of doping, cheating, lying and subterfuge littering the sport’s recent history, this was one of cycling’s lowest moments. It certainly felt that way to those fans who had been avoiding the morning commute to cheer on their heroes. Heroes with feet of clay, it now seemed. Even Bradley Wiggins, a frequent and outspoken critic of doping, found himself drawn into the 2007 mess when his teammate on the French Cofidis squad, Cristian Moreni, tested positive for testosterone. The hormone is known as ‘the idiot’s drug’ in cycling due to the strong chance of you being caught if you abuse it. The whole team were removed from the race, showing that even the most vehement of protesters can find himself tarred with a great big dirty brush.
How would Dave Brailsford be able to put his master plan into action against this tawdry backdrop? He faced the issue head on, talking about providing an antidote to the constant negative stories – ‘the doom and gloom’ as he called it. The garlanded cycling writer Richard Moore would even later mischievously suggest that Brailsford was perhaps using ‘the logic of the property market: buy when prices are low’.
As it happened, in the end, the deal almost came to Brailsford rather than him chasing down the cash in the traditional way of these things. Sky, the Murdoch empire’s broadcasting giant, were looking for a sport in which to get involved – a sport they could own publicity-wise, a sport that worked on a myriad of different levels from children’s participation through family leisure pursuits via fitness fanatics to the best professional outfit in the game. Sponsors have a closer relationship with their teams in cycling than any other sport. Steven Gerrard doesn’t play for Carlsberg, he plays for Liverpool. Lewis Hamilton doesn’t drive for Santander, he drives for McLaren. But Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish, in 2012 at least, ride for Sky. There’s value in that.
In fact, even more value than you might think. Sky, under the aegis of BSkyB, the operating company, directly paid £6m towards the running of the team in 2011, the last year for which figures are available at the time of writing. This came out of the company’s marketing budget, which was, for the same period, wait for it, £1.2bn. OK, we don’t know the costs for 2012, and expensive arrivals like Mark Cavendish don’t come cheap, however, the transfer costs incurred by the team when buying Wiggins, among others, out of his previous contract, will have disappeared. So, let’s just suppose for a minute that BSkyB put in the same amount of money in 2012 as they did in 2011. That means the entire publicity attained by the team in this glory-soaked season accounts for just 0.5% of their total marketing spend. That sounds like the sort of value most peop
le can appreciate.
It sounded very much like a match made in heaven.
*
In the spirit of doing things differently, Sky had given themselves what Brailsford would call a ‘nice problem to have’. When the team was eventually launched at the beginning of the 2010 season, he talked confidently of producing a ‘British winner of the Tour de France within five years’. Gasps of amazement, even ridicule, were heard around the cycling world, but they were scared of Sky’s power. Ever since 2010, it had been clear that the man chosen to fill those intimidating shoes of destiny was Bradley Wiggins. Team Sky arrived in Liège on the last weekend in June 2012 with the avowed aim of delivering victory for Wiggins in Paris.
The ‘nice problem to have’ was Mark Cavendish. In the interests of building their British team and thus hiring the best British riders, they had spent years courting the fastest finisher in the sport, possibly the fastest ever finisher in the sport. The Manx rider came at a high price, but he also arrived as the World Champion, BBC Sports Personality of the Year and the winner of twenty stages of the Tour de France. The question was: could Team Sky deliver on both fronts? Could they guide Wiggins to overall victory and simultaneously lead Cavendish to the stage wins they had signed him for? Could they support Cav’s bid to win the points jersey while Wiggins fought for the biggest prize? Wiggo in yellow and Cav in green?
There was a precedent. In 1996, the German T-Mobile team had managed to win the race with Bjarne Riis, take second place with the emerging Jan Ullrich and the green points jersey for the speedy Erik Zabel. Zabel had become a confidant of Cavendish in recent years, guiding the young Brit when he first entered the world of Tour de France sprinting at that same T-Mobile set-up. However, things had been different for Cavendish at the various incarnations of the High Road/HTC/Columbia team from which he arrived at Team Sky. There, he was king of the castle. Da man. They surrounded him with powerful domestiques like Bernie Eisel and race-proven sprinters in themselves like Matt Goss and Mark Renshaw whose sole purpose was to get the Manx Missile to the finish line in the right place to do his thang. And his thang invariably involved a big grin and a victory salute. How would they cope with those demands and the need to control the race for Brad? Would they be able to sit on the front all day to dissuade attacks, chase down escapees, keep Wiggins out of the wind, line out the bunch in the high mountains, protect a potential yellow jersey for many days on end and produce a high-speed train to lead out Cavendish? It was a tall order. Perhaps Cav would revert to his early-career style of joining the trains of other sprinters’ teams as they pounded towards the line in tight formation before popping round them cheekily to take the victory for himself? A young prodigy might get away with that for a season in his youth, but the World Champion at the world’s biggest team would make himself few friends. And you need friends in bike racing or bad things start to happen.