by John Deering
Stage 1, from Liège to Seraing, would help us find out.
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Fabian Cancellara looks good in yellow. Five prologue wins have delivered him plenty of days in the maillot jaune over the years, and his power on the hard roads and fast stages of the Tour’s first week have often kept him in the front of the race until it meets the mountains. The Swiss hero loves racing in Belgium and northern France, too, as his dominating victories in the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix have proved. His grin tops the yellow jersey with pride as the Tour rolls out en masse for the first time.
Bike racing has changed considerably in the last few years. In the old days, races would be packed with lengthy stages that would begin at a leisurely pace before rocketing through the final hour at a furious speed as the sprinters’ teams vied for supremacy in the final shakedown. These days, bizarrely, the fastest hour is often the first. This is because, with stage wins at such a premium, everybody is keen to get in ‘the break’. Not a break, but the break. The second the commissaire’s flag is withdrawn inside the red car at the front to signify that neutralisation is over and racing can begin, riders begin firing themselves out of the bunch and haring off up the road. The peloton, filled as it is with other riders who want to be in the break, quickly accelerates to breakneck speeds to bring them back. There are plenty of riders here who have no hope of winning the overall prize and no hope of winning sprint stages, who will lose out in the time trials and get destroyed in the mountains. What they crave is the chance of a stage victory, getting themselves into a tasty little move, outrunning the bunch and outfoxing their breakaway companions to taste Tour glory. They will also be doing their hard-pressed teammates a favour, as they can relax in the bosom of the bunch, safe in the knowledge that their buddy up the road will save them from a day killing themselves at the front to bring it all back.
Liège on Stage 1 is no different to this pattern, and Cancellara’s RadioShack-Nissan team ride tempo while various hopefuls launch themselves towards Seraing. Those trying to digest their generous breakfasts in the crowd behind are delighted when things calm down a little sooner than is often the case and the break forms. Six riders, no famous names, no danger to those with their eye on ultimate glory. After a few moments of jousting with the sextet a handful of yards in front of them, the peloton relents and they gather themselves for a few minutes, Cancellara’s men ensuring it doesn’t get silly and jeopardise his yellow jersey.
This morning in the Team Sky bus, Sean Yates had laid out the day’s priorities:
No crashes.
Keep Brad safe.
Put a rider in the break.
Keep the race together in the final stages for Cav.
Lead out Cav.
Give Edvald Boasson Hagen free rein.
The first week of the Tour de France is a dangerous place to be. People fall off. Dreams are shattered. The best laid plans of mice and bike riders et cetera. When Wiggins hit the deck, resplendent in his newly acquired GB Champion’s jersey twelve months ago, it was the death of a million hopes for British bike fans, not to mention the man himself, his team and his family. Crashes happen, but there are things that can be done. It’s safer to ride near the front. It’s better to have your teammates around. And it’s good if it’s not raining.
If there’s a rider from Team Sky in the break, less work is required from his teammates to chase things down. It’s also an opportunity to win a stage if the move stays clear, or even a chance to take yellow when time gaps are so narrow at this early stage in the overall competition.
Cav’s requirements become more accentuated the nearer we get to the finish. If he’s in there, he’s trusted to win. He’s the fastest man here out of the 200-odd riders competing. If the team can bring him through, they will.
Edvald Boasson Hagen, champion of Norway, is a popular man at Team Sky. Blessed with immense strength, he has the ability to blast his way to victory on hard days. His overall hopes are hampered by his difficulties in the high mountains, but he is a wild card, a quality accessory that any team would be glad to have. Let him go his own way.
The crashes have begun. First to hit the deck is Tony Martin, his run of bad luck continuing after a puncture robbed him of a big shout in yesterday’s prologue. He carries on with a battered wrist, lacerated elbow and sour demeanour.
Team Sky regroup around their leader and settle in for the long haul, taking it in turns to make sorties back to Yates’s car and return with bottles. It’s a showery day, and as the pace picks up towards the day’s dénouement, things become increasingly fraught. The six escapees show no desire to be caught, and though the RadioShack-Nissan-powered peloton closes the gap to a minute with 30km left to ride, they grit their teeth and press on gamely.
The dreaded shout of ‘Chute dans le peloton!’ crackles Yates’s radio, and he cranes his neck round the cars and riders in front to see who has gone down. Luis Leon Sanchez from Rabobank is hurt . . . a couple of Spanish guys . . . oh shit, a Team Sky jersey. It’s his trusted road captain, Australia’s Mick Rogers. Vastly experienced and a former contender himself, Rogers is Yates’s eyes and ears in the bunch. He is bumped and bruised but uninjured. Yates lets out a breath he has been holding for some time and chases after the race, now closing inexorably on the six men in front and the finish in Seraing.
Cavendish moves up under the patronage of his minder Bernie Eisel. Eisel arrived at Team Sky from HTC with Cavendish and has been at his side unstintingly for the last couple of years.
The big danger to the pure sprinters – Cavendish, Greipel, Farrar, Petacchi – is the siting of a nasty little hill within the finishing town of Seraing. It’s clear that several riders have this in mind, and the pace reaches crazy levels as the escapees are finally gobbled up and those with aspirations push on. There is a huge roar from the crowds beneath the finish line’s big screens as the yellow jersey himself, Spartacus, Fabian Cancellara launches a searing move with just 1,500m to go. He tears the field apart with the burst, but two men just manage to hang on to him: powerful Slovak Peter Sagan and our own Edvald Boasson Hagen. Unable to rest lest they be reeled in by the desperate bunch, Cancellara opens the sprint, but he’s easily overhauled by a blistering burst from Sagan who has time to pull off a dancing victory salute as he crosses the line. Edvald is third. A powerful performance but not at the level of Sagan. Cancellara has lost the stage but retained the jersey and his famous grin.
What of Cavendish? Like the other pure sprinters, the speed and the severity of the final short climb was too much for him to be in a position to compete and he saved his finish for the following day, rolling in among the main field in 128th place.
Wiggins, however, has had a first stage to remember. Having avoided the mishaps that have split the bunch at times, including the spill that put his captain Mick Rogers on the deck alongside him, Bradley has stayed calm, maintained his position in the bunch and, despite not having designs on stage victory, positively flew up the last climb to take an excellent sixteenth spot on the stage alongside his main rivals Evans and Nibali. He will look them in the eye tonight and say, ‘I’m coming for you.’
PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT TO talk about Bradley’s dad, but it’s his mum they should be talking about.
Linda was a seventeen-year-old local girl with a love of bike racing when she met Garry Wiggins near her home in West London. She was a regular at the local track and her pretty blonde looks and independent nature soon brought her to the attention of the attractively cavalier Australian rider who was one of the more impressive guys to be seen on the Paddington track. He hit on her, she hit on him back and she found herself with a rather exciting and rakish boyfriend five years her senior.
Garry had arrived from provincial Victoria with a bike, a few Aussie dollars, and a burning ambition to make a name for himself in European cycling. He bullied his way on to what was then a thriving track scene, using his skill, his power and his fists when necessary.
In 1979, Linda married Garry and
they decided to set up home in Belgium to further Garry’s racing career. His plans lay not on the road but on the lucrative six-day circuit. The six-day is a popular niche event in some areas today, but it was big news in the 1970s and 1980s. A circus of riders would move from town to town and set up shop in an arena for a week where they would ride either on the boards of a permanent track or one constructed for the occasion. There was an annual event at Wembley Arena, or Empire Pool as it was then known, called the Skol Six. The gloriously named event brings back images of cheap beer sloshing around in plastic glasses and men hurling encouragement and abuse at sportsmen while scarcely noticing what is going on. A bit like Saturday afternoon in the Tavern at the Lord’s Test.
The riders would perform in pairs over six nights of racing, riding a form of tag-team racing called the madison after Madison Square Garden in New York, where the discipline had developed. Effectively, only one of the pair is racing. The other tends to roll around the top of the banking out of the way. When his teammate is flagging, he hurls his fresher partner into the action with a handsling. One of cycling’s more dangerous stunts, the handsling, along with the harem-scarem nature of the random tags going on at any moment, makes the madison extremely exciting to watch, but hard to follow. Hence the booze and the hollering hordes.
Garry Wiggins was pretty good at it. From the Wiggins’s little apartment in Ghent he would race most days in the summer, competing in the small circuit races known as kermesses that each small town staged on its local roads. Then in the winter it would be on to the tracks of the six-day ring in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, and a chance to earn some proper money.
It was into this strange world that Bradley Marc Wiggins arrived on 28 April 1980. Unlike anything that happens at Team Sky these days, in 1980, Bradley was very much Not Part Of The Plan. Garry had already managed to leave one family behind in his life – a wife and daughter from a teenage marriage in Australia – and now the second one was coming under some pressure. Amphetamine use was rife in those long days and nights of sustained racing and the lack of proper doping controls meant that riders were often looking for the other type of speed to get them through their working weeks. Garry filled that need for himself and plenty of others by being the go-to man in Ghent if you needed a helping hand with what cyclists have always euphemistically termed medication. According to Brad himself, writing in his excellent 2009 autobiography In Pursuit of Glory, after a family visit to Australia, Garry smuggled back a whole bunch of amphetamines in his baby’s nappy. That must make Brad the youngest drug offender on the cycling circuit by some distance.
Amphetamines, booze, a hard man’s nature and a temper. It must have been pretty tough for Linda, struggling to look after a baby at her young age in a small apartment in a foreign country. People are often mistaken that being in Belgium, a dual-language country, means that people speak both French and Flemish. In fact, it’s much more like England and Wales: you wouldn’t expect to walk into a supermarket in Norwich and be understood if you asked for your lottery ticket and 20 Marlboro Lights in Welsh. That’s Belgium. Wallonia in the south is pure French; Flanders in the north is all guttural Flemish, a language that has been described as sounding like a rural version of Dutch. Linda’s French lessons from school weren’t very useful for integrating into Ghent society. A drunken, angry and sometimes violent husband was the last thing she and her baby needed.
The couple struggled through to Christmas 1982, fighting, breaking up and reuniting regularly, until Garry didn’t turn up in England as planned for a family Christmas. He’d decided to spend it with his new girlfriend instead. That was it as far as his attempt at happy families went.
A child’s bike turned up on Brad’s third birthday, but that was the only thing he or Linda got out of the itinerant elder Wiggins for the rest of the boy’s childhood. And Linda certainly didn’t miss the black eyes.
Linda’s parents, George and Maureen, were a godsend. While she worked around the clock to provide for her young boy, his grandparents did all they possibly could to help and support her. She moved back home – even though her two sisters were still there – and the family dug in and helped each other out. It wasn’t long before the hard-working young mum had grafted her way into a proper flat for herself and her toddler, within walking distance of the old place in Paddington.
Granddad George was Bradley’s constant companion in those early days. Sport ran through George like working-class blood, but the sports he took Brad to week in, week out during those formative years were far removed from the Tour de France. For racing and excitement, it wasn’t the velodrome, it was the greyhound tracks of London; and for guile and craft it was snooker and darts in the British Legion.
Linda unsurprisingly found herself a new man, despite not having much time for looking with her long hours and her inquisitive schoolboy running around her skirts at every other moment. Brendan was a thoroughly decent guy who respected and nurtured Bradley through his school years, and he and Brad’s mother also gave the boy a brother, too, Ryan, seven years Brad’s junior.
Bradley Wiggins was a typically bright London schoolboy, popular enough at school, well loved at home, playing football in the streets and parks with his mates, getting in and out of the odd scrape but nothing to write home about. Where was the genesis of the Tour de France hero? How did this gangly smiling kid become a World Champion and Olympic gold medallist?
STAGE 2:
Visé–Tournai, 207.5km
Monday, 2 July 2012
Each team in the Tour de France is made up of nine riders. The designated leader of the team wears a number ending in one, hence Bradley Wiggins’s 101. Each of the riders has a specific role. Team Sky is as follows:
101: Bradley Wiggins. The leader. The man. The one. The reason we’re all here. Fourth in this race three years ago, he revealed his potential. His first Tour with Team Sky was also Team Sky’s first Tour and it proved to be a steep learning curve for both parties. In 2011 he arrived in great form with an improved team but was an early crash victim. This year he starts as the favourite to win the race.
102: Edvald Boasson Hagen. The wild card. A massive talent, champion of Norway, he’s at his best in the long hard classics and a powerful hitter with a chance to pull off a win on any given day. Licence to seek out stage wins without any specific assisting role but will be expected to provide pace and effort to aid the team effort when required.
103: Mark Cavendish. The fastest man in the world. The World Champion. The quickest sprinter in this, or any race, and the most prolific stage winner riding. Still only 27 and already the winner of twenty stages. Here to add to those, but unsure of how much support he can rely on from a team committed to winning the overall prize.
104: Bernie Eisel. Cav’s right-hand man. Mark Cavendish brought his trusty lieutenant with him to Team Sky from the engine room of their HTC squad after plundering Tour wins together for years. The motor-mouthed Austrian is a massively popular member of the team and expected to single-handedly do the job a whole team did last year and lead Cav out.
105: Chris Froome. The secret weapon. The African-bred Brit climbed to a completely unpredicted second place in last year’s Vuelta a España, as good as any result by a British cyclist in a grand tour in the history of cycling. Here, his job is to accompany Wiggins every step of the way in the mountains, and provide a Plan B if the sideburned Plan A doesn’t pan out.
106: Christian Knees. The horse. Sean Yates would never want to take an army into battle without at least one man to do his old job. Get on the front. Raise the tempo. Close things down. Put some hurt on. With a man like Knees on the front, the others can take a break, knowing the lanky German will do the work of ten men if necessary.
107: Richie Porte. The class act. The young Australian has carried out his apprenticeship alongside Alberto Contador at Saxo Bank and is ready to become the hitter he has always promised to be. Strong in the time trial and when things curve uphill, he has all the at
tributes to be a leader of a grand tour team himself. This year, he is one of those whom Wiggins will look to lean on in the Alps and Pyrenees, and a possible Plan C.
108: Mick Rogers. The captain. Three times the World Time Trial Champion, the 32-year-old from New South Wales has always been known for his wise head. Briefly a contender himself when leading the T-Mobile and HTC squads, his role as decision-maker on the road for Wiggins and the rest sits comfortably on his experienced shoulders. Will be expected to be one of the pace-setters on the lower slopes of the big climbs.
109: Kanstantsin Siutsou. The pro. The Belarusian has been on the scene since becoming World Under-23 Champion in 2004, picking up stage wins and overall places in the grand tours ever since. Impressed Team Sky while at HTC last year when his prodigious climbing dragged Wiggins back up to Evans and Vinokourov in the Dauphiné Libéré when the Brit was in danger of losing the lead. Will form part of a powerful climbing phalanx with Froome, Porte and Rogers to fight for Wiggins in the mountains.