Bradley Wiggins

by John Deering

  There were rumours that an on-the-spot offer was made of a contract with Team Sky if he pulled it out for Wiggins that day, but stories like that abound in cycling. What is more certain is that when La Toussuire appeared in the roadbook of the 2012 Tour de France, everyone at Team Sky would have remembered how the experienced Belarusian had ridden there a year before. He rode alongside Wiggins for the 2012 Dauphiné where the Brit retained his title, and also during his successful assault on Switzerland’s Tour de Romandie. Siutsou was well worth his place in the nine. Which is why it was so disappointing that he became the first rider to abandon the 2012 Tour de France.

  We’ve heard a lot about crashes in the first week of the Tour, but this wasn’t really what we had in mind. This was not some crazy snarl-up in the last few kilometres as everybody rides flat out to hold their place or move up the line, or a death-defying descent in torrential rain. With 50km to go in a fairly typical northern stage, there was a touch of wheels and Siutsou hit the deck hard enough to break his tibia. It happens. But that doesn’t make it easier to bear for you or your team when you are the victim.

  After that, the crashes come thick and fast. The roads of this stage are narrower than the first two, as the organisers attempt to take the race up some smaller local climbs, and the attendant nervousness spreads. Team Sky group around Wiggins, and Yates and Rogers are adamant that they need to ride at the front, the safest place in the bunch.

  However, as Chris Froome would later ruefully point out, ‘You can’t have 200 riders on the front though.’ With the finish atop a sharp little rise similar to the springboard Peter Sagan had used for victory on Stage 1, everybody was desperate to be at the head of things. Into the frantic final kilometre, and Wiggins and his entourage are within touching distance of the front when the experienced Katusha sprinter Óscar Freire is squeezed into the barriers directly in front of them, bringing everybody on the left-hand side of the road to a standstill. Brad was able to clip out of his pedals and stop, but Froome found himself straddling the barriers in an effort to avoid hitting the deck.

  Panic quickly subsided when it was clear that nobody else had been injured, and the riders, shaken by Siutsou’s exit, calmly proceeded to the line. Bradley’s second spot was protected by the Tour rule that dictates all riders delayed by a crash in the final kilometre shall be given the same time as the bunch they were in when it happened. Phew.

  In front of them, Sylvain Chavanel was trying to ride roughshod over that, anyway. The Frenchman, level on time with Wiggins, launched a ferocious attack to try and win on the slopes into Boulogne. If he could finish one second clear of the bunch, second place overall would be his. If it could be eight seconds, then the maillot jaune itself would be his. He hadn’t reckoned on the awesome power of the 21-year-old Liquigas-Cannondale Slovak though, and Peter Sagan soared clear with immense power to take his second great stage and solidify his grasp on the green jersey. Behind him, our hero Edvald smashed his way to the finish line to take second place, with the yellow jersey of Switzerland’s own tough guy, Fabian Cancellara, just behind him.

  Team Sky retreat to the Big Black Bus to consider the day, lick their wounds, consider their losses and count their blessings. They’re a man down, but the hitters survived some scares. They could have lost a serious chunk of time if the big pile-up had happened a couple of minutes earlier. Breathe steadily. Move on.

  Sean Yates speaks to Sky Sports about Kanstantsin Siutsou. ‘He is a big loss. We have to deal with it. It will just impact on the workload of the other seven members of the team.’

  Non-cycling followers watching Sky Sports News furrow their brows. ‘I thought he just said they were down to eight riders? Now he’s talking about seven?’ Of course, for Yates, it’s obvious that there is one rider who won’t lift a finger unless he has to: Bradley Wiggins. He is here to win and must be protected and assisted at every turn.

  And then there were eight. As Yates says: ‘One minute all is calm, the next minute all hell is let loose. It’s a little bit nerve-racking.’

  REALLY, THERE USED TO be only one way to be a full-time cyclist. You had to join a team and be a professional road rider. There were the odd few who would go to Europe and live off scraps at sponsored amateurs and hope that their results would bring them that pro contract, or an even more select band that Bradley Wiggins’s father, Garry, had tried to break into who could make a living out of the European winter indoor track circuit, but even they would usually supplement their income by riding on a pro team in the summer.

  In the 1970s and 1980s there was quite a tidy home-based professional scene. Based largely upon criteriums, town centre racing that would take place on evenings throughout the summer months, and the round-Britain Milk Race, there was a fair amount of cash to be had. Riders like Keith ‘Leggo’ Lambert and Sid Barras grafted hard for their wins and led powerful teams of tough pros. They were professional sportsmen and, if not salaried like today’s sports stars, they could earn a good living and be counted alongside the footballers, cricketers and rugby league stars of their day. Rugby league is actually a good comparison, as, like rugby, cycling had a seismic split down the middle. Professionals and amateurs. Never the twain shall meet. The amateurs had their racing scene, with the peak being the amateur National and World Championships and the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, while the professionals had an entirely different calendar.

  Great British riders of the era like Chris Walker, Malcolm Elliott or Sean Yates were unable to illuminate the Olympics at their peak, because they were pros. A serial UK winner like Chris Lillywhite, now working alongside his old teammate Shane Sutton as part of the GB set-up, turned professional at seventeen and never got a sniff of the Olympic rings. The great Sean Kelly had been pre-selected for Ireland to go to the Montreal Olympics but was caught racing in apartheid South Africa under an assumed name for money and turfed out, causing him to turn professional earlier than intended.

  Two things changed to unite the sport during the 1990s. Firstly, the Olympics became ‘open’. Anybody could enter regardless of their professional status. The traditionalists argued that the amateur ethos of sport for its own sake was irreparably damaged, while the reformers retorted that as a celebration of the best in sport, the Olympics should feature the best sportsmen and women. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the deed was done, and people like Miguel Indurain, Tim Henman and Ryan Giggs became, largely to their own surprise and delight, Olympic athletes. It meant that the Olympics were no longer a sideshow in cycling, they were part of the main event, and professional careers could be tilted towards the medal podium.

  The other big change was the introduction of National Lottery funding. Amateur sports that had always been the backbone of the Olympic programme like athletics, swimming and cycling had always relied on dedicated individuals prepared to go to breaking point in their home and family lives, foregoing work or relaxation in return for squeezing training in somewhere and somehow. This had ultimately resulted in Great Britain’s worst return at a modern Olympics in 1996, when Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent’s brilliant victory represented the country’s only gold medal of the Games. UK Sport was established the year after the Atlanta Games, with the responsibility of distributing money raised via the National Lottery to fund sport.

  As well as promoting grass roots schemes and growing public participation in sport and exercise, the stated aims in UK Sport were to increase the number of medals at Olympics and World Championships. This was revolutionary for cycling, as Chris Boardman’s coach Peter Keen and his successor Dave Brailsford were able to establish the phenomenally successful track cycling programme that won so many medals at Athens, Beijing and London, and turn Great Britain into the world’s most successful track cycling nation.

  One of the ways they did this was to pay a stipend to athletes likely to make the grade to enable them to train and prepare properly without going to work. In other words, a cyclist could now make a living without having to choose between turnin
g professional or going to the Olympics.

  The seventeen-year-old Bradley Wiggins had been dreaming of the Olympics for five years after seeing Chris Boardman make them his own in 1992. He went to the National Junior Track Championships and won the 3,000m pursuit, the scratch race, the points race and the 1km time trial. He was also making waves in the Pete Buckley Trophy, a national series of road races for juniors. It gained him selection for the World Junior Championships in Cape Town, a high honour for a rider’s first year in the juniors, and a berth that had often been left empty in previous years as the expense of sending a team was weighed against the likelihood of success. Brad finished sixteenth in the individual pursuit and then a wonderful fourth in the points race behind the man who would one day be his road captain at Team Sky, Mick Rogers.

  Coaching, training and diet became Brad’s new life. He had had a taste of how things could be in South Africa and he wasn’t about to let that life slip through his fingers for want of application. He ate, drank and breathed cycling, and by his own admission must have been a very boring teenager. A year after Cape Town, he was on a plane for Havana for his second Junior Worlds, a year older, a year stronger, a year wiser. With that in mind, another fourth spot in the points race was a huge disappointment, and the eighteen-year-old was crushed by what he perceived as his failure. The team management persuaded him to have a crack at the pursuit, which he saw as his weaker event. Amazingly relaxed and pressure-free after the expectation of the points race, Bradley sailed through the rounds and ‘before I knew it I had won the bloody title’ as he later described in In Pursuit of Glory.

  And before he knew it, the Junior World Champion was in Kuala Lumpur with the senior England squad for the Commonwealth Games and was winning a silver medal as part of a hastily rejigged team pursuit squad. The five-man squad from which the quartet of riders were chosen was comprised of Bradley Wiggins, Matt Illingworth, Colin Sturgess, Jonny Clay and Rob Hayles. They represented the best of Great Britain as well as England, and Bradley knew only too well what that meant: a place at the Olympics was in his grasp. With only two years until Sydney, he was part of the best team pursuit squad this country had ever produced, running the all-conquering Australians close in Malaysia, with the best yet to come.

  That wasn’t even the sum of 1998’s good news. UK Cycling took their new Lottery money from UK Sport and gave £20,000 of it to Brad to allow him to train properly and prepare to win medals for his country.

  There was a new star in the firmament.

  STAGE 4:

  Abbeville–Rouen, 214.5km

  Wednesday, 4 July 2012

  The road to Rouen is paved with uncertainty. Crashes, crashes, crashes: the story of the first week in the Tour de France for many years. Is it getting worse? Or is it the fact that we have a man in this race with the hopes and dreams of a nation riding on his shoulders? Is that why we watch with white knuckles gripping the armchair? We’re dreading ‘Chute dans le peloton!’ to be swiftly followed by ‘101, Wiggins.’

  It doesn’t help that we’ve been here before. It is a fact of cycling that people who crash tend to crash again. They don’t necessarily cause crashes – though some do – but they don’t have the supernatural awareness some have which helps them avoid the accidents when they happen. As somebody who has crashed out of this event once already, concerns run high for Bradley Wiggins.

  Mark Cavendish is no stranger to ripped shorts either. He has been accused of being reckless by his sprinting opponents, and, when he was younger perhaps, they may have had a point. These days, his problems in the sprint tend to stem from fearlessness rather than recklessness, as he continues to put his nose in where it hurts and take the risks needed to win races. Being the most marked man in the sport brings its own dangers, too, as rivals fight to get on the wheel of the fastest finisher. In a sprint stage, if you finish in front of Cav, you probably win the race. More insidiously, there are those who will actively try to baulk him, as the Italian sprinter Roberto Ferrari did in May’s Giro d’Italia. Ferrari callously flicked off his line when he sensed Cavendish beginning to overtake him in the classic ‘switch’ – the most underhand and despised of all sprinting misdemeanours. At an estimated 75kph, with no protective clothing other than a skid lid, the World Champion was lucky to get up from that crash and continue in the race.

  It wasn’t his only crash in the Giro, either. One problem riders don’t have to contend with on the Tour as much as its Italian counterpart is corners. The Giro organisers love a 90-degree bend 200m from the line. At least the Tour bosses realise that this is probably a bad idea if you want to keep your competitors alive, even if a smattering of road furniture and roundabouts in the final run-in are often unavoidable. The beauty of road cycling as a sport is that it takes place on public roads that we can all use. The downfall of road cycling as a sport is that it takes place on public roads that we all know have bends, potholes, bumps and narrow bits.

  You can guess where this is leading to . . .

  Brad avoided today’s big smash, but Cav didn’t, and neither did his constant companion Bernie Eisel, who was naturally alongside him at the time. With numerous abrasions and a damaged hand, the World Champion rolled over the line a few minutes after the stage winner, but within that small vignette was contained his most painful injury: André Greipel had won the stage. The German was definitely the fastest in this sprint in the absence of his more garlanded former teammate and took the prize accordingly. This made Cavendish as livid as the rips in his jersey and shorts, and the blood dripping down his battered body. The fact that Alessandro Petacchi had finished second just showed him that, in his mind, taking his 22nd Tour stage would have been like removing sweets from the proverbial toddler.

  ‘We see this kind of thing time and time again,’ Sean Yates wearily told the Sky News reporters at the finish. ‘Nobody wants to see crashes for anybody and we were among the victims again today.’

  Somebody else who, perhaps surprisingly, decided to have a public opinion on the accident was Mark Cavendish’s girlfriend. Peta Todd took to Twitter to declare imperiously, ‘This is people’s lives. If you haven’t got the intention of making sure you have the team to look after the World Champ don’t just wing it. He is just a man.’

  The Team Sky hierarchy’s reaction to being lectured on tactics by a Page 3 glamour model sadly went unrecorded. Questioned about Todd’s comments, Dave Brailsford shrugged and said, ‘Sprinters crash, that’s just part and parcel of the job.’ He could have swapped ‘Cavendish crashes’ for ‘Sprinters crash’, but we knew what he meant.

  It is interesting to reflect on what Team Sky could have done differently to keep Cavendish out of such a crash when he was fighting for position in the run-in to a finish that he fancied. Or perhaps Todd blames all his teams for all her boyfriend’s crashes over the years? What seemed more likely is that this was an opportunity to let off some steam about the more general issue: that, for once, Mark Cavendish was not the star of the show. Team Sky were here to make Bradley Wiggins the first British winner of the Tour de France, not retain Mark Cavendish’s green jersey of best sprinter. Surely Cavendish, and by extension his partner, must have known that when he signed for Team Sky?

  To follow the logic of Todd’s rather rambling tweet, Team Sky should either build their team around Cavendish or not include him in their nine selected riders. We can only imagine what her reaction would have been if they had left him out of their Tour de France team. And Team Sky’s stated mission was to win the Tour de France with a British rider. Seriously, what did the Cavendish camp think? And what did Cavendish think when he heard about the row? Did he close his eyes and inwardly groan? Did he feel a warm glow of pride at hearing his partner support him so staunchly? Did he even discuss it with her beforehand, perhaps a subtle way of letting the world know how he felt without upsetting Team Sky’s precariously balanced apple cart?

  Those of us with an interest in modern sport know how Twitter can bring comradeship, enlight
enment and understanding to its participants, or instant opprobrium crashing down on the heads of those who use it unwisely. Goodness knows how many times Kevin Pietersen’s friends, family and teammates must have wanted to wrench his iPhone out of his hands and smash it into a million pieces before he bashed out another self-destructive 140 characters.

  Several of Team Sky’s riders’ partners are regular tweeters. It would seem likely that many of their followers do so because of the identity of their husbands and boyfriends rather than any personal prowess, though Todd’s modelling career has of course brought her plenty of fans of her own. This race still has more than two weeks to go, and the action hasn’t even started in earnest yet.

  THE EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD BRADLEY WIGGINS sat down at Christmas 1998 and thought about his future. He didn’t need any motivation to achieve his immediate goal: to go to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. He’d been dreaming about it since his first laps round his flats in 1992 as a twelve-year-old Boardman fan. He knew that to make this happen, he would have to be motivated enough to make 1999 a very hard year indeed. He would need the results to keep him in the frame for selection for Sydney and grow from being one of the world’s best juniors into a man.

  After Sydney, he would choose from one of the teams that had begun to follow his progress and turn professional, leave the track for the road and become a Tour de France rider. Those had been his twin ambitions ever since he’d begun racing in earnest at Herne Hill and on the Hayes Bypass: the Olympics and the Tour.

  He settled in well with the Great Britain track squad after his baptism with the big boys in Kuala Lumpur. The professionalism of the track squad was growing year on year and the new line-up for the 1999 World Championships in Berlin reflected that. Brad, Paul Manning, Bryan Steele, Matt Illingworth and Rob Hayles largely represented the new breed of Lottery-funded full-time athletes whose goal was medals at the World Championships and the Olympics. They would tackle the team pursuit in a better-prepared state than any team before them.