Bradley Wiggins

by John Deering

  One of the few other Englishmen who knows what it’s like to pull on the yellow jersey had a proud look on his face as he leaned back on his Jaguar and turned his face to the sun. ‘We laid down the law today and proved that we are very, very strong,’ said Sean Yates.

  Chris Froome is welcomed on to the podium twice, first to accept the Champagne as stage winner and then to don the polka dot jersey of King of the Mountains. It is one of the rare moments in the modern history of this race when the best climber, as Froome has clearly demonstrated he is, gets to wear the jersey. The jersey is decided by collecting points for being first over the top of the hills and mountains that are scattered all over the second two weeks of this race, so it tends to be won by a rider who is low enough on overall consideration to be able to slip into breaks every day and hunt down those points. Riders with higher aspirations – in Froome’s case, protecting his leader’s shiny new yellow jersey – have to forego this prize.

  Foregoing prizes is becoming a theme for Chris Froome.

  Bradley Wiggins steps up like he’s spent his life on that podium instead of spending his life waiting for this moment. The jersey is made for him. He kisses the podium girls with the relaxed confidence of a former lover. He shakes Bernard Hinault’s hand as if he’s saying goodbye after a day in the office and they’ll see each other tomorrow. They probably will. And the day after that, too.

  Wiggins, the prolific tweeter, summed up his day thus: ‘Honoured to be in yellow made possible by an incredible group of guys, big thank you and huge congratulations to Mr Froome.’

  THE AFTERMATH OF ATHENS was not a pretty thing for Bradley Wiggins. By his own admission, he hopped on to a carousel of celebratory dinners, public appearances and candle-burning that would stretch through the autumn of 2004, into the winter, over the festive period into the New Year and deep into 2005. The whole period was awash with alcohol and the bleariness of a hundred hangovers.

  It started as soon as the Games were over – several post-event interviews in Athens were completed in a bit of a haze – and continued through the Tour of Britain. The race had an end-of-term party feel about it, as the reassembled British riders rode hard all day and partied hard all night, culminating in a couple of infamous nights that are still talked about with affection and disbelief on the circuit today. ‘Do you remember that night in Newport? Now that was a night . . .’ Et cetera.

  Cath was pregnant and still working that winter. Brad put his bike in the garage and left it there, spending his days in the pub before getting home in time to cook his new wife – they had married in November – dinner, which would invariably be accompanied by a bottle of wine or two. Looking back later, he felt that he was entitled to enjoy his time in the sun after the amazing success of Athens, but his eternal approach of doing everything to the maximum also applied to enjoyment and he admits now that he ‘lost the plot a bit’.

  The period was also marred by depression, a strange sort of post-achievement lethargy that was hard to break. The money that Brad had vaguely expected to roll in for a triple gold medal winner failed to materialise and it began to dawn on him that he would have to work for the cash his family needed. He needed new goals. It was the perennial problem for those who achieve their lifetime goals at a young age, especially those who achieve them at 24: what will I do now?

  He had signed an improved contract at Crédit Agricole, but he had been so poorly paid in 2004 that it was still something of an embarrassment. There were no endorsement packages for razors or breakfast cereal. When the bike finally came out of the garage, its owner was a stone overweight and going nowhere fast. His teeth grinding with resentment at the lack of interest his team were showing him and the low salary they felt he merited, he listlessly began racing again. Crédit Agricole had him in the frame for his first Tour de France, but he was doing little to merit those plans.

  Everything changed forever in March. Ben Wiggins was born. The excited father, to his eternal annoyance, was racing and missed the moment. Rushing home, he got there too late. Never mind. It wasn’t that moment itself that changed the world for Brad, but what it meant for the future. He suddenly saw with clarity that he was the spearhead of a unit now, the man that would have to provide for his family, the breadwinner, the focused professional. The dilettante he was in danger of becoming was banished. Only the best would do for his wife and his son.

  The new attitude didn’t come soon enough to earn him that ride at the 2005 Tour, but, working alongside Simon Jones and Team GB again, a crack at his first World Time Trial Championship was lined up for Madrid in September. He trained hard for an event that was new to him. As a pursuiter, he was strong in short time trials, but the whole tactical pacing of one’s effort in the longer tests was a fresh skill to learn if he was going to excel at it, and we know what Brad is like when he has a new hobby. Fortunately, in this case, it was trying to win a world title, not drinking for England.

  After an enjoyable feeling of being back on top of his game again, the resurgent Wiggins was seventh behind Mick Rogers at his first Worlds TT, a result he considers to actually be fourth, as three of those who finished above him have subsequently served bans for drug abuse.

  The good second half of the season led to an offer from another French team, Cofidis. Not only did they intend to pay him a lot more money than Crédit Agricole were laying out, they showed an interest in Brad and his future plans that had been distinctly absent in his previous teams. And they promised him a start in the 2006 Tour de France. Another dream was about to be fulfilled.

  The Melbourne Commonwealth Games and the Bordeaux World Track Championships were both scheduled for the spring, which isn’t much use for Tour de France preparation, so the man who enjoys competing for his country so much had to forego the opportunity to add to his medal tally. It was a tough call to make, but the Tour was filling Brad’s thoughts 24 hours a day. That meant a return to one of Brad’s other vices – overtraining. He believes that he was never above 90% in 2006 as a result, but it wasn’t disastrous and he arrived in Strasbourg for the Grand Depart trying his best not to look overawed. The Tour is just so much bigger than everything else in the cycling world that it’s hard to stay in touch with reality.

  Things got off to a bad start.

  On the eve of the race, the UCI received a list of bike riders implicated by Operación Puerto, a Spanish police investigation into Eufemiano Fuentes, a sports doctor who had clearly been supplying performance-enhancing drugs to many sports people for many years. Cycling took a lead and decided to expel anybody associated with Fuentes from the race before it had begun. The team managers were instructed to omit those riders from their teams and told they would not be permitted to replace them. Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, the favourites in the absence of the freshly retired Lance Armstrong, were among the thirteen men out on their ears in disgrace.

  Still in shock, but glad that men he considered cheats would not be lining up against him, Bradley tackled the 7km prologue hoping to land a top ten finish. In the end he was a very respectable sixteenth and got down to the business of getting through his first Tour de France. To say he did so without any great difficulty would be belittling the nature of his struggle to stay involved in the racing every day, but he did so with no more difficulty than the other sufferers around him, eventually making it to Paris in 123rd position.

  The 2006 Tour will forever be remembered for the Floyd Landis affair. After appearing the strongest rider for the first half of the race and cruising into the yellow jersey much like Wiggins went on to manage six years later, Landis suffered an appalling day on the Alpine stage to La Toussuire, losing eight minutes on the final climb to his GC rival Óscar Pereiro. The following day, Landis staged a comeback worthy of Lazarus, riding like a man possessed to take back nearly all of his lost time in one lone break over the mountains to Morzine. He duly pressed home his advantage and took the jersey back in the race’s final time trial to be acclaimed as the winner in Paris, the eighth time in s
uccession that an American rider had done so.

  Landis’s glory lasted 48 hours.

  He had tested positive for synthetic testosterone after his heroic lone break. Not for the first time the cycling world had suffered a seismic moment and not for the first time it revolved around the Tour de France. Eight years on from the infamous Festina affair it seemed that nothing had been learned.

  Bradley Wiggins, who had believed that the racing in 2006 was infinitely fairer than in 1998, was devastated. In In Pursuit of Glory he writes: ‘“You bastard Landis,” I thought. “You have completely ruined my own small achievement of getting around the Tour de France and being a small part of cycling history. You and guys like you are pissing on my sport and my dreams. Why do guys like you keep cheating? How many of you are out there, taking the piss and getting away with it? There is me trailing home 131st and, for all I know, I might be a top 50 rider if we all started on a level playing field. Sod you all. You are a bunch of cheating bastards and I hope one day they catch the lot of you and ban you all for life. You can keep doing it your way and I will keep doing it mine. You won’t ever change me, you sods. Bollocks to you all. At least I can look myself in the mirror.”’

  Bradley’s willingness to speak his mind to reporters meant that he began to be held up as a sort of crusader in the vanguard of the anti-drugs movement, a role with which he wasn’t entirely comfortable. He felt that his own stance was straightforward and he was happy to espouse it, but he didn’t want to be a spokesman for his generation.

  His thoughts turned immediately to next year’s Tour de France. Not only would he be a year stronger, a year wiser and a year better prepared, the Tour was scheduled to start in London. London!

  With that on his mind, Brad went to the World Track Championships in Mallorca and returned with two world titles: World Individual Pursuit Champion and World Team Pursuit Champion. An amazing week.

  *

  After a wet and dreary start to summer, the sun picked the first weekend in July to shine. Millions of people lined the streets of London for Saturday’s prologue and for Sunday’s road stage down into the Garden of England and a finish in Canterbury. The British riders on the Tour were deliriously happy. They felt as though their time had arrived, and none more so than the boy who was brought up a couple of miles away in Paddington, Bradley Wiggins.

  Brad’s chances for the prologue had been talked up massively and he was enjoying the attention, without really thinking himself a likely winner. True, he had just pulled off probably the best result of his road career to date, the prologue of the Critérium du Dauphiné in the Tour’s traditional last warm-up event, but he felt that Fabian Cancellara was ideally suited to the fast twisting corners of the Westminster course and he expected the Swiss’s faster acceleration to make the difference between him and the rest of the field. So it proved, with Brad extremely pleased with fourth spot.

  The crowds remained huge all the way down through Kent and the French press were full of the wondrous start in England when the Tour arrived there to start the business in earnest.

  On the first Friday, the last day before the Alps, the Tour found itself starting in a small village by the name of Semur-en-Auxois, not far from Dijon in the heart of the country. There were about 200km to cover between there and the finishing town of Bourg-en-Bresse.

  Brad soon found himself in a small break. With the mountains looming, the peloton were settling in for a long hard day and were happy to let the break push on. Surprisingly, Brad’s comrades in the move seemed similarly inclined, and they fell away to leave the tall Englishman on his own at the front of affairs. It was Cath’s birthday and, knowing she’d be certain to be watching on TV, he set about getting himself some airtime. A couple of hours later he was twenty minutes ahead of the field. The bunch started chasing, knowing what they had to do to bring the lone ranger back before the sprint, but they hadn’t counted on Brad’s engine running so smoothly. Normally, lone breakaways can be expected to tire after a long day in front, especially one as long as this. Nearly 200km on your own is epic in anybody’s language. Still he pushed on, with the bunch nudging ever closer.

  Brad maintains that he would have won that day if it hadn’t been for the headwind that stopped him in his tracks as he swung into the last 25km to Bourg-en-Bresse. He began fighting the gear in a way that seemed completely alien to the smooth style he’d been displaying all day up to this point. At the 5km point, the race swooshed by, leaving him beaten but proud. And famous, too. Everybody applauded the brave Englishman and they eschewed a crack at the winner Tom Boonen, to talk to him afterwards. Brad swears that he hadn’t realised that the thirteenth of July was the anniversary of the great Tom Simpson’s death, but the cycling press, knowing what an avid cycling historian Brad was, were sure he’d meant the move as a tribute.

  Wiggins was enjoying this Tour. He was ‘on it’ and contributing to the racing. Against his own expectations he rode a dream long time trial in Albi to finish fifth behind Alexandre Vinokourov, a man who had been struggling with injury throughout the early part of the race. Brad was certain he’d been beaten by a cheat, and his righteous anger was proven to be justified two days later when the Kazakh rider and his team were thrown out after his positive test. His teammate Andrey Kashechkin also posted a dubious time quicker than Brad that day, so the Londoner has always considered himself as third fastest that day, only beaten by Cadel Evans and Andreas Klöden.

  The last mountainous day on the Tour was a clamber up to the summit of the Col de l’Aubisque, the oldest mountain in the Tour, first included in 1910. Wiggins was in a foul mood on a hot day and was not amused when his team tried to bundle him into a car immediately after the stage was finished. What the hell was going on?

  Cristian Moreni, an Italian with Cofidis and a friend of Brad’s, had tested positive. The whole team was escorted to Pau police station and arrested. After questioning and extensive searches of the team vehicles and the team hotel had been carried out, Bradley and his teammates were freed but excluded from the race. Angry and ashamed at being part of such a farrago, Brad headed straight for Pau airport, pausing only to bundle all his Cofidis kit up and dump it into a nearby bin. ‘I would have happily set fire to it,’ he commented later.

  Back in England, the fire still burned, but he was calmer. The best start to a Tour de France ever had turned to ashes for the whole race, but the personal hit of beginning in your own home town and then your own team being thrown off . . . it was a heavy burden for Bradley to bear.

  He believed, ultimately, that these problems – Rabobank’s Michael Rasmussen was also withdrawn while in the yellow jersey for lying to the doping testers – would strengthen the sport. The younger generation of riders had had enough of this way of racing and this way of living. They wanted to race clean, know that their competitors are clean, and stop creeping around like the secretive criminals their older colleagues had become.

  It was a lesson that cycling was finding hard to learn.

  STAGE 8:

  Belfort–Porrentruy, 157.5km

  Sunday, 8 July 2012

  Thanks to Fabian Cancellara’s occupancy of the yellow jersey, Team Sky have been able to concentrate on staying out of trouble for the first week of the Tour de France. All that is about to change as the responsibility of the lead becomes theirs.

  With the bubbles from yesterday’s Champagne dissipated and the backslapping over, thoughts turn to the job in hand. The brief is to protect and retain Bradley Wiggins’s yellow jersey for two weeks while scaling the Alps and the Pyrenees, hold it through two long time trials and take it down the Champs-Élysées on Sunday, 22 July.

  That means a couple of changes in job specification for some riders. Brad can ride much as he has the first week, with his cohort of Mick Rogers, Richie Porte and Chris Froome close at hand. Christian Knees will continue to tap out the rhythm at the front of the line. The remaining three of the reduced eight-man team have slightly readjusted targets for the moment.r />
  Mark Cavendish’s biggest personal goal for the coming weeks is the Olympic Road Race at 2012, coming up less than a week after the finish of this race in Paris. He believes the best way to prepare is to complete the Tour, while some of his rivals are talking of leaving the Tour early to rest and hone their form. However, they don’t have Cav’s incredible record on the Champs-Élysées, where he will be attempting to win for an unsurpassed fourth year in a row. In recent seasons, he has appeared to increase his finishing speed during the closing week, significant gaps opening between his backside and his sprinting rivals the longer the race has gone on. Although the first week has had some good moments, the World Champion feels that there is a lot more to be taken from this race, and his hand is feeling better by the day after his spill on Wednesday.

  For the moment though, Cavendish is happy to adopt the unfamiliar role of domestique. Not for him the train of dogsbodies ready to jump to his every command. Instead, he’ll spend long hot days toiling back up to his companions from the team Jaguar loaded up with cold bottles and energy food for everybody. We will get used to the ungainly sight of the rainbow jersey stuffed like a tourist’s rucksack in support of the Team Sky effort.

  And a domestique doesn’t need a domestique, so Bernie Eisel is being reassigned to team duties. This will largely mean riding with Christian Knees. The two get along well, chatting in German when they’re alone. The language of the squad is English, and the riders and staff all make an effort to talk in the most commonly held tongue. Indeed, you’d have to be a pretty special performer to get a ride on this outfit if you don’t speak English, as communication is high on the list of Dave Brailsford’s priorities for forging a winning unit. Eisel is talkative, always the one with the instructions on training rides, always the one who knows where the best cafés are, where to find the best cakes, the best coffee, the best way back. Knees maintains a poker face; on occasion one corner of his mouth quietly turning up into a small smile.