by John Deering
‘That should be enough to win it,’ he reportedly tells his audience at the finish. Not renowned for bragging, we can accept his word that 52 minutes and 21 seconds is indeed pretty swift for the 41.5 rolling kilometres that separate Besançon from today’s start house in Arc-et-Senans.
Chris Froome’s time trialling career had inauspicious beginnings. Turning out for the country of his birth, Kenya, at the 2006 World Championships, he managed to ride down the start ramp and straight into a UCI official. It takes some doing to overcome a reputation like that, but in becoming a major tour contender in his own right, he was knocking out some startlingly good time trial rides, not least one at altitude in Spain last year when he took the red jersey of leader in the Vuelta. Today he flashes through the first time check as the fastest man on the road. Yes, quicker than Cancellara.
Evans is the penultimate man out on the course, and his time compared with Froome is amazing. Amazingly bad. He has somehow lost almost a minute to the Team Sky man, and Froome’s leader hasn’t even got to this point yet.
Wiggins is on his way, though. Watching Wiggins ride today is like watching a thoroughbred on Epsom Downs. Troy, Nijinsky or Frankel: little effort, minimum movement, maximum speed. Somewhere in a zone uninhabited by mere mortals, his stealthy black Pinarello is counterbalanced by the eyecatching yellow skinsuit of race leader, his mirrored helmet lens reflecting the road ahead as he eats it up. A single RAF roundel, the mark of the mod, sits subtly on the front of his helmet, Brad’s sense of fashion confounding even the Tour’s attempts to make him as garish as possible. Calf-high black aero overshoes mask the fact that the distance from Brad’s knee to toe is as long as many people’s entire inside leg. Those legs turn with a sublimely supple motion that brings to mind a Ferrari ticking over at 90mph in the inside lane.
He puts more than a minute into Cadel Evans in the first 16km.
Those first 16km are easily the defending champion’s worst of the day, but there’s no coming back from a deficit like that. By the time he reaches Besançon, Evans knows he is staring down both barrels. He has endured a couple of difficult days in the mountains, but his attacking performances have given him great heart and he has lost time to nobody. Here in the time trial, however, his traditional happy hunting ground, he is scrabbling in the dust left not only by Bradley Wiggins, but Chris Froome too. Tonight, sixth place will be his only consolation for his efforts on a hot day in the shadow of the Alps.
There is no discernible change in Wiggins’s rhythm as he approaches the line, but with Yates talking to him via an earpiece for the whole ride and driving yards behind him in the team Jaguar, Brad certainly knows that he is ‘on a ride’. Having the honour of starting last, as befits a yellow jersey wearer in a Tour time trial, he also has the comfort of knowing exactly what he has to do to overcome all those who started before him.
He breaks the beam at 51 minutes and 24 seconds, and wins his first ever stage in the Tour de France. There is something magnificent about yellow jersey wearers winning stages in the race, an affirmation that they are deserved and rightful torchbearers. Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, Lance Armstrong – memories of them popping Champagne corks on the victory podiums clad in the maillot jaune are powerful ones that resonate down through the years. To those images in our heads we can add Bradley Wiggins in Besançon.
While Wiggins’s win is, to some extent, predictable – he is clearly in the form of his life and a master of this particular discipline – Chris Froome’s second place is a fantastic bonus. Team Sky and British cycling in general can be forgiven for pinching themselves. Two British cyclists sit first and third in the standings of the Tour de France.
When Brailsford made his famously bold statement about winning the Tour with a British cyclist within five years of Team Sky’s inception, it is unlikely that either of these men would be thought of as riders likely to fulfil that particular prophecy. One was a rouleur more suited to the cobbles of the north or the boards of a velodrome; the other was a virtually unknown African. It is to the eternal credit of both men that they were able to turn expectations upside down.
For once, they would even have a brief opportunity to savour their achievements, as tomorrow would be the first rest day of this race.
Cadel Evans splits the two on GC (General Classification), but he is nearly two minutes adrift of Wiggins now, and just a few seconds ahead of Froome.
‘I’m just really pleased with how I put the day together. Mentally, too,’ recounts the usually laconic winner at the finish. ‘At the moment it’s just relief and pride in myself for doing that.’
The key for Wiggins is that he has beaten the champion and affirmed his race lead. The time gaps and permutations of what happens next haven’t yet filtered into his consciousness. ‘When I get back tonight, that’s when to start thinking about the context of how it fits into the whole Tour and everything. Numbers are being thrown around – you’ve got this on Cadel, this on him – but at the moment it’s a lot to take in.’
Back inside mission command, the Big Black Bus, Wiggins considered his achievement and spoke to the Team Sky website: ‘We’re nine days into the Tour now and there were two tough stages before today. Everyone was tired last night and you never know how you’re going to recover. Time trialling’s what I do best, though. I get into my zone, know exactly the routine I have to go through during the stage and I felt great today. The minute I turned the first pedal stroke on the warm-up I felt fantastic so I knew I was on a good one.
‘This is what we’ve trained for. Sean was saying to me on the radio in the last 10km, “Think of all those hours, all those sacrifices you’ve made.” This is what that was all for and that really motivated me. All the hard work during the winter, missing my children’s birthdays being on training camps and things. This is what it’s all for. These moments.
‘I didn’t set out today for the stage win, it was a battle for the GC, but to get the stage win is a bonus and that’s fantastic as well.’
BRADLEY WIGGINS WANTED TO get away from Cofidis after the Moreni affair. He needed somebody to be angry at, and it became the team. Though they weren’t directly responsible for what had clearly been one old pro looking for a decent last payday’s actions, he felt that the team were the first line of defence against cheats and should do more to stop riders cheating in Cofidis’s name. He found an ally in Bob Stapleton, the man running the Team High Road project.
High Road was a very modern concept of a team. A holding company which was Stapleton’s baby was set up to run a team on a certain budget. A sponsor would come in and foot that defined bill. The sponsor could change from one season to the next, but the nucleus of the organisation would remain the same. They had been operating in this way as the T-Mobile squad for some time, with Mark Cavendish making a name for himself as their exciting new sprinter. Unfortunately for Stapleton, the German backlash against doping, especially regarding the implication in Operación Puerto of the wunderkind Jan Ullrich, led to T-Mobile giving up on cycling and withdrawing at the end of the season. It was a test for the High Road business model, but Stapleton’s approach was sound and the team would carry on as they had planned to in 2008, becoming known for that year’s Tour de France by the name of their new sponsor, the outdoor clothing company Columbia.
The team were also happy to support Brad’s ambitions on the track, an absolute prerequisite for any potential employer of Wiggins in Olympic year. While he didn’t really want to race in the red of Cofidis again, a plan thrashed out with Shane Sutton and Simon Jones left him reluctantly agreeing that a late 2007 season of hard racing was the best start to his build-up for Beijing, now the only target that mattered to Wiggins. He was determined to go to China and come back with three medals, at least as good a haul as Athens, and perhaps he could even better his gold, silver and bronze from 2004.
In Brad’s view, the big challenge was to compete at his peak in all three events, the individual pursuit, the team pursuit and the
madison. He felt that the individual pursuit, being his performance alone and the first event of each Olympics he had competed in, had taken preference over the others at his previous championships and Olympics, and he wanted to correct that. He felt that he was the best pursuiter in the world; he believed the GB quartet ought to be the best team pursuit squad of all time; and he was excited about partnering his new teammate and Olympic newcomer Mark Cavendish in the madison.
To that end, Wiggins trained like a man possessed over the winter. He and Cavendish rode the Ghent Six together, the team pursuit squad put in some crunching training in Mallorca, and Brad himself put in long solo hours at Manchester Velodrome with the individual pursuit in his sights. The key stop on the road to Beijing was to be a similar one to the Athens build-up, the World Championships. This time round, however, they would assume a greater significance than a mere staging post and pointer to future success, they would be in his adopted home town of Manchester and would be a massive target in their own right. It was a great opportunity to test his ability to do the ‘triple’ of individual pursuit, team pursuit and madison.
The sixes hadn’t gone particularly well for the new Wiggins–Cavendish pairing, but they weren’t too worried. Cavendish was coming off the back of his breakthrough season, a long hard battle since early spring and was exhausted, just as Wiggins was running into the form of his life. They scraped a good ride in a World Cup meeting in the new Beijing velodrome to ensure qualification for later in the summer, then set their sights on Manchester as their real target.
The atmosphere at those Manchester Worlds was unbelievable. There was a feeling that Team GB were the real force in world track cycling now and they believed they could win titles in virtually every event, men’s and women’s.
The first part of Wiggins’s own trilogy went extraordinarily well. Despite easing back in his qualifying round a little bit too much and finishing with the second fastest time, he easily dispatched the man who finished quicker than him, the Dutchman Jenning Huizenga in the final to retain the title he had won in Mallorca a year previously. He was now a triple World Individual Pursuit Champion. As the celebrations and backslapping began, so did the real test. This time, he pulled away from enjoying his moment and deferred it until the meet was finished and the velodrome lights would be switched off in a few days’ time. He believed that he and his team pursuit partners Ed Clancy, Paul Manning and Geraint Thomas could not only win the world title but break the world record in the process. He needed to prepare properly.
By the time he was back at the velodrome in the early morning light, he was totally in the zone, race face firmly affixed. As a result, he was able to commit himself to the team like never before. The racing began with a shock, as a powerful Denmark foursome blasted a super quick ride of 3’57”. That would take some beating. The GB team knew they didn’t have to beat that, they just had to be quick enough to make it to the final, where they believed that they could beat the Danes no matter how fast they went. They cruised round in the second fastest time to set up the big showdown. After a few hours, they were back at the track and ready, the febrile atmosphere reaching fever pitch with the local crowd high on success, excitement and plentiful beer.
It’s unlikely that there has ever been a more precise display of team pursuiting than the one that Team GB delivered that night. The world title and a new world record of 3’56.322” confirmed their perfection and sent the arena into fits of ecstasy. Once again, Brad forced himself to turn his back on the celebrations and tiptoed into his room, where his roommate and madison partner Mark Cavendish was already softly snoring.
The crest of a wave that the Great Britain team had been riding throughout this meeting had not gone unnoticed by the competition. As well as those two pursuit golds, the team went on to win a scarcely believable nine world titles out of a possible eighteen on offer, the most dominant performance by a nation in modern history. The seven golds landed the previous year in Mallorca were improbably put in the shade, and all this in Olympic year.
No pressure for the madison duo, then. They were unsurprisingly marked tightly, and Brad was forced into putting everything into a massive chase to keep them on level terms. But all was well as he ground back up to the wheels of the leaders who had broken away and he handslung Cav into the action to win the points they needed. As so often at the finish of the madison, there was a little confusion as the judges checked the scores, but the Team GB management were in no doubt: Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish were champions of the world.
The big night out deferred for the past two victories sprang into action, and three nights of carousing were crammed into one long Manchester night. Good times, and the Olympics to come.
*
There was no year-long bender after these championships. The quiet confidence of this crack Great Britain squad knew that Olympic medals were what mattered. Nobody wanted to miss this opportunity, possibly one never to be repeated. Surely, they wouldn’t remain this dominant forever. Now was the time to claim their inheritance, stamp their mark on the Olympics and ensure they would never be forgotten.
Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish both headed to the Giro d’Italia in the colours of Team High Road. Brad was delighted to have a spearhead in the team and relished the work of setting Cav up for the sprints. The new boy picked up two stages in his first grand tour, delighting his team and repaying his teammates for their hard work in delivering him to the line.
Cav was to go on to his first Tour de France, and Bradley was a little envious not to be supporting him, but his plan took him to the routine of velodrome and road training that he so appreciated. Routine had been what was missing in his earlier years as a professional, and he now had a much greater appreciation of what worked for him, largely through the efforts of Chris Boardman, Shane Sutton, Simon Jones and the whole Team GB set-up.
As he set about the business of ‘getting the numbers up’ Cav took an incredible four stages in his first Tour de France. In the space of a couple of weeks, he became one of the country’s most successful ever Tour riders, all at the age of 23. Heady stuff for British cycling fans. With the blessing of Bob Stapleton and a huge pat on the back from his team, he left the race before the Alps to fine-tune his training for Beijing.
The Olympics were set to follow the same schedule as they were for Brad: individual pursuit, followed by team pursuit, ending with the madison. The Olympic qualifying was more comfortable than could be imagined, with rider after rider posting average times, and Brad found himself facing the unheralded Kiwi Hayden Roulston in the final. Unaccountably struck by nerves before the final, he sought the counsel of Steve Peters, the Team GB psychologist who had been an increasingly reassuring presence in Brad’s preparation, despite his initial resistance to the idea. Peters reminded him of a theory that would later become a mantra for Dave Brailsford’s Sky team: control the controllables. Don’t worry about Roulston, you can’t affect his ride. You know that you are a faster pursuiter than him. You know that all you have to do to beat him is execute your own plan, and you will be Olympic Champion. Again.
‘Execute’ is a great word to describe what Bradley Wiggins did in that final. He rode exactly as he had intended and extinguished any hopes that the hardy young New Zealander may have had of dethroning the king. It was another Olympic medal, his fifth, and a second gold. He was starting to be spoken of in the same terms as Steve Redgrave, one of his heroes. It was all a bit rarefied, and Brad tried to keep his head down as he had in Manchester and ready himself for the team event to follow.
Team GB cruised through the qualifying round, allowing Brad to recover a little from his three individual rides, then lopped a gobstopping whole second off their new world record in the semi-final. The others may as well have gone home.
Denmark were the opposition for the final, doing their best to avoid looking like the goat tied to the stake in Jurassic Park. Only the Team GB quartet themselves knew what they could do though, and they were only too keen
to execute their plan. They took another two seconds off their own newly set world record to be crowned Olympic gold medallists.
World records aren’t beaten as often as one might expect at Olympic Games, the recorded times of less importance than the glory of gold and winning a title. However, when an athlete, or in this case a team of athletes, have lifted an event to a whole new level of sublime achievement, world records are virtually inescapable. What a performance.
Now Bradley had to battle fatigue – he had pulled out six performances at these Games – to partner the new star of cycling, Mark Cavendish, in the madison. It didn’t go to plan. Marked tightly again as in Manchester, a combination formed by the experienced Argentinian and Spanish pairs put the GB duo on the back foot. Once again, Wiggins was forced into a mighty chase, but this time a blend of fatigue and the determination of the other countries doomed it to failure. The dream team finished in the group a lap down on the medallists in ninth spot. Cavendish was almost alone in a devastating Team GB performance at the Games in leaving the velodrome without a medal, and was seemingly unhappy with what he perceived to be Wiggins’s lacklustre performance. The ill feeling was not to linger, but it put something of a tarnish on an incredible performance by Great Britain. Somehow they had managed to bring home seven of the ten gold medals on offer in the velodrome, plus an incredible win by Nicole Cooke under the Great Wall of China in the women’s road race. For his achievements, Brad would receive a CBE to supersede the OBE that Athens earned him.