Bradley Wiggins

by John Deering

  *

  This is a race light on big names in the absence of Lance Armstrong, Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador. When the drug police discover a banned substance in the urine sample of Frank Schleck, there is a massive feeling of disappointment across the whole race. Naturally, he denies it. Naturally, he says he must have been ‘poisoned’. Let’s hope he is right. There must surely one day be an instance of a cyclist being wrongly accused of doping: let’s hope it’s today, eh Frank?

  It’s the second doping infringement of the race after the earlier expulsion of Cofidis also-ran Rémy Di Gregorio. Unlike Bradley Wiggins’s Tour experience with Cofidis in 2007, this time Di Gregorio’s team decided to stay in the race. A sign of this being a more isolated incident than the old days, or shamefully turning a blind eye? Teams have to make their own decisions in circumstances like these.

  That doping stories are still likely to come out at some point in the Tour de France is depressingly predictable, but it can’t shake the belief that this is a new environment. Sean Yates affirms what we’ve heard elsewhere. ‘It’s a different world these days,’ he replies with a smile when asked about the prevalence of doping compared to his days as a rider. ‘The cheats get caught. Catch all the cheats, and there’s no cheats left.’

  Frank Schleck is removed from the Tour de France by his RadioShack-Nissan team in order to ‘prepare his defence’. The popular Luxembourger has lost a legion of fans overnight, especially in Britain, as Wiggins and Millar both recognise. He’s also managed to bring shame and doubt upon his brother’s great achievements, just by association.

  Wiggins would assert that this is a position that he will never, ever find himself in. ‘If I felt I had to take drugs, I would rather stop tomorrow, go and ride club 10-mile time trials, ride to the café on Sundays, and work in Tesco stacking shelves.’

  Terry Leahy shouldn’t hold his breath.

  BRADLEY WIGGINS SEEMED TO benefit from his experience at the Tour de France in 2010. He was aware that part of his problem had been an increased propensity to fret. He went back to the old mantra of controlling the controllables. Stick to the basics. Train hard. Stay thin.

  Team Sky was also strengthened. Brad had always felt at home amongst familiar faces, but now there was renewed quality, too. Edvald Boasson Hagen was still there, as was the burgeoning talent of Geraint Thomas. Their big winter signing was Mick Rogers. The experienced and popular Australian was drafted in from HTC-Columbia with the express brief of helping Brad to win the Tour. Rogers had been a team leader in his own right for some years, always with the same squad since its T-Mobile days. He felt that it was time to realign his personal goals and came to Team Sky, a set-up he had been admiring from afar throughout 2010.

  A ninth place in the 2006 Tour de France and three back-to-back world time trial titles would have you think that Rogers was a veteran, but in actual fact he was only a few months older than Brad. He had also ridden poorly at the 2010 Tour, but had come to the conclusion that his days as a contender were behind him and he would be better suited to using his intelligence and steady speed to help a team in a more all-round capacity. Sadly, that wasn’t going to be in 2011, as the glandular fever that had plagued him earlier in his career returned to put him out for a while. Brad would benefit massively from Mick’s arrival, but not yet.

  Instead, Bradley went to Paris–Nice to begin his European season and came away with third overall behind the German duo of Tony Martin and Andreas Klöden to prove that he was in hot form. The result was forged upon a narrow loss to Martin in the race’s time trial which shaped the rest of the race. He was pleased with his performance: he was not expecting to be setting the world alight in March, it was July Team Sky were interested in.

  To that end, there was to be less racing in 2011 and more training. The team wanted to control Bradley’s form, not batter it, so this time, they rejected a ride at the Giro d’Italia and looked instead at the Critérium du Dauphiné as the ideal preparation.

  The race could not have gone better. Third spot behind the big Dutchman Lars Boom in the prologue was an ideal foundation, then he and Edvald Boasson Hagen had kept pace with the climbers as the race ramped up. He was second again to Tony Martin in the Stage 3 time trial, but his superior climbing form saw Brad slip into the yellow jersey. It looked good. Sky rode strongly and intelligently to protect his lead over the remaining four stages over plenty of high passes in the Alps. The technique of staying calm and not responding immediately to everything was honed over this week, especially on the final climb to La Toussuire, when they resisted enormous pressure from Cadel Evans, Alexandre Vinokourov and Jurgen Van Den Broeck. Rigoberto Urán Urán in particular was proving a useful henchman to have.

  Emboldened by their sublime team performance and the biggest win in Team Sky’s short history, Yates and Brailsford resolved to take the same squad to the Tour de France in three weeks’ time.

  Meanwhile, Bradley nipped back to England and claimed a proud win. It was his first National Road Race title, won in great style in a Team Sky clean sweep on a Northumberland circuit. It meant that he would be going into the Tour de France resplendent in the white jersey with red and blue bands of GB Champion. He looked particularly proud whenever he raced in it: it could have been designed with the mod in mind. As well as displays by other riders like Sean Yates in that national jersey over the years, it brought to mind Olympic greats like Daley Thompson, Steve Ovett and Steve Redgrave. Right up Brad’s street, in fact. It was going to be a great Tour.

  There was no prologue. Instead, a tough road stage was followed by a shortish team time trial won by Garmin-Cervelo, just four seconds ahead of Evans’s BMC, Team Sky and the Schleck brothers’ Leopard-Trek teams, all on 24’52”. The only loser in the first couple of days was defending champion Alberto Contador, who lost time after a crash on the first stage and then a few more seconds with his Saxo Bank team’s performance in the TTT. Evans took a great win on the steep little Mur de Bretagne to take Stage 4, with Brad not far behind, and the race moved on, everybody doing their best to avoid the crashes that were punctuating a horrible first week. Cav took his first win of the race the next day and railed against the organisers about how dangerous the route was, after a day in which numerous crashes disturbed the action. Christophe Kern, Janez Brajkovič and Tom Boonen all made early exits with injuries. Contador was down again. These tumbles could decide the fate of the Tour, surely not what the organisers intended. It was getting silly.

  Team Sky kept Brad towards the front at all times, to the extent that he ended up with a top twenty placing on Cav’s stage, but it was no guarantee of safety.

  The sixth stage was memorable. This was the day that Team Sky would put it all together. Edvald Boasson Hagen made Dave Brailsford a proud man by winning the uphill sprint into Lisieux after a perfect lead-out from Geraint Thomas. ‘He deserves to be the first guy to win a stage in a grand tour for the team, because he’s performed so well since he joined,’ said the boss. Brad hadn’t put a foot wrong, sitting in sixth place, ten seconds off the leader Thor Hushovd, and the team was purring like a well-tuned V8.

  Twenty-four hours later, it was all in tatters. With 40km to go before the finish in Châteauroux, Brad came down heavily in a big crash at the centre of the bunch. As the road narrowed there was a squeeze, wheels touched and many riders were left with nowhere to go. The GB Champion’s left shoulder hit the tarmac hard, too hard for his collarbone, which broke. The perennial broken bone for any cyclist, the collarbone was just not designed to withstand falling off bicycles. Edvald Boasson Hagen, Xabier Zandio and Juan Antonio Flecha waited anxiously for their leader, but the game was up. They were waved on, and Brad was ushered into an ambulance.

  It seemed that the dream was over again. Not through bad form or bad preparation, but bad luck. Perhaps the Tour de France just wasn’t for Bradley Wiggins. Perhaps that fourth place was a fluke after all, never to be bettered; a great story for the kids, but not the portent of something even g
reater.

  The new focused Wiggins thought this was unlikely. He was sure he could win this race now.

  STAGE 16:

  Pau–Bagnères-de-Luchon, 197km

  Wednesday, 18 July 2012

  Bradley Wiggins is getting used to this yellow jersey. He’s been wearing it for ten days now, long enough to look more at home in it than he did in his Team Sky kit. That cool jersey bearing the legend ‘Wiggo’ along its flanks, the ‘O’ discarded in favour of the mod RAF symbol, is something of a distant memory. The other riders get Porte, Rogers, Eisel. Brad gets a nickname.

  There are stars who are well known enough to be known by their surnames: Lennon, Connery, Cobain. Then there are those big enough to be recognised by purely a colloquial shortening of their full names: Wills, Wiggo, Becks. On the rung above those are celebrities known purely by their first names: Elvis, Marilyn.

  Wiggo T-shirts are beginning to appear upon the chests of Great Britain, the ‘O’ supplanted in the same way as the man’s Team Sky jersey. Joke shops are selling out of fake sideburns. Something is happening in a country hungry for the Olympics to begin, a sporting tension and excitement that is seeing a nation’s appetite for summer success whetted by the Divine Sideburns. Some have even begun to refer to Bradley Wiggins as the Modfather, surely an error as this epithet is already well and truly wrapped around the shoulders of one of his own idols, Paul Weller.

  Team Sky have played their hand masterfully in this Tour so far. The lessons of 2010 and 2011 have been learned well. The direction of Brailsford, Yates, Ellingworth, Kerrison and everybody else from the Murdochs down has put the team in a golden position, and the riders have each, to a man, played their part. Wiggins holds the nap hand.

  Today is the day when the cards are laid down.

  When the route for this Tour de France was announced on a cold Paris day seven or so months ago, the organisers had made it clear that they expected Wednesday 18 July to be a pivotal day in the race’s destiny.

  In the distant historic days of Tour legend, days when the race passed over the classic quartet of Pyrenean passes were virtually de rigueur. Historically and hysterically dubbed ‘The Circle of Death’ – they’re not even in a circle – the Col d’Aubisque, the Col du Tourmalet, the Col d’Aspin and the Col de Peyresourde are arranged in such a perfect geographical way that the temptation to take a race over them in succession is almost too much to bear. In recent times though, that is exactly what the organisers have managed to resist, with all the passes featuring regularly, but rarely together like this. In mitigation of the difficulty, the more common mountain top finish of a key Pyrenean stage has been foregone. Instead the natural ending in Bagnères-de-Luchon at the bottom of the Peyresourde will host les arrivées.

  If Nibali, Van Den Broeck, Evans or, whisper it, Chris Froome have designs on winning this race, today will have figured high on their lists of launch pads for some time.

  Bradley Wiggins not only knows this, he has his own ambitions to fulfil. He has said plainly that each day is a step towards Paris, and there will only be four paces left after today. And none of those will be as gigantic a stride as this one will be.

  It’s hot today. Not ideal for anyone in the high mountains, especially not a skinny pasty-faced Londoner.

  Today there is little urge to chase any breakaways, with Team Sky unthreatened by any rider outside of the top ten. Andreas Klöden in eleventh spot is nearly ten minutes behind Brad overall, so there is no urgency to hunt down a move. Every Team Sky rider has very specific instructions for this stage, and it won’t be until later this afternoon that their trial will properly begin. Thus it is no great shakes when a massive breakaway move forms early after the roll out from Pau, with virtually all the teams represented by at least one rider. Except Team Sky, of course. Both their cars trundle comfortably along behind the main field.

  There are 38 riders up the road from the yellow jersey group, the best placed being Egoi Martínez, holding down eighteenth place overall and the same number of minutes behind Bradley Wiggins.

  Over the Aubisque and the Tourmalet – in theory harder climbs than their smaller sisters the Aspin and Peyresourde, but further from the finish – it is Christian Knees and Edvald Boasson Hagen that perform the donkey work for Team Sky and the rest of the race.

  It is Thomas Voeckler, chasing points for the King of the Mountains competition in the lead group who takes the Jacques Goddet prize for being the first man over the highest point of the Tour, this year, the Col du Tourmalet. The Pyrenees have long held an inferiority complex about their status of being lower than the Alps, and there has long been talk of surfacing the track that leads upwards from the summit of the Col all the way to the summit of the Pic du Midi above it. This would be a finish of 2,877m above sea level, another 700m higher than the Tourmalet. The gradient of the road and the accusations of spectacle-over-sport that would follow such an inclusion have dissuaded the race organisers up until now. They regularly make sure that there are no super-high passes in the Alps included in the route – no Galibier in 2012 – to ensure the Pyrenees get to host the Prix Jacques Goddet occasionally.

  The Tourmalet drops down into the famous Tour de France village of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, where blond Pyrenean cattle roam carefree across the common that marks the beginning of the Col d’Aspin. Today, we’re trekking up the thickly wooded western shoulder, giving the riders some respite from the July temperature.

  Liquigas-Cannondale show their hand. The entire luminous-green squad gather at the front to lift the pace. Team Sky slip in behind them, confident that it will be their other rivals who feel the pain. Domestiques don’t come with much better CVs than Ivan Basso, and the former Giro d’Italia Champion ratchets the hurt up another notch to stretch the line behind him to breaking point. His leader Vincenzo Nibali is confident enough to call upon the full power of his team and to demonstrate again that he’s not scared of Wiggins or Team Sky.

  But, as Team Sky had wagered, it is not the British team that is suffering. The casualty is the champion, Cadel Evans. This time his BMC team are there in number unlike his horrible isolation at La Planche des Belles Filles eleven days ago, but they are unable to prevent him from losing contact with the Liquigas-Cannondale-driven group. Worryingly for the Australian and his team, there is still a full 50km left to race, another first category mountain, and then hammer it well and truly down at the front.

  Out of the trees and on to the beautiful gorse-covered moorland over the Aspin, Evans is a minute behind Nibali and Evans, but a concerted pursuit around the hairpins brings him back as they fly through Arreau and over the confluence of the Nestes. He must be dreading the last climb, the long drag of the Peyresourde. Already tested beyond his limit, he must deal with Wiggins and the Team Sky dark army as well as the determination of Basso and Nibali’s Liquigas-Cannondale.

  Basso lifts the tempo once again, and pop goes Evans. Within minutes the group is like a bowl of Rice Krispies as Van Den Broeck, van Garderen and Zubeldia all crackle and follow Evans out of the rear. Now Nibali takes up the reins. It’s what he came here to do, hurt the big names and try his best to win this Tour de France in the mountains. It’s a ferocious move and the field shreds behind him. Only two men remain in pursuit of the bold Italian.

  Unfortunately for Nibali, they are the only two men above him on the GC and they are the Team Sky teammates Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins. Froome takes up the effort smoothly, the loyal lieutenant once again to his leader Wiggins, pacing the yellow jersey inexorably back on to Nibali’s wheel. For all Liquigas-Cannondale’s fine efforts, they have only succeeded in leaving their leader exposed against the combined might of the race’s best two riders. He tries again to dump them as they close in, and this time it’s the yellow jersey himself that bridges for the duo. None shall pass.

  In the sort of sight beloved of Tour followers over the decades and befitting of such an epic parcours, the top three in the race clear the summit of the last climb together, figh
ting each other every pedal turn of the way.

  The plunge into Bagnères-de-Luchon cannot split them and they breast the line together, seven minutes after Thomas Voeckler has celebrated another famous solo victory and claimed the treasured polka dot jersey of best climber. Cadel Evans is sadly not there with them. The tribulations of the Australian as he laboured under the combined pressure of Liquigas-Cannondale and Team Sky have left him another four minutes adrift by the line. He will not retain his crown of Tour de France Champion now, with more than eight minutes to conjure up on Wiggins from somewhere.

  Sean Yates may not be saying it out loud, but he’s eyeing the Team Sky one-two with Wiggins and Froome in Paris on Sunday. He tells the team’s website: ‘It’s got to the point where whatever we say isn’t doing them justice. This is no ordinary stage race. It’s the Tour de France and we are into the third week now and they have been consistently amazing. Everyone is hurting in the race but it panned out really well for us today. The break went without anyone really dangerous in it so we could just ride. Liquigas-Cannondale took it up a bit in a bid to get rid of Cadel. Then Brad and Froomey had the legs to follow Nibali when he tried to get away. It was probably the toughest stage of the Tour so to come through that in the manner we have done is a great achievement for the team.’

  TEAM SKY HAD A clear plan for 2012. It was pretty similar to 2011, actually, but didn’t involve their leader falling off.

  First, they still thought they could add to their team for the Tour. Mark Cavendish was brought in at great expense to extend the image of the British team, but the Tour line-up, especially if it was to accommodate Cavendish, would need more specialists rather than the great all-rounders like Juan Antonio Flecha and Simon Gerrans. More soldiers to ride alongside Wiggins in the mountains. In came the Australian pairing of Mick Rogers, recovered from illness, and his prodigiously talented compatriot Richie Porte. In came Kanstantsin Siutsou who had impressed them so much in last year’s Dauphiné.