Bradley Wiggins: My Time (13 page)

After that time trial, I said something to Tim about how I could have done without the chain coming off, and his answer was, ‘Well, you’ve got to give them a bit of a chance.’ There was no big deal made of any of the wins; it all just felt as if it was meant to be. It was like being in a football team in midseason: great victory, but we’re playing Manchester United
next
week. If you compare my cycling season to winning the Premiership, getting to 22 July in the yellow jersey was the equivalent of hitting the end of May with 100 points to Manchester United’s 95. If you beat Chelsea along the way that’s fantastic, but you don’t dwell on it. You go on to the next one. It’s only when you look back that you think, ‘Bloody hell, that was good.’

I was pretty tired after Romandie. We’d had a massive April; we’d done a lot of hours, and I had had only five days at home to recover before we travelled there. As a result, I didn’t feel great in Switzerland even though it went so well. I wasn’t comfortable and had to dig deep at times, for example to win that first road stage. I’m not used to being out of my comfort zone like that. But that was the plan: the early season wasn’t about winning Romandie, it was about building to be at my best at the Tour. So Romandie was part of the workload; the good thing was that, in spite of the fatigue, we still won the race. It showed how far we had moved on.

I had a massive downer after Romandie. I felt like packing it all in, simply because I looked at Twitter for the first time in a long while. While social media is a great way to keep in touch on the net, it has a downside that most people in the public eye experience: users can say pretty much whatever they like about you under the cover of a pseudonym. They can target you, but you don’t know who they are. It was about this time that a group of people ‘out there’ began making insinuations about drugs. What was being said made me begin to think, ‘What I’m doing at the moment, I’m quite dominant here; I’m winning bunch sprints and it does look a
bit
suspicious, I guess.’ I started thinking that I didn’t want to win the Dauphiné Libéré, because if I did win it they would say that I was doping for sure. Then I began thinking: imagine if I win the Tour – what will they come up with then? I started saying to Cath, ‘Forget this, I can’t be bothered. I don’t want to win the Tour because I can see what’s coming.’ So I had a week off the bike after Romandie. I spoke to Shane; he got pretty annoyed and said to me – among other things – ‘You have just got to ignore those people.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m human. I can’t just take it on the chin all of the time.’

I spent a week in Majorca with the family, and started riding my bike a bit, and then I went to Tenerife. I hadn’t done much for two weeks and I had begun to feel really guilty. When I got there, I thought, ‘It’s been so perfect up to now; perhaps this is when I’m going to lose the Tour.’ It was hard to deal with at the time, and I spoke to Tim about it. Tim’s view was, ‘You’re gonna get this, you’re gonna get this.’

When that little crisis came I didn’t deal with it by taking to drink or anything like that – that was a phase I’d gone through back in 2004 and it was very much a phase. Instead I immersed myself in time with the family. As usual it was Cath who took the brunt of it. She’s on Twitter, so she’s vulnerable – people think they can have a go at her too. And at home my being unhappy and angry impacts on her, so it’s a big strain. We began to realise that it was part of dealing with success. You don’t expect it but there is a lot of other stuff that comes with winning bike races. It wasn’t nice at the time, but I look back now and I think, well maybe that’s part of the process, maybe it’s not just about leading races but
about
dealing with all the other hassle that comes with it. So I thought, ‘To hell with it, I’m not looking at the computer.’ I got to Tenerife and I threw myself into the training there. You’re cut off, you’re remote and that is probably the best environment. You’re among like-minded people and you get down to business again.

That period in Tenerife at the end of May was the last big spell of work we were going to put in before July and the Tour. We were doing back-to-back days of heavy training, putting in six-hour rides, climbing at specific power outputs, working hard all round. We then had nine days until the Dauphiné to back off and freshen up, to let the training work through. Six weeks was still a long time until the Tour, but in terms of building a base, which we had been doing since the start of November 2011, those two weeks in Tenerife at the end of May were the last big block of work we could do, because of the time it takes for the work to be absorbed. During that fortnight our workload was getting on for the equivalent of fourteen days’ racing at the Giro or the Tour, but in controlled conditions.

The Critérium du Dauphiné, or Dauphiné Libéré as cycling traditionalists call it, was not quite like the other events I’d raced in 2012. It was the moment when the season became truly serious. We came to the start in Grenoble having done that Tenerife camp, so that was all the work done apart from fine-tuning. We all realised that now we were into the last period before the Tour. We had won Romandie and Paris–Nice; at that stage the season had been perfect and I was already the Tour favourite, but the other Tour big names for
July
– Cadel Evans, Vincenzo Nibali and Andy Schleck – were all going to be riding at the Dauphiné. It was the first showdown close to the Tour where what happened really mattered. Up to that point nothing had been particularly significant because Cadel had had a different schedule; you couldn’t read too much into the racing he had done. He was sure to have improved since Romandie and would be getting into his Tour form.

This all put the Dauphiné at a different level compared to the other races. At Paris–Nice or the Tour of Romandie, if something happened, no matter how disappointing it might be on the day, in the long term it didn’t matter because the season was all about the Tour, whereas this was the race where you needed to show off a little bit. In addition, for the first time in my career on the road I was going back as defending champion to a stage race I had won. I certainly felt I had to step up; it felt different from the minute we started the prologue. I was last off because of being the previous year’s winner, which was a different experience altogether. As had been the case in the prologues at Romandie and Paris–Nice, the conditions were changing all the time during the day. There were thunderstorms, and although I had a dry run the wind had changed quite a bit, so in the circumstances finishing 2nd by 1sec to Luke Durbridge of Australia was a good enough ride, considering he had started ninety minutes earlier than me. I’d gone considerably faster than everyone who’d started around me; as at Paris–Nice and Romandie, it was another sign that I probably would have won had I gone off with the fastest guys.

The minute I’d finished I began thinking, ‘I haven’t got the race leader’s jersey, it’s the perfect position to be in.’ I did manage to take 5sec out of Cadel, who had chosen to start earlier and went out at the fastest time of the day. Ever since we all got it so wrong at the prologue of the 2010 Tour, when I went off early because we thought the weather would change, I’ve opted to accept the responsibility of starting last man in the team, no matter what the conditions. You accept who you are and you take what you get.

The next day was a little different: Cadel won the stage after getting away close to the end, but he wasn’t far ahead and I took the jersey. It sounds strange, but I was a bit gutted. It meant the team had to ride on the front for two days more than we had wanted, and I was not keen to be wearing the jersey going into the long time trial on day five because I didn’t want to have to wear the race leader’s skinsuit.

That sounds fussy but it’s a good example of how the smallest things can affect you when you race. As is the case in all the races run by ASO, the company that runs the Tour, Paris–Nice and most of the biggest races in France, the leader’s kit is supplied by Le Coq Sportif. Their skinsuits don’t suit me, because they have panels on the arms where the logo of Le Crédit Lyonnais, the race sponsor, is printed. The logo has to be printed a certain way so they put in the panel, which is stitched across the top of the biceps. I had noticed it after the Paris–Nice time trial; it’s uncomfortable, because when I get into my tuck position the stitching pulls my arms and I get a lot of cuts right into the flesh. It’s purely down to my body shape.

I knew that my time-trialling form was there from the prologue. I was even more certain after day five, the 42.5km
contre-la-montre
to Bourg-en-Bresse. I nearly caught Cadel, who had started two minutes ahead of me, and that felt like the first time I had really put the hammer down before the Tour. As far as the time trial itself went, it was ridiculously windy, the worst I’ve ever done. At times it was touch and go – I was right on the limit of being blown off. Andy Schleck did come unstuck in the wind, breaking his pelvis, which put him out of the Tour. It wasn’t a shock to me that he lost control, because you didn’t dare take your hands off the bars to take a drink, and there were times when you had to come off the tri-bars to keep command of the bike. I’d ridden a couple of shorter time trials, 10-milers, in horrendous winds in England – including one just before the 2009 Tour – which were good practice as it turned out.

I didn’t set out to catch Cadel: I always expect to catch the rider in front of me, but that simply reflects the state of mind I have for every time trial I ride. There were some lovely long straights on the course, rolling straights on the run-in to the finish, so I knew I’d get within sight of him. I expected to be at least a minute faster than him on that day, having taken 5sec out of him in a short prologue, so to get him in sight and nearly catch him meant it was job done. I tried not to get too fixated on it though. If you were watching it, you might wonder why I didn’t catch him, as I had him in sight for so long in those final kilometres. I kept to my rhythm, I didn’t want to take too many risks on the corners and he finished strongly. It’s not a case of thinking, ‘Oh yes, I’ll catch him now’; at that
point
you are both trying to empty the tank, you’re an hour into the stage and all you can do is to ride your own race.

It was every bit as important to have beaten Tony Martin by 34sec; I’d only very rarely got past him before he became world champion in 2011; in 2012 I’d beaten him just the once, at the Tour of Algarve, but that was by milliseconds. We’d been chasing him since he had raised the bar at the World’s the previous September and putting over 30sec into him meant it was paying off. There was another side to this win: I had to be careful how I dealt with beating Cadel by such a large margin. I know I’m not that good with the media, but on this occasion I may have got it right. The journalists were trying to turn our sporting rivalry into a personal battle, and they were asking me whether this was making a point or not, a big statement that I was better than the defending Tour champion. It was important to make sure I was very respectful of him in all the interviews I did. It was also vital to keep in mind that things can change: at a similar time trial in 2011 I put a fair amount of time into him, but he pulled the best time trial of his career out of the bag to win the Tour six weeks later.

After that we had only to defend the jersey. Compared to the previous year, when I had been a bundle of nerves, I was far more confident, and the team was better prepared after the training camps. The real statement for the Tour came on the second-to-last stage, a full-scale day in the Alps culminating in the Col de Joux Plane, a brute of a climb which is shorter than the usual Alpine
col
at just over seven miles, but hits one-in-nine in places. The bottom of the mountain was almost impossibly hard, with Eddie setting an
incredible
pace. For the first 600m I didn’t drop below 500 watts. After that it was a matter of the team riding as they had done in training in Tenerife, where we had practised this: hitting a climb, three guys in front of me, each of them doing 3km as hard and as long as they’re capable of, and then peeling off.

I didn’t look around a lot and I remember Sean saying through the radio, ‘Nibali’s gone’ and ‘Vanendert’s gone.’ He was just talking me through all the riders who were going out the back as our guys set the pace, and eventually there were only eight left in the group. On those climbs you’re concentrating so much, but even then the little doubts come in. You think, ‘Right, what if Cadel attacks now at this pace?’ but then I look back and realise I was doing 450, 460 watts, so if someone was going to attack at that pace it would have been ridiculous, they would have had to be going so hard to open even a tiny gap.

Because I was sitting in second or third wheel all the way up the climb, I never turned round. I try never to look behind on a climb, so that then all the other riders get to see is my backside. Sometimes you’re sitting there thinking, ‘This is getting tough’, but I’ve been told I don’t really show it when I’m on the rivet, and I guess that’s a good trait to have. You don’t need to assess the others: if you’re feeling it then they’re feeling it. It wasn’t until I looked at the photos afterwards that I could see just how much the other guys were grimacing behind. I had a decent lead in the overall standings, 1min43sec on Cadel, and I knew the race was over once we got down into Morzine, because the day after should be
pretty
straightforward; that meant it was just a case of counting down the kilometres. On that kind of climb the pain is similar to that in a time trial, but with the difference that you have five hours in your legs when you hit the climb so there’s a bit more fatigue in there. It’s not easy, it’s not painless, but with the team in control it’s pretty businesslike.

As I’ve often said, I know my cycling history. I’ve always been into it, since I was a teenager watching videos of the Tour de France rather than doing my homework. So the night I won the Dauphiné, I asked the journalists in the press conference a question: who was the last winner of Paris–Nice and Dauphiné in the same year. A lad from
l’Equipe
called Alex said it was Eddy Merckx. I smiled straight away; it was Eddy, and before him Jacques Anquetil – another five-time Tour winner – and they both went on to win the Tour in the same year. I thought, the three of us now, it’s a nice little club to be in.