Bradley Wiggins: My Time (15 page)

I can’t say enough about the quality of what we called the climbing group within Sky; it consisted of guys who on their day were all potentially capable of challenging for a place on the podium in the Tour de France. Mick’s finished top ten in the Tour and top ten in the Giro, Richie’s run top ten in the Giro, Kosta as well, while Froomie had that 2nd place in the Vuelta, and maybe could have won it. All of these riders were superbly talented, which helps explain why we were so dominant in the mountains. If you put all those guys together, get most of them training and racing as a group all year, and get them committed to one cause, you end up with a dominant climbing group. It was similar with CSC when they had Frank and Andy Schleck, Carlos Sastre and Ivan Basso. A group like that feeds off each other; you create momentum, you become your own little unit. We all clicked and the core of the group had raced and
trained
together all year as well, which I think made a huge difference.

The climbing group’s performance on the Joux Plane in the Dauphiné had highlighted the team’s strength, but what it didn’t reveal was the depth of the commitment they showed for the whole nine months, right up to the end of the Tour, and beyond, in some cases. Riders like Mick, Kosta, Christian and Richie in particular, as well as Froomie, had totally bought in to what I was trying to do, to win the Tour in 2012. On top of their work in the races, they accepted that trying to win the Tour meant they had to sacrifice practically their entire season as a result, just to do that for me. They would need to put the same training in as me, make those same efforts emptying the tank in Tenerife and Majorca, all to be as good as they could be just to help me. That was a massive commitment from those guys and it’s something I will never forget.

It’s hard to know what to say when other people show that measure of dedication to your cause. It’s kind of humbling to think that they all did that for me. I know they get paid to do it, but you cannot forget that those guys are capable of winning races themselves. I’ll be forever grateful for what they did and I don’t think I could articulate that in an email. Just saying something like, ‘Hey, guys, thanks for last month, it was fantastic’ wouldn’t do them justice, so it might take a while before I’m able to express my gratitude completely. It must be a little bit like when someone saves your life. I’m sure that’s not the best analogy but I do wonder how you ever repay those people for what they did. Saying thank you isn’t enough;
that’s
the way I feel about it. I guess the fact they were willing to do it is a mark of how my leadership skills have come on and I suppose in a nice way it must come down to the fact that they like me. That’s a wonderful thing to feel.

CHAPTER 10

WORKING CLASS HERO

AS THE TOUR
approached, I was having similar feelings to those I remembered from before the Beijing Olympics. I really felt this could be my year. It was simply the way I’d felt all season; that was how it had been back in 2008, in the weeks leading up to the Great Britain cycling team’s epic medal haul in Beijing, with my personal gold medals in the individual and team pursuits.

Four years on, there was a similar feeling of momentum gathering. There had been no upsets, no major setbacks, barely a day’s training lost for any reason, which is rare when you are pushing your body hard for nine months. There had been two glitches, but they were not big ones. At Paris–Nice I had started getting a cold because of the freezing conditions there. My body just let go and when I got home it felt as if I was going to get really ill, but then I went to Catalonia and I was fine. I came back from Spain having pulled out because of the heavy snow on the hardest mountain stage, thinking,
‘Shit
, I’m going to miss a couple of days’ racing.’ Tim and Shane simply said, ‘No worries, you can train harder than that.’ So we put two or three days together, and I actually trained harder than I would have raced.

Shane is always saying, ‘Don’t make the small things into big things, and don’t let the big things become small things.’ What that means is that you just deal with what comes at you along the way, never getting too carried away with the highs and never getting overwhelmed by the lows. All year I had been trying to hover along in a stable state without making a big issue of anything. So everyone was saying, ‘Sky look amazingly strong, with a team like that Wiggins is going to win the Tour’; but that didn’t create any more pressure. I’d built up to the point where it wasn’t a surprise. It wasn’t news to my ears because we’d been training all year as a team to be in a position to go to the Tour as favourites. The feeling was simply that we were on track.

That didn’t mean we took anything for granted. There is so much more involved in the Tour than with any other bike race. There were all the problems that could arise in the first week and there was the question of how much more Cadel might improve. That mattered because I had been close to my best in the Dauphiné. In the three weeks before I travelled to Liège to start the Tour, it was just a case of sustaining the form, dropping a tiny bit more weight, backing up a bit in the training and letting the effect of all the work come through. During the Dauphiné we still hadn’t seen the effects of the last training camp in Tenerife. Clearly I was in the ballpark and we’d done all the work; I had got the team I needed
around
me, and that meant we were in a position to win the Tour de France. But we were all too well aware of what had happened in 2011. I couldn’t just sit in the bunch and wait until the mountains and assume it would all go perfectly.

Before the Tour, eight or nine days out, I had to do a big media day while I was putting in my last training in Majorca. At a time like that, I see those things as just getting in my way. I had five and a half hours’ riding to do that day in the mountains, and we had to start the press conference at lunchtime, so I had to go out at 7 a.m. and do my training. I was on the go for twelve hours, speaking to what seemed like every man and his dog: the BBC, Sky, Sky Sports, ITV,
l’Equipe
and two teleconferences for the newspapers. I was out of the hotel at 6.45 a.m., with five or six camera crews following me, got back at 1.30 and was full-on until 7 p.m. with interviews. Then the next morning I was down at the beach at 8 a.m. doing a photo shoot for
l’Equipe
.

But I was very confident. All the data was suggesting I was in a great place, the family were in Majorca with me and I was really enjoying it. Shane is very good at preventing me from ‘testing myself’ in training. The big risk is making efforts that you think will reassure you of your form, but which can actually be quite damaging. Instead, it was a matter of ‘putting the hundreds and thousands on top of the cake’, as he likes to say. There is always a little fear that something is going to go wrong at the last minute, but then you think, ‘What if that did happen? I can’t control that.’ You have to have the confidence to keep up the momentum. The Tour was just another race, exactly the same thing as I’d done all year. I’d
just
gone through one phase of training and racing after another and now we were finally there. My win in the Dauphiné didn’t tell me that all I would have to do was turn up at the Tour and I could win, but it was proof that I was going to be able to dig deep physically as a result of all the work we had done since last November.

Before Beijing, in the Great Britain team we had been aware of the expectation, we knew we were the favourites, but we also knew that we had to keep concentrating on what we had to do. I felt poised for the Tour, hopefully to make history.

After the Dauphiné finished we spent a night in Châtel and drove part of a couple of Tour stages: the route of the first long time trial from Arc-et-Senans to Besançon and the first summit finish at La Planche des Belles Filles. By now I had seen most of the Tour route, but it was a bit of a blur. I didn’t see the use in having the route for stage 10 or 11 at the front of my mind because it was too much information. There was no need to know yet. It was too far away, and the race was simply too vast.

There was one thing I did have in my mind all through the spring and early summer: stage 20 of the Tour was a 53.5km time trial from Bonneval to Chartres, which we had looked at before Paris–Nice. That was a key stage for me. But as of mid-June, I was looking no further than the prologue time trial in Liège, rather than worrying about what was beyond that. The fact that I take the race from day to day means that I only remember the stages we have previously looked at when we actually get to them. When I finish a day’s
stage
in the Tour, I look at the route and see what we’ve got tomorrow, and Sean Yates will say, ‘That’s the climb we did when you had to change the wheel at the bottom’ or ‘That’s the stage we rode a hundred kilometres of the day after the Dauphiné finished’, and that helps me put the pieces in the jigsaw. That’s how I deal with it.

Sean has been the lead
directeur sportif
at Sky since midway through 2010 but he and I go back a long, long way. That was underlined by something I put in the post to him between the Dauphiné and the Tour. Back in 1997, when I was fifteen years old, I made the trip to the British Cycling Federation dinner during the off-season, to be presented with the trophy for the juvenile points race. It was Sean who was handing out the prizes; I still had the photo of us together at the dinner. I made a point of sending Sean that picture after the Dauphiné and I said to him, ‘I bet you never thought that kid would become a contender one day.’ He laughed, but that’s just his way.

As is the case with Shane Sutton, Sean and I share a lot of history. At the Tour of Flanders in 1996, when I was just fourteen, I went up to him at the start and asked him for his autograph. He was one of my heroes as a kid; I grew up watching him. Back then, Robert Millar, Chris Boardman and Sean Yates were the Brits in the professional peloton, and for various reasons Sean was the fans’ choice. He wasn’t a big winner, although he won a lot of decent races: the GP Eddy Merckx time trial, the Tour of Belgium, a time-trial stage in the Tour de France at a record average speed and he wore the yellow jersey for a day in the Tour in 1994. He wasn’t a Chris
Boardman
, who was picking up prologue time trials left, right and centre. No, he was Sean Yates, a working-class hero. At that time cycling wasn’t mainstream, so he wasn’t a house-hold name, whereas Chris had a higher profile, thanks to his Olympic gold medal. Sean was dearly loved within the cycling world though, I think because he was someone the British cycling public could associate with; he’d come from where they were, their world of club time trials and winter runs. I liked the fact that he was ordinary and unpretentious. By the time I knew him he drove an old Land Rover – the flash motorbike from his younger days had gone – and he was still competing in events like the North Road Hardriders ‘25’, a classic grassroots time trial in Hertfordshire, simply because he loved to race. He’d ridden the Tour de France a dozen times but had no airs or graces.

Sean’s last season as a full-on professional was 1996, but he has never properly stopped racing since then. By 1999, when we raced together at the Good Friday Meeting at Herne Hill – the old Olympic track in south-east London – he was competing again. He had made a comeback in 1998 to ride the Tour of Britain for the Linda McCartney team – sponsored by the vegetarian food company owned by the late wife of the former Beatle, and the last serious attempt to get a British team in the Tour before Sky came along – where he ended up as
directeur sportif
. They were the coming team in Britain, with high ambitions for the Tour de France; I was the junior world pursuit champion by then. At Herne Hill we raced together in the team pursuit. The teams were a mix of young riders and stars of the past like Phil Bayton, Ron Keeble
and
Ian Hallam – all names that are mainly forgotten now but which will mean a lot to British fans over a certain age – so I was in Sean’s team. I remember he said to me afterwards, ‘I was really struggling to hold your wheel.’ He was lovely. He wasn’t behaving like a lot of old pros when you’re that age, who seem to be trying to put you down a bit: ‘Don’t get too big for your boots, this means nothing in the juniors, you’ve still got to break through.’ He was really praising me: ‘You’re going to be really good one day.’ And I was thinking, ‘This is Sean Yates telling me this.’ I remember it really sinking in: Sean Yates said to me I’m going to be really good one day.

At the end of 1998 after I won the Junior World’s, he asked me if I would like to join McCartney for ’99. I said no, I’d love to, thanks, but I was going to stay with British Cycling. Peter Keen had started the World Class Performance Programme and I was going to go with them. In 2000 McCartney had grown, with Sean hiring the Olympic bronze medallist and Tour stage winner Max Sciandri. I heard that Sean wanted to ask me to join, but he didn’t because he knew I was on the Olympic squad and wanted to ride the team pursuit in Sydney. After the Olympics that summer, where I got a bronze medal in the team pursuit and came close to a medal in the Madison, he rang me on the landline at my mum’s, because we didn’t have mobile phones.

‘Right: do you want to go pro with us next year? We’re going even bigger and we’ve signed Íñigo Cuesta, Kevin Livingston and all these other guys. We can pay you thirty-five grand.’ I just thought, ‘Wow, thirty-five grand and a pro contract. Flipping great, I get to be with Sean Yates!’ and that was that.
I
signed with Linda McCartney. They sent my race programme through, saying, ‘This is what we think you should do next year.’ On 4 January 2001, I loaded my Fiesta up at my mum’s and drove to their base in Toulouse. I drove down there with one wing mirror because someone had wiped the other one off when it was parked in London, but it didn’t matter because the front-left passenger seat was full of stuff anyway. I took bedding, pictures, virtually everything I owned, left at six in the morning, went via the Eurotunnel across to France, drove down and arrived there at ten at night. Julian Clark, who ran the team, took me to my apartment, installed me in there and that was it: I was a pro in the Linda McCartney team. Although I never got as far as actually being paid.