Bradley Wiggins: My Time (3 page)

It was all new to me – in fact, a transfer battle of this kind was almost unprecedented for cycling – and it went on for a long, long time. Much too long, as it turned out. The week after the Tour we went back to Girona, the city in south-east Spain where my wife Cath and I had set up a second home for the season, as it’s the Garmin base. I went out for dinner
with
the Garmin team director Jonathan Vaughters. He said, ‘Look, I can pay you this much, but I can’t pay you it next year because I don’t have the budget. In two years’ time I can pay you more, and I’ll match what Sky are going to pay.’ Jonathan is a lovely guy – he understood me and he understood that my urge to join Sky wasn’t really about the money. However, I think he was pissed off with the way everyone went about it and I think he felt a little bit threatened at the idea of losing a potential leader for the Tour.

As the deal was being negotiated, a lot of the press weren’t helping either. There were journalists digging for information, ringing up Jonathan, saying, ‘I heard Brad’s going to Sky. Is this true?’ Jonathan would then get annoyed, which didn’t make negotiating any easier. At the end of November, Dave and Carsten went to New York to meet Jonathan and fought it out over six hours in an office with all their lawyers. When they came out of that meeting they’d done the deal but it was all on the basis that nothing could be said. A week later I raced at a Revolution track meeting in Manchester and I gave the press the impression I might be staying at Garmin. I had no choice but to say that because if I’d said otherwise I would have violated the terms of the deal and I wouldn’t have had a team for 2010 at all. The whole thing was a mess from start to finish and when it was over and the announcement was made it was a huge relief for everyone. But that was just the beginning.

A lot of the problems that cropped up in 2010 went back to the fact that from the end of the Tour until I signed with Sky,
which
was almost five months, I didn’t have a team. I remember coming home on 9 December having been presented to the press in London as a Sky rider, and that was it, it was all done. But then it was Christmas, and New Year, and in all that time I hadn’t really started training for this big race in France that we were going to try and win.

It had all been about changing teams up to that point. I’d just been drifting along, going to all these dos – parties and dinners and the rest, all for having finished 4th in the Tour – but because I didn’t have a team, I hadn’t done the usual thing you do in October. Every year, when the season’s finished, that’s when you sit down with your coaching team to plan the next season, set out your targets and discuss how you’re going to achieve them. I had done none of that. I didn’t even have a proper bike to train on: I was riding around on a bike made by my old mate Terry Dolan, who has a business a few miles away from my home in Lancashire. Garmin had taken back all the Felt bikes I had been using; as I wasn’t with Sky yet, I didn’t have a Pinarello to ride. I couldn’t go to the first Sky get-together in Manchester and I was riding around in unmarked, black kit through November and December. It was a week before Christmas by the time we got it all signed and I was told that I would be looked after by Rod Ellingworth, who was Mark Cavendish’s trainer and had joined Sky as race coach; Matt Parker, my trainer since 2007, would be working with me as well. But I still hadn’t started training.

On 4 January I needed to be in London for the team launch at the Millbank Tower, a massive place down on the
Embankment
. I remember arriving at the hotel in London the previous night and shaking hands with a load of people I’d never met and who I was supposed to be leading. Someone told me that Thomas Löfkvist was frustrated that I’d signed because he had joined on the assumption that he would be the leader in the big Tours.

The hype around the team was immense. We had put our cards on the table: Sky wanted to win the Tour de France with a British rider within five years, and win it clean. The crowd at the launch was huge; when we came on to the stage to be introduced by Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan, I was asked to stand in front of the other riders. I didn’t want to at first; I wasn’t keen to be at the head of it all. Already I felt uneasy about being the centre of attention. I spoke to the press there but had had no briefing about what I should or shouldn’t say. I started babbling about how I would have to learn to talk bullshit; I’ve no idea where it came from. It was all completely new to me.

Straight after the launch we flew to Valencia for the first training camp. I was really unfit, and struggled for the first few days, but all the cameras were there and only one question was being asked: can you win the Tour within five years? But even at that point I still hadn’t sat down with anyone for a phased planning session that answered the basic question: right, how are we going to do this? We simply had no time to stop and reflect.

We rushed the race programme out and then drifted along. I said I had ridden the Giro d’Italia in 2009, and that it had seemed to work really well for me, so I would do the Giro
again
; before we knew it we were in April, and then we were off to the Giro. I won the prologue because I’d been training for that, and was in reasonable shape until a week to go. I was lying 7th by then, but I was beginning to feel really tired, so I dropped back from the lead group on one of the key mountain stages and then rode through to the end. Even if I hadn’t sat up I wouldn’t have been able to stay with the leaders. The problem was that everyone was watching me; if I wasn’t physically up to it, it was easier to drop back and say I was saving myself for the Tour de France rather than having to explain to everyone that night what was going on. I knew I was going to have to save myself for the Tour or I would have nothing left, but the physical damage was done anyway.

Before the Tour we went on a training camp in the Alps to look at the mountain stages but during those few days, I just felt terrible. I hadn’t done the work and I didn’t perform. On the day we checked out the Col de la Madeleine, one of the biggest mountains in the Tour and a key climb in 2010, Michael Barry – the Canadian who was my personal watchdog for that Tour – was supposed to do about half an hour on the front and then I’d take over. It was something similar to how we might work it on the Tour, with the lead
domestique
– team worker – making the pace to enable me, the team leader, to sit in his slipstream and save my strength. But it didn’t work out like that: he dropped me at the foot of the sixteen-mile climb. Instead of me surging past him to take on the lead as he fell back, I was left behind. From there on in to the Tour it should have been apparent that I wasn’t in the shape to get a podium finish. It was as simple as that.

The pressure during the Tour that year was massive. It was Team Sky’s first year in cycling, the stated goal was to win the Tour, I had finished 4th the year before and the natural assumption was that I would perform better than before. The amount of media attention was immense, because no British team had been in this position. It was new to me too, and I didn’t deal with it well.

The prologue was a nightmare – I wouldn’t normally expect to finish 77th, even though I was riding in the rain – and for the whole race I was carrying the effects of a nasty crash on day two. I got through that, moved up to 14th overall after the stage across the cobbles of Northern France to Arenberg, and coming towards the Alps at the end of the first week I was feeling good. I was beginning to think I might be OK, even on the first big Alpine climb, the Col de la Ramaz on the stage to Morzine. I asked the team to ride on the front there, to set a decent pace, but by the time we got to the finish at Avoriaz I simply hadn’t recovered. I was hanging on all the way up the final climb, counting down the kilometres until the point where I simply couldn’t hold the lead group any more. When I look back now I’m amazed I clung on for so long, not accepting what was meant to be, that I was going to get dropped. As I crossed the line a journalist asked me if that was the end of my Tour. I told him where to go.

I had no option but to keep playing the game, keep telling people what they wanted to hear even though inside I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I particularly remember the first rest day in Morzine, the very next day. The team was holding a press conference in the evening and I said to Dave, ‘I am
not
going, it’s just not on, what am I going to say?’ His answer was, ‘Come on, Brad, just head down there. Say you’re going to continue riding, and just keep up that fighting spirit. The press don’t like people giving up, so just keep going.’

That was what I did. I tried to fight on but it’s hard to fight when you haven’t got any form because ultimately it depends on what strength you have in your legs. Every mountain day became a grind as I wasn’t quite good enough to stay with the first group when the racing got serious. I did start to come round a little bit in the third week and I had a couple of decent days. I was in the break one day in the Pyrenees and I had a good last time trial for 9th place. In fact, I was good enough physically to have a chance of winning it but the wind changed quite a bit so I rode in tougher weather than the guys who filled the top positions in the standings. I was the best of all the guys who rode in the harder conditions, but it didn’t count for anything.

So much had changed from the year before. All of a sudden I was leading a team – or I was supposed to be leading a team – and I didn’t really know how I’d got there. As far as building up to the Tour went, I had repeated the training and race programme that I had followed the year before. I thought it would work but it was all on a wing and a prayer. I finished 23rd in the Tour, which shows I was fit; what I was lacking was the last 10 per cent that it takes to compete with the best guys; for example, when we went over a certain altitude – about 1,600m we later worked out – I was struggling. As a result I was barely hanging on whenever the overall contenders began slugging it out.

Mentally it was tough. I felt I had let a lot of people down. I’m quite good at remaining positive though, and that’s what I was trying to do. But throughout that whole season I felt alone. I felt I had no one to talk to; I didn’t really have a coach to ring up on a daily basis, to give me constant feedback and support. My feelings finally got the better of me in the Pyrenees, at the summit finish at Ax-Trois-Domaines, where I came in 36th, four minutes behind the favourites. Unusually, I was on my own when I got back to our camper van on the mountaintop; there was a wall of press waiting for me when I came out to ride back down the climb to the team bus, which was parked at the bottom. One of them, an Australian journalist I’ve known for many years, asked me what had happened. I just opened up: ‘I’m fucked. I’ve got nothing. I don’t have the form, it’s as simple as that. I just haven’t got it as I did last year. I just feel consistently mediocre. Not brilliant, not shit, just mediocre. I just haven’t got it right this year.’ It might not have been my most professional interview ever, but it was almost as if I was tired of the lies. It’s incredibly hard telling people what they want to hear when you know the opposite is true. I didn’t want to go on flogging a dead horse.

By the end of the Tour it was clear that we needed to look at where it had all gone wrong. There had to be a review of how we had built up to it, taking in everything: my racing programme, how we selected the team, how we dealt with the media, how we rode the race. At one point late on, Dave said to me, ‘Look, we know you’ve got the machine. We know you can do it. You finished 4th last year. We just need to figure
out
how to get your body working properly.’ But after Paris the whole team went their separate ways: we were all exhausted, and at the end of the Tour, all you want to do is get home. I didn’t ride my bike for a week and then the Sunday after the Tour de France finished, I took part in the Manchester Sky Ride, one of a series of mass-participation cycle rides where thousands of members of the public could get on their bikes and pedal along with the stars.

That night I was sitting at home when my phone rang. It was my mum and she said, ‘George has had a heart attack.’ I said, ‘Fucking hell’, or something, and I hung up on her. I had absolutely no idea what to say. George was my granddad.

CHAPTER 2

ROCK BOTTOM

WHEN I CAME
off the phone, Cath asked me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘George has had a heart attack.’

We had no idea what to do. It was about ten o’clock at night, so we dropped everything and drove to London. We got to the hospital at about two o’clock in the morning and stayed all through the night. He was on a life-support machine, so I stayed for three or four days at the hospital, day and night.

George had always been there. He was the father figure, the role model in my young life, from the day when my mother Linda and I moved in to my nan and granddad’s flat in Kilburn after my father Gary had walked out on us. Gary didn’t so much walk out on us in Christmas 1982 as throw us out. I wasn’t even two-years-old. We’d gone from our home in Ghent to see my mum’s parents, and he called my mum to say she and I weren’t to come back to Belgium. He’d got together with someone else. For a while, until Mum got a small place of her own, I ended up living in a family consisting
predominantly
of women: Nan and Granddad and their three daughters and me. For a long time, George was the only other male in that environment until my aunties had kids. For my first eight or nine years I spent a lot of time with him, so he was like a father in many respects; he brought me up. I find it difficult to explain what he was like. I suppose everything I am, everything I say, all my mannerisms and so on, all come from him.

Granddad loved sport, so I used to go greyhound racing with him every Saturday night at Wimbledon dog track. We had a weekend routine of our own: Saturday morning I’d go and get
Sporting Life
and a handful of betting slips from Ladbrokes for him, go back home and fill in all the betting slips for the Saturday afternoon horse racing on the telly, and after that it was off to watch the dogs. Through him, I learned all about betting: how the odds work, all the signs the tic-tac men use. I guess as I got older he was incredibly proud of me, but he never showed it to me. Even now, that side of my family doesn’t hold me up as anything special, I’m just like any other cousin or grandchild. They don’t really say, ‘I’m so proud of you’, they’ll still put me down or whatever – ‘What’ve you got your hair like that for?’ – which helps you keep a sense of who you are.