Bradley Wiggins: My Time (6 page)

‘How was he?’

‘He was in a really bad way, mate, he didn’t look so well. I bought him a drink one night and we talked through a few things and he asked a lot after you, you know.’

Shane had looked after Gary because he was my dad, helped him out a bit and gave him a thousand dollars out of his own pocket and that was it; I think it was the last time Shane saw Gary, and pretty much the last I heard of him.

Six years later, when Gary died in January 2008, it was Shane who phoned me at 4 a.m. to tell me he had heard from a mate in Australia that my dad was in hospital and it wasn’t looking good for him.

Later I spoke with Shane a bit more about him and he said, ‘Fuck, Gary was talented, very talented, but he just didn’t put the work in. And he was a big drinker.’ I never knew my father as well as I know Shane; I do know he’s far more loyal than Gary ever was. Shane has been my role model for the last ten years and he says I’m like his son.

When Simon Jones, my coach since 1998, left British Cycling in early 2007, Shane was brought in by Dave Brailsford to oversee the team pursuit squad. Simon had wanted us all to go on a massive training camp in Australia that winter, but I’d refused to go because Cath was pregnant with Isabella. Simon was fairly annoyed at me, and told the guys when they arrived Down Under that I would never race with them again, something that I had no option but to accept. At the start of 2007, Dave told me he was letting Simon go, and said, ‘Shane’s going to take over, and I’m going
to
bring this guy Matt Parker in, he’s got some good ideas; he’s going to be the sports scientist.’

Shane’s first words were, ‘You’ve got to start getting some enjoyment back into this programme.’ He asked me to lead the group. And he said, ‘We need to start loving our athletes a bit more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you need?’

He bought me a phone and a SIM card, and said, ‘See this? This is the backbone. If you ever need anything just ring me and you’re not paying for this out of your pocket.’ Three months before I had thought I was out of the squad after I’d refused to go to Australia; suddenly I was being made to feel like a million dollars.

It can be infuriating being trained by Shane, because everything in his life is so hectic. He’s got a lot going on and he really struggles when he feels as if he’s not in control. He will ring me at times: ‘What you doing?’

And I’ll say: ‘I’m having a day off.’

‘What the fuck you having a day off for? You should be out on your bike.’

But he hasn’t seen that I’ve been training for the last five days. When he’s not in control and he comes in and just sees what’s in front of his eyes, he can find it tough. It’s just the way he is and the way he operates. He’s constantly thinking about his athletes, often to the detriment of himself and his own family. There are times when you think, ‘For Pete’s sake, Shane, go and see your own family, don’t worry about us for once.’ His approach can seem extreme. For instance, he
apologised
to me at the start of the Dauphiné in 2012; he was really upset because he felt he had let me down. He had wanted to be at the race with me, but he’d had to go on holiday with his family to Center Parcs after being away at the World Track Championships in Australia. At times he expects you to show the same commitment as him. I’ll say, ‘I need to spend some time at home’, and he will say, ‘I haven’t seen my own family for three years.’ It can be infuriating. All you can say is, ‘No, Shane, we’re all different.’

Shane is incredibly observant as well. He’s always watching and thinking. He looks at little details, like the way I am pedalling, and he’ll say to me, ‘You didn’t look comfortable on that climb’, or ‘You were pushing too big a gear.’ He is great at knowing when to make an athlete stop and rest. He’s always saying, ‘You need to recruit now.’ By which he means letting the work soak in. His argument is: you need to do all this training but you also need to take the time off to let your body recover and adapt. Not a lot of athletes do this, but you need to recruit all the effort and repair all the muscle damage for the training to have any effect. If you don’t rest, you don’t recruit. For example, before winning the Dauphiné in 2012 I had two days off. I wasn’t sure about taking two days without riding the bike but he was determined I spend some time with my family. That’s what he’s like. As a coach he is incredibly good at the human side of it. He knows how it feels because he’s been there; he knows what six hours in the saddle feels like and he knows the mental effort it takes to ride for that length of time two days after a race.

Since the end of 2010 the way Tim and Shane have been working together is that Tim will write the training programmes and then Shane will adapt them to fit me and the world I live in. He’ll simply change the details, based on his experience of bike racing and his knowledge of me. It may seem small, but it makes a massive difference to the state of mind of his riders. Tim might have pencilled in some interval training three days after I’ve won a big race; Shane will look at it and say, ‘No, Brad just needs to ride his bike that day. He doesn’t need the mental stress of doing intervals.’ The outcome is the same: in physical terms I end up with the workload Tim devises, but Shane reduces the impact the training has on my mind and on my life. The key thing is Tim has never been a bike rider whereas Shane has; that means he understands what it’s like and runs the programme through the filter of normal life. That’s where the two of them work well together. Their skills just marry up.

Between them, Tim and Shane figure out the specific areas I need to work on. They look at everything through the year, they review what went right and what didn’t. Once we’ve reassessed the goals and decided what we’re doing next year, Tim and Shane will go away and write a plan for the season, a phased plan – like a business plan, but working back from the main goal – and Tim will look at it for weeks before coming back with another plan that includes all the specifics. One phase can be two weeks or ten days, one phase could be a week-long rest; for example, you might start off with five weeks general conditioning, getting back up to, say, twenty hours a week; phase two will be pre-race conditioning so it
will
be Majorca, say 1 January to 19 February. That will be working harder, starting to touch on threshold areas, and then it will be 20 February to 24 March, an initial race phase that includes Paris–Nice. It will be like that all the way towards July. That’s what we’ve always done with the track as well, from the days when we always worked back from the date of the team pursuit at a World’s or an Olympics.

Before Shane and Tim took over, I worked mainly with Matt Parker, the sports scientist who had begun working with the team pursuit squad in early 2007. Matt had always been at the velodrome; he used to test me on the rig. He looked after bits of my training until 2010 although he wasn’t a constant presence like Shane and Tim are now. I’d ask Matt what training I should be doing for a particular period; he’d send something through and I’d follow it, or at least I’d follow bits of it. It was much more informal, and there was never any criticism from Matt. He was very respectful of me and he always used to say to me, ‘You know yourself better than anyone.’ Which is perhaps why I felt like I could do no wrong. Perhaps Matt had too much respect for me; he is a lovely guy and would never have a go at me or criticise me if I missed out sessions we’d agreed on. Whereas Shane would go, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you go and do that? I didn’t tell you that was a key ride for the hell of it.’ So that’s the difference between Matt and Shane.

That’s not to say a hairdrying from Shane is hard to take. He’s just honest. It’s always a matter of, ‘Right, I’m going to tell you something now, you’re not going to like it, but you need to pull your head out of your arse, all right? You know
I
love you to bits, but these next three days are vital.’ It’s in that tone. He’ll tell you you’re the best athlete in the world and you’ve just got to get this bit right. He’ll praise you at the same time as making you feel how important this is. He’ll say, ‘To be honest, last week you fucked up. I’m telling you that as a mate, you messed up big time, you shouldn’t have gone and done what you did, but it’s done now and you learn from your mistakes.’ The reason why athletes like Sir Chris Hoy and I are happy to take a bollocking from him is because when he tells you that stuff you know he cares about you. He’s not ranting at you because he’s going to get in trouble himself or because he’s had a bad day. And you know likewise that when you do well he will never blow smoke up your backside. He will say, ‘Good job, mate, and you know the next three days are important; you need to get your feet up and recover.’

At other times it’s swung the other way. I’ve been in a bit of a box physically, needing to recover, but I’ve still gone out and completed what’s on the programme. In that case Shane will pull me to one side and say, ‘You know, Brad, this is where you’ve got to be careful, because that’s your desire to win the Tour coming through and it may be your downfall; you’ve still got to be very sensible and listen to your body. Just because you think, “You know what, I’m tired, I’m not going to do it today,” that doesn’t make you not committed or dedicated to what you’re doing.’

It’s quite funny when it’s Shane who’s telling me to take it easier because he has such a reputation as a hard nut, but a lot of the time it’s Cath who ends up doing that for me. I’ll
say
I feel guilty because I didn’t go on my bike today and she’ll tell me not to be stupid. She’s the one who always knows me best in that sense. As an athlete you are always trying to find that balance, to walk that fine line between training hard enough and not overdoing it, so it’s not enough to have a coach who simply shouts at you and tells you you’re soft, now go out and do it. Getting it right comes partly down to experience, and partly to having the right people around you.

CHAPTER 4

BACK ON TRACK

ONE OF THE
key things that Shane came up with in autumn 2010 was that I really needed to get back into the velodrome. He feels that track work in the winter gives you real routine, and some of the intense work we do with the Great Britain track squad is beneficial for the road. So with a view to possibly riding the team pursuit in the London Olympics – which were now just over eighteen months away – I went back to the GB squad again. That gave me a good base for what turned out to be a pretty mundane winter: I would be in the velodrome a couple of times a week doing some fairly intense workouts, I would be riding hard from my home in Lancashire and that was it.

I did what I had to do and when I began racing on the road again at the Tour of Qatar, the form was there straight away. That didn’t mean I was winning, but it put me in the front group on most of the stages. The team were pleased and that began to set me up for the spring. After Qatar it was the track
World
Cup at Manchester, where I joined up with my fellow Beijing gold medallists Geraint Thomas (or ‘G’) and Ed Clancy, plus young Steven Burke, for a convincing win that wasn’t light years away from the world record we’d set in Beijing. I was getting a lot of praise that winter, which was rewarding after I had made more of an effort to be a leader. Everyone was telling me I was more communicative, a joy to work with again. As an athlete, you feed off that: if you do something and it works and you get positive feedback, you want more of it.

That spring, it all started to go right. At Paris–Nice I finished 3rd overall, which was a huge step up in performance from anything I’d done since finishing 4th in the Tour the best part of two years before. It wasn’t run in my kind of weather, being cold and wet, and the guys ahead of me, Tony Martin and Andreas Klöden, were both serious stage race specialists. It was clearly a step forward: we were heading in the right direction, and that’s how it continued. At Paris–Roubaix, my favourite one-day Classic of them all, I did a good job for the team, giving Geraint Thomas my wheel when I crashed and he punctured at the start of the Arenberg Forest cobbled section. At the Tour of Romandie I helped with leading out another of my teammates from the pursuit squad, Ben Swift, to win a couple of bunch sprints, something I’d begun doing at Qatar for Edvald Boasson Hagen.

By that summer, I felt I was beginning to lead the team: at the dinner table, before and after the races, when Sean Yates was talking to us in the peloton on the radio. I wasn’t afraid to make it clear at the start of some events that I was just
there
for preparation, but I was ready to give something back as well by helping my teammates in those races. The point was that I had been 100 per cent committed throughout the season and had been communicative with the guys about that. That meant riding on the front when G was leading Bayern Rundfahrt – a five-day stage race in Bavaria – and then getting the payback at the Dauphiné Libéré when I put my hand up and said, ‘This is a big race for me.’

Another big change in our approach was that I had begun racing to get results all year round, rather than just putting everything into the Tour. Again, I had learned a lot from 2010. I remember being 7th overall with a week to go in the Giro d’Italia that year, and sitting up on the mountain stage to the Zoncolan, because I wanted to save myself for the Tour. I ended up thinking that perhaps I could have managed a top ten in the Giro; it was a reminder that there are races out there other than the big one in July. For the sake of just racing for five or six days flat out, when I was in a position to get something, rather than sitting up and thinking, ‘Yeah, well, you know what, I’m going to save it for the Tour,’ I might have won Paris–Nice that year, for example. So I thought, holding back for the Tour is not going to change a lot. You’ve still got to ride the races.

In 2011 we never really backed off on any one race, apart from the Tour. The goal was always July; I wanted to peak for my best form in that month but I wasn’t going to sacrifice everything for it. The Brad Wiggins of 2010 might have tapered off, gone into races like the Dauphiné or Paris–Nice fresh to get the best possible result, but in terms of the bigger
picture
you don’t hold any consistent form if you drop off training several times in the year in order to hit one peak after another. It has to be one long build in which you race as hard as you can, you race to win with whatever you’ve got at the time. If it’s good enough for a result, that’s great.