Bradley Wiggins: My Time (18 page)

The first bad pile-up was on the Tuesday, coming into Boulogne; we were descending on a country road and they started falling at twentieth wheel from the front, and that was it. Apparently that one happened because someone else tried to move up right on the edge, someone else just moved to the right and the first guy went into the grass, tried to jump back up into the road and then bam. You’re going downhill, doing about 60 or 65km per hour, it’s narrow, only one lane. You start seeing people braking up ahead so you slam up, people
up
against you hit their brakes and skid, people are all around you hitting the floor. This is what happened here, and it blocked the road completely. I didn’t think twice: I got off my bike, put it on my shoulder like a cyclo-cross rider, and ran down the verge into a field to get round as there was no way through all the guys on the deck. I just got back in, and the guys behind didn’t. I had to do it – if you stand on the road you’re going to wait there for a couple of minutes, and a lot of people didn’t come back from that crash. At the time I didn’t think I might have lost the Tour, but when I got to the end and I saw how few there were in the front group, I realised it certainly was one of those moments.

That ended up being one of my hardest days on the Tour. For a little while it felt like touch and go, as immediately after the crash I was the only rider from the team in the front group. I was thinking, ‘I’d better not puncture here.’ It was about 20km to go, and I’d never have got back in. That could have been a couple of minutes lost all of a sudden. The other big problem was that I didn’t take in enough food during the stage with all that was going on. Usually I eat as much as I can, constantly. I have a routine: every twenty minutes, eat something or take a gel. Rice cakes are what I tend to have with me; our chef Søren makes them, like rice pudding congealed into little squares.

But there was no time for that: even before the big crash, the stage had turned into a complete scramble. The crowds were huge, the roads were narrow, you couldn’t move up for fear of hitting a spectator, there were small crashes going on so you were constantly chasing back to the bunch; with all
that
to think about, I kept forgetting to eat. I got really cold that day and I was struggling at the end. I had nothing left when we hit the finale. Without a doubt I would have lost time on Cadel Evans and the others on the climb to the finish. Luckily for me, however, I was caught behind yet another crash right at the end. I say lucky because it came inside the last 3km – the point after which they give you the same time as the lead group if you are held up in a crash. Losing five or ten seconds at that point would have been a huge blow.

The big Boulogne crash was where we lost Kosta with a broken shin. I saw him in the hotel after the stage on Tuesday and the big picture was the last thing on my mind. You don’t think, ‘Shit, we’re a man down’, you can only express sympathy for a guy who’s broken his leg and will be healing for three months. There’s nothing you can say to a guy in that situation; I told him not to worry about us. You have to keep in your mind that it’s only a bike race.

At Sky we were dithering at times in that first week. It wasn’t until the stage into Saint-Quentin that we said, ‘Right, one day we are going to come unstuck and lose this.’ Cav had had his crash in Rouen the day before. With 25 or 30km to go we were all at the front doing our job and it started getting hairy, I slipped back a bit in the bunch and we all split up. We couldn’t move up, any of us, it was about 60km per hour, going down this descent. I remember sitting there with Christian thinking, ‘If there is a crash now, that’s it. It will split the peloton and we’re not going to get back.’ I couldn’t
move
up the side of the bunch because everyone was wall to wall; I was just sitting there, in the form of my life, I couldn’t move up; I thought, ‘If something happens now, my Tour is over, because of someone crashing in front of me, not because I haven’t got the legs.’

Nothing happened; we went down into Rouen and then the big crash happened with Cav. Fortunately it was within 3km to go and I crossed the line thinking, ‘You were lucky there, Brad.’ I said to Sean that night we’d been great until 30km to go when we’d lost it; that was where we said, ‘We need to take this on a bit more at the back end.’ The day after, Saint-Quentin, that was it, we team time trialled for 25km and I gave a bit of a lead-out to Cav at the finish. On that stage, in fact, we were killing two birds with one stone: we were covering my backside against crashes but we were also keeping Cav up in the front for the sprint. We were all super-happy with ourselves.

The crash that made the biggest impact in the first week was the ‘massacre’ on the way to Metz, which happened about 25km out from the finish and cost several contenders their chance in the race. We were doing 70km per hour down a long straight road, with the trains on the front of the bunch; apparently the crash was started by a guy who used to be in our team, Davide Viganò. His team leader, Alessandro Petacchi, decided to remove his overshoes; he took one off, gave it to Viganò, took the other one off and Viganò took his hands off the bars, sat up to put them in his back pocket, touched a wheel and that was it: bang, carnage.

Just before it happened, I was twenty riders back in the bunch, and I remember thinking, ‘This is ridiculous, this is getting crazy.’ The crowds were closing in on us from the sides of the roads. I thought: ‘If there’s a crash now, I’m down, there’s nowhere to go.’ I saw an opening, I went right up the outside with Christian Knees on my wheel; we passed the GreenEDGE train on the front and got in the slipstream of the motorbikes. We were doing 75km per hour behind a motorbike, so I stopped pedalling, looked round, put my hand out and apologised to GreenEDGE for overtaking them. That was just a matter of respect; telling them I wasn’t showboating when they were riding at the front.

At that point the crash happened behind me, right where I had been sitting. You think: ‘Was that fate?’ There had been a split second when I thought, ‘I’m in the wrong position here’, so I moved up and got myself out of it, then the crash happened. Eddie Boasson Hagen was in the middle of it; I had been sitting on his wheel and if I hadn’t moved up that would have been my Tour over there and then. We’d tried to do the same thing as at Saint-Quentin a bit earlier, we’d all got a bit dithery, I’d shat myself and moved up with Christian.

I went through that Tour without a single puncture or crash. Was that luck? Or was that me being on the ball, completely focused and putting as much thought into every single stage as if it was the only one that counted, in a way that I hadn’t done the year before? It made me think of something Chris Boardman said. He was asked to sum up what quality it is that makes me a strong Tour contender.
He
said, ‘It’s hard to put your finger on one thing, but as I’ve found out over the last ten years, the thing that makes Brad good is his ability to learn.’ I think that’s quite a reasonable summary. My crash in 2011 was definitely a lesson. You think how many guys going for the overall got wiped out in that one crash at Metz: Frank Schleck, who had finished 3rd in 2011; the Giro d’Italia winner Ryder Hesjedal; one of the best climbers, Robert Gesink; another Giro star, Michele Scarponi. So perhaps that was the day when I won the Tour.

After the Dauphiné, Sean and I had gone and looked at the stage finish at La Planche des Belles Filles, high up in the Vosges above the town of Nancy. From the prologue onwards it became apparent that I was going to take the jersey there, as long as I didn’t have any problems in the first week. There was no way Fabian was going to be able to get up the climb with us. In all the races we’d done up to that point it had become clear that the most efficient way for me to climb was just to ride as hard as possible at the bottom to put everyone in the red. Then I could ride what amounted to a time trial up to the top. So, working back from the finish, we would have to hit the last hill with our climbing group on the front. We would deal with it in the same way as we had training in Tenerife: full on up the climb with three guys in front of me, each of them doing 3km at threshold or as much as they were capable of, then peeling off. That was how we had always intended to ride in the Tour. In training I had it hardest because I had to sit through
all
the stages: Kosta would go first, 3km above threshold, Richie would take over – Jon Tiernan-Locke was with us at that camp, so he did it as well – then I would have to take up the last few kilometres.

The goal for the stage was to hit the climb, 8.5km to the finish, with Mick on the front, then Richie, Froomie and me. It wasn’t super-long so we would ride above threshold: bloody hard. Mick would go as hard as he could which would probably be a kilometre and a half, Richie would take over and do the same thing, then Froomie. Eventually we would get to the summit and there shouldn’t be many other guys left with us. The worst thing for me – or it used to be in the past – is when riders hit a climb and everyone stops and looks at each other, then someone launches, then everyone reacts; we all go up to him, get back to him, it stops again, someone else attacks. That’s how the Alberto Contadors of this world climb, whereas all this year, in all the major climbs we had done – at the Dauphiné, at Mende in Paris–Nice, in the Algarve when Richie won – we had hit the climb hard, running the race straight away. That’s how we know we can get to the summit in the most efficient way possible.

Planning a finish like this is just a matter of working back in stages from the goal and figuring out who does what in each section. Sean looks at the route and then they’ll have a chat in the bus the night before – Sean, Rod, Dave – and they’ll have in mind what they want to do. They’ll come up with a strategy and they’ll present it in the bus to us in the morning. We’ll have our own input on it but nine times out of ten we all agree; then we try and implement it. We’ll say
the
way we need to do it is to keep Mick, Richie, Froomie and Brad for the summit; we’ll say, ‘Eddie it’s your job to take it up from that last climb and do the descent, Christian, you’re on bottle duty all day and if you can pace the guys going into that second last climb your job is done, Bernie, go as far as you can, Cav, you’re on bottle duty as well,’ and that’s it.

So that was the goal at La Planche des Belles Filles; it was then a question of getting into the right position. Sean had worked it all out because he had recced the route a couple of times. Before the final ascent, there was a climb that dragged up for a while, followed by quite a nasty, fast little descent. We knew we needed to be in the front for that descent, and the best man for that job would be Edvald. So working back from that, Christian and Bernie could do the job to get us there early on. We decided that 500m from the summit we were going to hit the front with Eddie, and he was going to go full on down the descent, take it to the foot of the climb, with the peloton in one line. Then Mick would take over followed by the three of us. That’s exactly what happened.

While all that was going on in the race, I was sitting there in the line. I was in a perfect position, because I was at the peak of my fitness. You’re completely in control, but you realise you’re going bloody fast. You’re composing yourself, getting ready, getting ready. You are almost waiting for someone to come up and come round you, and swamp you. Once a stage is done, you look back with the lads, and you say, ‘Ah, I thought someone would have come over the top’, and Eddie
might
say, ‘When I swung off the front it was in one line, everyone was pinned on the wheel.’ It’s at that point you realise just how good your physical shape is. What tells you you’re better than everyone else is the fact that you’re still in control at those moments whereas everyone else is on their limit.

When we actually hit that climb to La Planche des Belles Filles, Mick was doing his thing and it was bloody hard, but you’re composed and you think, ‘Yeah, I can take this up a level, it’s not a problem.’ Then you get a kilometre, two kilometres into the climb, Richie takes over, two and a half, three kilometres into the climb, you’re halfway up, Richie’s on the front, you’re working hard, and you’re thinking, ‘I’m still in control of everything, I’m nowhere near getting dropped.’ Then you watch it on the telly in the evening and you look at the back of the group and it’s decimated. You watch Andreas Klöden, Frank Schleck, all these guys who’ve been on the podium at the Tour, struggling. You think, ‘Bloody hell, that’s how hard it was for these guys,’ but when you’re sitting there in third wheel you don’t see anything else but the team. You don’t realise what’s going on behind you. Shane’s always saying to me, ‘If you were hurting, imagine what the rest of them were feeling.’

So going up there, with the pace we were setting, no one was going to attack. At the end, bizarrely, Cadel tried to get away but I didn’t know why he did that. He pressed on through a little flat bit, took the corner first into the last steep part of the climb, then just stopped. It was really weird, but there were a lot of things he did in that Tour which made me
wonder
a little. At Planche des Belles Filles he showed he didn’t have the legs straight away; at the time you’re thinking, ‘OK, maybe he just misjudged it.’ But it wasn’t the last time he tried something and it just didn’t happen for him. Then on that final ramp, Froomie pulled away in the final metres to win the stage. We had done the job.

When I pulled on the yellow jersey a little while later it felt as if nothing else mattered. Regardless of what might happen in the rest of that Tour de France, I’d taken the yellow jersey. Up to that point, it had all been about the process. We knew we could win the Tour, but, for me, to get through that first week unscathed, to get to that point where we arrived at the climbs, to race a summit finish in the Tour de France, and pull on the yellow jersey that was an incredible feeling. Wearing the
maillot jaune
had been my dream from when I was about ten or twelve, so to have gone through all that and achieved it was something that’s hard to put into words. I realised that a couple of hours later, when I got back to the hotel and Scott Mitchell the photographer came in. He captured the moments from arriving at the hotel, walking into the lift, going up, going out of the madness of the Tour de France into my hotel room, and just sitting there with the jersey draped across the settee next to me with the realisation that I had taken the yellow in the Tour. He captured all that, and yeah, it was a nice feeling.