Bradley Wiggins: My Time (9 page)

Here’s an even more important point: the fitter you get the less the races take it out of you, which in turn means you have to train even harder. You get into the depths of the season, as we did later on, and you find a one-week stage race such as the Dauphiné has hardly touched the sides, because you’re so fit by that point. By the end of the Dauphiné it was tough on the boys, but not on me sitting in sixth wheel all day.

You assume racing is harder than training because as a cyclist it’s engrained in you from when you are a kid. I used to assume that after a stage race I’d have three days off to recover, three days of café rides. When we started working together in 2011, Tim got me out of that; I’d say I needed to recover, he’d tell me the race hadn’t been that hard. I had to get out of a lifelong habit of thinking you don’t need to train in summer because the racing takes care of it.

The Vuelta was the eye-opener: I’d finished 3rd after three and a half weeks of quality training. And the training hadn’t even been about the Vuelta; we went to the Vuelta to prepare for the world time trial championships. From there we thought: more training next year, more quality work on the things that we can control. It’s about specific things: Tim might say, ‘We need to train your threshold, increase your threshold.’ I might spend ten minutes at threshold in a four-hour bike race; we might as well go and do an hour of that in one day, in twenty-minute blocks. So the philosophy became: don’t go to the race to train, but train first, go to fewer races, and go there to win.

CHAPTER 6

BROTHERS IN ARMS

BEFORE WE COULD
work that through, and before I caught up with things over the winter, there were two big jobs to be done in Copenhagen. First up, the world time trial championships, a race I’d never quite got right. As long ago as 2004 I had finished 5th behind Michael Rogers in Madrid, while in Mendrisio in 2009, one of Fabian Cancellara’s many wins, I had been in 3rd on the road when my bike gave out on me. I knew that I had a medal in my legs at some point; it was simply a matter of getting the build-up right.

For a good five years, Fabian had been the man to beat in time trials, the best in the world by some margin. He’d won the World’s in 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010 and the Olympic gold in 2008. He was the one who had raised the bar in the discipline. In fact, he’d raised it so high that he became dominant to the point of making his opponents look almost ridiculous at times, such as at the World’s in 2009. It was only in 2011 that people started to get the better of him, riders
such
as Tony Martin of Germany, while I had finally managed to beat him earlier in the year at the Bayern Rundfahrt. The World’s in 2011 in Copenhagen, when Tony took gold and I rode to silver, was the first time he’d been beaten in the championships since 2005 (he didn’t ride in 2008). That made the time trial a huge day for me. I’d been knocking on the door for a few years, just trying to get a medal, and it set us up with a perfect platform for 2012, when I was aiming to go for the Olympic gold in London. Coming off the back of the Vuelta, that Wednesday in Copenhagen closed the season brilliantly: I’d won the Dauphiné, crashed out of the Tour but come back at the Vuelta, and now I’d broken my duck here at the World’s. There was just one job still to do on the Sunday.

I’d had a fair few text messages that year from Mark Cavendish. Before the Tour began, the messages were all really encouraging: ‘I hope you do well, I think you can win this.’ And when I crashed out he sent me some lovely texts while he was still on the race, just saying, ‘I hope you’re all right, I’m gutted for you’, and that sort of stuff. It was just nice, typical Cav, typical of how we get on. Cav is like my younger brother. We fall out, we make up, we take the piss out of each other, we say this and that, but the relationship is never going to go away. It’s like that with my own brother Ryan, who is eight years younger than me and is now living in Milan teaching English. We can go for months on end when I don’t happen to talk to him and then it’s like we saw each other yesterday. It’s just the relationship we have.

The first time I remember bumping into Cav was in the corridor at the Manchester velodrome some time in 2003 when I was in there training for the world pursuit championship. Cav was in the academy and they were in there trying to set their individual pursuit times – back then you used to have to meet a certain standard to get on the programme. He came up to me; he’d done the time he needed to do and he was really made up about it. He’d have been seventeen or maybe eighteen. The next year, 2004, we rode a criterium, a city-centre circuit race, in Calne; I was riding for Crédit Agricole at the time, he was there with the academy. I got 2nd and won a box of Go gels as a
prime
– one of the prizes they give out for first across the line on certain laps during the race – and I remember in the HQ afterwards I gave them to him. They’d have been twenty-five quid’s worth, and he was so grateful I’d given him these gels because at the academy they had to buy that kind of thing for themselves. I reminded him of that in 2011 and he said, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot that, I’m going to put that in my book.’

In 2005 I rode the Giro; after that it was the national
criterium
championships at Otley, where I led him out and he won it. By 2007 he had turned pro, he got his first big win in Scheldeprijs and he was getting established as a sprinter; he started saying to me, why don’t you come to T-Mobile next year? We both rode the 2007 Tour, then started doing some Six-Days together that winter as preparation for the Madison at the World’s and the Olympics, and then I joined T-Mobile, or HighRoad as it became. So we spent a lot of time at training camps and races; we used to room together. In 2008
we
won the Madison together at the world championships, did Romandie and the Giro in the same team, shared hotel rooms all through those. Then it was the Beijing Olympics, where the Madison was a disaster because I wasn’t at my best, and Cav was extremely unhappy as it was his only chance for a medal, and he was really pumped for it. After that we didn’t talk for five years, or so it would seem if you believe what you read in the papers.

After Beijing, I didn’t speak to him until I saw him in Qatar the following February, but I did get a text from him a couple of weeks after the Olympics: he said, ‘How are you doing and have you sobered up yet?’ In 2009, when I was with Garmin and he was at HTC, we would talk about cycling but never mention the Olympics. That’s something we have never, ever discussed. So through 2009 we had a few little spats but it’s not a problem. When he does something I don’t like I just say, ‘Oh you dick’, and likewise he’ll say it to me. That’s part of the relationship we have. That’s how we get on.

We had a bit of a spat on the Tour in 2009. Cav had the hump a couple of weeks in, because he had been docked some points in the green jersey by the
commissaires
. A few days later we rode a stage to Le Grand Bornand in the Alps. Thor Hushovd, who was Cav’s big rival for the green jersey, and who had benefited when Cav was declassified, spent most of the stage at the front, and took loads of points towards the green jersey. At the end of that day Cav said a whole load of stuff about Thor in the press and I put on Twitter: ‘Great to see Thor answering his critics in his own way by putting two fingers up at them.’ So Cav said to me,
‘Oh
, thanks for that,’ and I told him he had been a bit of a tit. There had also been a dispute between Garmin and HTC – on the same stage where Cav was declassified – when their rider George Hincapie was close to getting the yellow jersey and Garmin chased him down. Cav had been pretty unhappy about that as well, so we didn’t talk for about a week. We were always avoiding each other. So then we didn’t talk during that Tour until the end, on the penultimate stage up to Mont Ventoux. Coming up to the mountain the race split in the crosswinds when we put the hammer down. Cav got up to the front group, I remember going up to him, riding up the side of this echelon; I just put my hand on his back and he put his hand out and we shook hands. It was like saying sorry. Then we went up the Ventoux, I nailed 4th place overall, and the next day on the roll-in to Paris we were talking for ages. There are some lovely photos of us from that day chatting and laughing together.

In years to come, I know I’ll look back and be proud to tell my grandchildren I rode with Mark Cavendish, the greatest sprinter of all time. A large part of that comes from the World Road Race Championships in Copenhagen, where the Great Britain lads put in one of the most dominating rides that event has ever seen. But it was a special time for me too. I’d come out of that Vuelta and my self-belief had gone up, I got my medal in the time trial, and then in the road race I had a role to play. My job was to do the last lap, to keep the pace as high as I could, and make sure that the peloton was all together when the final build-up to the sprint began.

Earlier in the year it didn’t look quite as simple as it turned
out
to be. In all the discussions about the World’s with guys like G, Ian Stannard and the others, and the discussions with Rod Ellingworth – the manager who masterminded the whole thing – I didn’t quite know what to think. But as the year went on, it became more clear-cut. Cav said he would love me to ride, which was probably what made the difference; and I thought, ‘OK, I’ll do the road race.’ But earlier in the year, I don’t think I really believed it would be possible. It wasn’t that obvious to me how we would manage to keep the race together to ensure there was a bunch sprint for Cav. No team had managed anything like it for years. But once we did it, we realised we had been part of something very special; that feeling is one I’ll never forget.

During the race, there wasn’t a lot of time to take it in. We had jobs to do, so we were concentrating on remembering the plan and realising it. Personally, I was just counting down the kilometres until I could open up. I felt the urge to go early. I was constantly thinking, ‘I’m going to go now.’ David Millar was the one who was captaining the team on the road that day; he was always sitting behind me and he was continually talking to me: ‘Not yet, Brad, it’s too early, we need you on the last lap, wait, wait, wait, wait …’ Dave was instrumental in our success; he’d become a father earlier in the month and wasn’t on his best form, but his guiding role was superb. He kept me on a leash. I didn’t want to be in a fight on the last lap; without him I’d have gone too early and ripped the race to bits.

Dave kept a cool head throughout the race, and on the last lap I was able to go for it. That turn I did felt fantastic. I was
just
super light on the bike. I always thought I had it in me but I had that rare feeling of grace, of confidence. I was convinced that no one would be coming past me, I had that kind of cocky attitude, a bit like Bernard Hinault used to have. I was swerving across the road going into the climbs, messing up any accelerations from behind. It was like the stuff I used to do on the track, a bit of showboating almost. Physically, what I had to do was commit every bit of energy I had for as long as possible before someone came over the top of me. I didn’t expect to last as long as I did. I think I did 8km on the front, 8 or 10km. At the end I felt incredibly proud that I’d done my job, and I’d not let Cav down. I’d committed to the job and I’d done it. And then I crossed the line and realised that we’d won and that sparked off a whole different set of feelings.

Sometimes in the past when I’d been in a winning team it had been a simple matter of, ‘Oh, that’s a good job, I’ve done my bit, it’s great you’ve won.’ But this time it was much, much more than that. I did it for Cav. Since mid-2011, with him it has always felt special. He’s so gracious, so grateful for everything you do for him. When you are committing to do your job for him, you know he’s not going to let you down. That’s inspiring in a way because you know he really needs you on the road when you’re doing your utmost, and he looks after you as well when it’s all over.

I can’t remember what he said afterwards. He was very emotional when we saw him in the bus, but it was a while until that happened, because he went straight off the podium to the doping control and press conference, and all that time
we
were in the bus drinking champagne. So it was at least an hour before he came back to us and we were all a bit silly by then; he was just very emotional. He thanked us all individually, we had another team photo on the bus; then we all went back to the hotel. We were all a bit dumbstruck, all a bit in shock. I don’t think we fully appreciated what we’d achieved. Cav’s gold medal was a victory for all of us.

The spirit that we built for that race was special, and it had come through when we had the team meeting before the start. We had to discuss what would happen if Cav punctured in the last lap and the thought was that all the attention would turn to G. We began wondering whether we should try and set up the finish for him or something like that but I said, ‘Look, we start as a team, we’ll finish as a team. We’re all here for Cav, we’ve all agreed to ride the World’s to help Cav win. If we do the whole day for Cav and he punctures on the last lap, we all stop, we all wait and we all try to get back. We’ll finish as a team that way.’ The attitude in that team was the same as if we had been going into war. We weren’t going to leave anyone out there on the battlefield.

That week in Copenhagen was just the best way to end the season. Afterwards, Shane was emphatic: ‘Just five weeks off now, this is part of next year, don’t touch your bike for five weeks, enjoy yourself a little bit but look after yourself and when we start back on 1 November we’re starting properly.’ There would be no question of having a month getting back into things. I had to be ready to start training hard on 1 November 2011. That was when 2012 began.

Moves had been afoot to bring Cav to Sky for a while. There were already mutterings in March or April 2011, and I remember talking to Cav about it. I encouraged him to come, saying it would be great to have him at Sky because at that time I was still finding myself, trying to become a real leader. I spoke to him a couple of times during the 2011 Tour; at the start of the Vuelta we were still discussing it. He had been talking about trying to get his main lead-out man Mark Renshaw to come as well; he was upset that Renshaw had gone to Rabobank. I didn’t see him again till the World’s and even at the World’s he hadn’t signed. Then I remember Dave ringing me a couple of days after the World’s and saying to me, ‘You know what, Brad, what would you think if Cav didn’t come to this team? It’s becoming a bit of a pain in the arse now, there’s so much riding on it.’