Bradley Wiggins (11 page)

The new attitude didn’t come soon enough to earn him that ride at the 2005 Tour, but, working alongside Simon Jones and Team GB again, a crack at his first World Time Trial Championship
was lined up for Madrid in September. He trained hard for an event that was new to him. As a pursuiter, he was strong in short time trials, but the whole tactical pacing of one’s effort in
the longer tests was a fresh skill to learn if he was going to excel at it, and we know what Brad is like when he has a new hobby. Fortunately, in this case, it was trying to win a world title, not
drinking for England.

After an enjoyable feeling of being back on top of his game again, the resurgent Wiggins was seventh behind Mick Rogers at his first Worlds TT, a result he considers to actually be fourth, as
three of those who finished above him have subsequently served bans for drug abuse.

The good second half of the season led to an offer from another French team, Cofidis. Not only did they intend to pay him a lot more money than Crédit Agricole were laying out, they
showed an interest in Brad and his future plans that had been distinctly absent in his previous teams. And they promised him a start in the 2006 Tour de France. Another dream was about to be
fulfilled.

The Melbourne Commonwealth Games and the Bordeaux World Track Championships were both scheduled for the spring, which isn’t much use for Tour de France preparation, so the man who enjoys
competing for his country so much had to forego the opportunity to add to his medal tally. It was a tough call to make, but the Tour was filling Brad’s thoughts 24 hours a day. That meant a
return to one of Brad’s other vices – overtraining. He believes that he was never above 90% in 2006 as a result, but it wasn’t disastrous and he arrived in Strasbourg for the
Grand Depart
trying his best not to look overawed. The Tour is just so much bigger than everything else in the cycling world that it’s hard to stay in touch with reality.

Things got off to a bad start.

On the eve of the race, the UCI received a list of bike riders implicated by Operación Puerto, a Spanish police investigation into Eufemiano Fuentes, a sports doctor who had clearly been
supplying performance-enhancing drugs to many sports people for many years. Cycling took a lead and decided to expel anybody associated with Fuentes from the race before it had begun. The team
managers were instructed to omit those riders from their teams and told they would not be permitted to replace them. Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, the favourites in the absence of the freshly retired
Lance Armstrong, were among the thirteen men out on their ears in disgrace.

Still in shock, but glad that men he considered cheats would not be lining up against him, Bradley tackled the 7km prologue hoping to land a top ten finish. In the end he was a very respectable
sixteenth and got down to the business of getting through his first Tour de France. To say he did so without any great difficulty would be belittling the nature of his struggle to stay involved in
the racing every day, but he did so with no more difficulty than the other sufferers around him, eventually making it to Paris in 123rd position.

The 2006 Tour will forever be remembered for the Floyd Landis affair. After appearing the strongest rider for the first half of the race and cruising into the yellow jersey much like Wiggins
went on to manage six years later, Landis suffered an appalling day on the Alpine stage to La Toussuire, losing eight minutes on the final climb to his GC rival Óscar Pereiro. The following
day, Landis staged a comeback worthy of Lazarus, riding like a man possessed to take back nearly all of his lost time in one lone break over the mountains to Morzine. He duly pressed home his
advantage and took the jersey back in the race’s final time trial to be acclaimed as the winner in Paris, the eighth time in succession that an American rider had done so.

Landis’s glory lasted 48 hours.

He had tested positive for synthetic testosterone after his heroic lone break. Not for the first time the cycling world had suffered a seismic moment and not for the first time it revolved
around the Tour de France. Eight years on from the infamous Festina affair it seemed that nothing had been learned.

Bradley Wiggins, who had believed that the racing in 2006 was infinitely fairer than in 1998, was devastated. In
In Pursuit of Glory
he writes: ‘“You bastard Landis,”
I thought. “You have completely ruined my own small achievement of getting around the Tour de France and being a small part of cycling history. You and guys like you are pissing on my sport
and my dreams. Why do guys like you keep cheating? How many of you are out there, taking the piss and getting away with it? There is me trailing home 131st and, for all I know, I might be a top 50
rider if we all started on a level playing field. Sod you all. You are a bunch of cheating bastards and I hope one day they catch the lot of you and ban you all for life. You can keep doing it your
way and I will keep doing it mine. You won’t ever change me, you sods. Bollocks to you all. At least I can look myself in the mirror.”’

Bradley’s willingness to speak his mind to reporters meant that he began to be held up as a sort of crusader in the vanguard of the anti-drugs movement, a role with which he wasn’t
entirely comfortable. He felt that his own stance was straightforward and he was happy to espouse it, but he didn’t want to be a spokesman for his generation.

His thoughts turned immediately to next year’s Tour de France. Not only would he be a year stronger, a year wiser and a year better prepared, the Tour was scheduled to start in London.
London!

With that on his mind, Brad went to the World Track Championships in Mallorca and returned with two world titles: World Individual Pursuit Champion and World Team Pursuit Champion. An amazing
week.

*

After a wet and dreary start to summer, the sun picked the first weekend in July to shine. Millions of people lined the streets of London for Saturday’s prologue and for
Sunday’s road stage down into the Garden of England and a finish in Canterbury. The British riders on the Tour were deliriously happy. They felt as though their time had arrived, and none
more so than the boy who was brought up a couple of miles away in Paddington, Bradley Wiggins.

Brad’s chances for the prologue had been talked up massively and he was enjoying the attention, without really thinking himself a likely winner. True, he had just pulled off probably the
best result of his road career to date, the prologue of the Critérium du Dauphiné in the Tour’s traditional last warm-up event, but he felt that Fabian Cancellara was ideally
suited to the fast twisting corners of the Westminster course and he expected the Swiss’s faster acceleration to make the difference between him and the rest of the field. So it proved, with
Brad extremely pleased with fourth spot.

The crowds remained huge all the way down through Kent and the French press were full of the wondrous start in England when the Tour arrived there to start the business in earnest.

On the first Friday, the last day before the Alps, the Tour found itself starting in a small village by the name of Semur-en-Auxois, not far from Dijon in the heart of the country. There were
about 200km to cover between there and the finishing town of Bourg-en-Bresse.

Brad soon found himself in a small break. With the mountains looming, the peloton were settling in for a long hard day and were happy to let the break push on. Surprisingly, Brad’s
comrades in the move seemed similarly inclined, and they fell away to leave the tall Englishman on his own at the front of affairs. It was Cath’s birthday and, knowing she’d be certain
to be watching on TV, he set about getting himself some airtime. A couple of hours later he was twenty minutes ahead of the field. The bunch started chasing, knowing what they had to do to bring
the lone ranger back before the sprint, but they hadn’t counted on Brad’s engine running so smoothly. Normally, lone breakaways can be expected to tire after a long day in front,
especially one as long as this. Nearly 200km on your own is epic in anybody’s language. Still he pushed on, with the bunch nudging ever closer.

Brad maintains that he would have won that day if it hadn’t been for the headwind that stopped him in his tracks as he swung into the last 25km to Bourg-en-Bresse. He began fighting the
gear in a way that seemed completely alien to the smooth style he’d been displaying all day up to this point. At the 5km point, the race swooshed by, leaving him beaten but proud. And famous,
too. Everybody applauded the brave Englishman and they eschewed a crack at the winner Tom Boonen, to talk to him afterwards. Brad swears that he hadn’t realised that the thirteenth of July
was the anniversary of the great Tom Simpson’s death, but the cycling press, knowing what an avid cycling historian Brad was, were sure he’d meant the move as a tribute.

Wiggins was enjoying this Tour. He was ‘on it’ and contributing to the racing. Against his own expectations he rode a dream long time trial in Albi to finish fifth behind Alexandre
Vinokourov, a man who had been struggling with injury throughout the early part of the race. Brad was certain he’d been beaten by a cheat, and his righteous anger was proven to be justified
two days later when the Kazakh rider and his team were thrown out after his positive test. His teammate Andrey Kashechkin also posted a dubious time quicker than Brad that day, so the Londoner has
always considered himself as third fastest that day, only beaten by Cadel Evans and Andreas Klöden.

The last mountainous day on the Tour was a clamber up to the summit of the Col de l’Aubisque, the oldest mountain in the Tour, first included in 1910. Wiggins was in a foul mood on a hot
day and was not amused when his team tried to bundle him into a car immediately after the stage was finished. What the hell was going on?

Cristian Moreni, an Italian with Cofidis and a friend of Brad’s, had tested positive. The whole team was escorted to Pau police station and arrested. After questioning and extensive
searches of the team vehicles and the team hotel had been carried out, Bradley and his teammates were freed but excluded from the race. Angry and ashamed at being part of such a farrago, Brad
headed straight for Pau airport, pausing only to bundle all his Cofidis kit up and dump it into a nearby bin. ‘I would have happily set fire to it,’ he commented later.

Back in England, the fire still burned, but he was calmer. The best start to a Tour de France ever had turned to ashes for the whole race, but the personal hit of beginning in your own home town
and then your own team being thrown off . . . it was a heavy burden for Bradley to bear.

He believed, ultimately, that these problems – Rabobank’s Michael Rasmussen was also withdrawn while in the yellow jersey for lying to the doping testers – would strengthen the
sport. The younger generation of riders had had enough of this way of racing and this way of living. They wanted to race clean, know that their competitors are clean, and stop creeping around like
the secretive criminals their older colleagues had become.

It was a lesson that cycling was finding hard to learn.

Thanks to Fabian Cancellara’s occupancy of the yellow jersey, Team Sky have been able to concentrate on staying out of trouble for the first week of the Tour de France.
All that is about to change as the responsibility of the lead becomes theirs.

With the bubbles from yesterday’s Champagne dissipated and the backslapping over, thoughts turn to the job in hand. The brief is to protect and retain Bradley Wiggins’s yellow jersey
for two weeks while scaling the Alps and the Pyrenees, hold it through two long time trials and take it down the Champs-Élysées on Sunday, 22 July.

That means a couple of changes in job specification for some riders. Brad can ride much as he has the first week, with his cohort of Mick Rogers, Richie Porte and Chris Froome close at hand.
Christian Knees will continue to tap out the rhythm at the front of the line. The remaining three of the reduced eight-man team have slightly readjusted targets for the moment.

Mark Cavendish’s biggest personal goal for the coming weeks is the Olympic Road Race at 2012, coming up less than a week after the finish of this race in Paris. He believes the best way to
prepare is to complete the Tour, while some of his rivals are talking of leaving the Tour early to rest and hone their form. However, they don’t have Cav’s incredible record on the
Champs-Élysées, where he will be attempting to win for an unsurpassed fourth year in a row. In recent seasons, he has appeared to increase his finishing speed during the closing week,
significant gaps opening between his backside and his sprinting rivals the longer the race has gone on. Although the first week has had some good moments, the World Champion feels that there is a
lot more to be taken from this race, and his hand is feeling better by the day after his spill on Wednesday.

For the moment though, Cavendish is happy to adopt the unfamiliar role of
domestique
. Not for him the train of dogsbodies ready to jump to his every command. Instead, he’ll spend
long hot days toiling back up to his companions from the team Jaguar loaded up with cold bottles and energy food for everybody. We will get used to the ungainly sight of the rainbow jersey stuffed
like a tourist’s rucksack in support of the Team Sky effort.

And a
domestique
doesn’t need a
domestique
, so Bernie Eisel is being reassigned to team duties. This will largely mean riding with Christian Knees. The two get along
well, chatting in German when they’re alone. The language of the squad is English, and the riders and staff all make an effort to talk in the most commonly held tongue. Indeed, you’d
have to be a pretty special performer to get a ride on this outfit if you don’t speak English, as communication is high on the list of Dave Brailsford’s priorities for forging a winning
unit. Eisel is talkative, always the one with the instructions on training rides, always the one who knows where the best cafés are, where to find the best cakes, the best coffee, the best
way back. Knees maintains a poker face; on occasion one corner of his mouth quietly turning up into a small smile.