Bradley Wiggins (15 page)

On a ride with Team Sky in the spring, I found myself alongside the Spanish cobble specialist, Juan Antonio Flecha. For twenty minutes I tried to chat about cycling with him as he politely and
not unkindly rebuffed my attempts to get him to open up with smiling monosyllabic answers and apologies for poor English. It was only when the subject turned to football and the forthcoming
Champions League showdown between Chelsea and Barcelona that he sprang into life, speculating at length (and in word-perfect English) about the game, the coach Pep Guardiola’s supposed move
between the two clubs and what the future held for both teams. It was a fascinating insight, not just into the mind of a true Catalan football nut, but also into the defence mechanisms of a
professional cyclist in today’s media-driven goldfish bowl.

On the rest day following Bradley Wiggins’s imperious time trial win in Besançon, Team Sky are the subject of three main topics of speculation. One might be forgiven for thinking
that the talk would be about Brad’s serene progression into the yellow jersey, however, the themes are: a) Chris Froome’s supposed unhappiness at playing second fiddle to his leader, b)
Mark Cavendish’s supposed unhappiness at playing second fiddle to his leader, and c) Vincenzo Nibali declaring that he is not scared of Team Sky and will attack at every opportunity.

Needless to say, Chris Froome hasn’t actually said that he is unhappy, any more than the World Champion has shouted his desire to leave from the rooftops, but it’s something to write
about. Nibali used his Liquigas-Cannondale team’s obligatory rest day press conference to issue the perfunctory rallying cry in a perfectly normal way that became twisted into a perceived
slight on Team Sky bullying tactics by the time it made it to the papers.

Elsewhere, Brad was photographed drinking coffee and reading
L’Équipe
. Frankly, they could have cut his head out and plonked it on to any other rest day photograph of any
Tour leader over the past thirty years. Fortunately, he didn’t succumb to the English cyclist’s bane, the readily proffered bowler hat and umbrella as props for this picture. The man
has his own style, thank you very much. As if those sideburns weren’t enough to demonstrate that.

An old teammate of Brad’s, former British Champion Matt Stephens, recalls his first rest day as a young rider on a stage race: ‘It was the Milk Race. I can’t remember where the
rest day was, but I had it all planned out: a bit of shopping at the local mall, ten-pin bowling. Then the DS came in and said, “Right, get your kit on, we’re going for a ride.” A
ride! I couldn’t believe it.’

It’s true. Those outside the sport are always perplexed by the idea of the rest day ride, and many inside it, too. Like 4,000km in three weeks isn’t enough; they need to go for a
spin on their day off. But it’s an essential part of keeping the blood flowing, the legs turning, the muscles working. Team Sky and many of the other teams have taken this to the next logical
level by encouraging their riders to warm down after stages, too, meaning that many post-race interviews are now conducted while the stars turn the pedals on static trainers underneath an awning
attached to the team bus.

Rolling out of Mâcon the following morning, the remaining members of the peloton are actually glad of those few gentle miles around the town the day before. There is a feeling of solidity
around the race now that the first act has unfolded and the French have managed to plant a flag in home soil with Thibaut Pinot’s weekend win. There are also fewer riders choking up the road:
Tony Martin has flown home to let his broken wrist heal up before the Olympic Time Trial, one of 23 riders who began the prologue the weekend before last who are no longer with us as we hit the
halfway point between Liège and Paris. Perhaps today will be the day when the crashes finally relent and this race settles down at last.

Today’s breakaway group is a large one, with perennial escape-junkies like Thomas Voeckler, Jens Voigt and David Millar swelling the numbers. Intriguingly, Liquigas-Cannondale wunderkind
Peter Sagan has snuck into it, too. It’s unlikely that his partners in the enterprise will want to tow him to the finish just to see him trample them in a sprint, so they will go hell for
leather over the climbs to try and unhitch the beefy Slovakian.

That’s exactly what happens over the day’s biggest climb, the testing 17km Col du Grand Colombier. Wiggins is unsurprisingly coming under some pressure of his own, but he is
comfortable with Edvald Boasson Hagen and Richie Porte marshalling the race and Chris Froome, as ever, riding shotgun. Two men in the top three is an intimidating sight for Team Sky’s rivals,
especially when they’re surrounded by such competent support. Nevertheless, Vincenzo Nibali is true to his word and launches his much trailed attack as the race passes over the top of the
climb.

It’s here that Liquigas-Cannondale’s plan starts to take shape. As their leader distances the peloton on the narrow, twisting descent using a lot of skill and even more nerve, he is
closing on his teammate, Sagan, dropped from the lead group. On the flat, with Nibali’s lead over the yellow jersey group reaching around a minute, they’re a fearsome duo and they set
about their work in earnest.

Sean Yates sends the word forward to his troops: don’t panic. The Team Sky mantra has served them well and will continue to do so. The men in black, white and blue settled into a steady
pursuit of the elusive Italian and his powerful lieutenant. If the shape of the stage had been like Sunday’s into Porrentruy, Liquigas-Cannondale would have really had Team Sky on the ropes.
But Yates, Rogers and Wiggins were all aware that not only was it further to the finish from the big climb than Sunday, there was another shorter hill punctuating the route. This hill, the Col de
Richemond, proved to be Nibali’s Calvary, as his bigger teammate faltered on the slopes and Team Sky reeled them in. A scare for the jersey, but no more than that, and all dealt with smoothly
and capably by Brad and his boys.

Thomas Voeckler is France’s most popular cyclist. Two long spells in the yellow jersey – the first as an unheard-of rider in Armstrong’s long shadow, the second just last year
– propelled him into public sight, but it is his do-or-die commitment that has given him a slot in their hearts. This year has been difficult for him, with tendonitis putting his Tour place
in jeopardy right up to Liège and his Europcar team coming under scrutiny from the doping enforcement agencies. Today is the day he puts that in the shade with a ride of incredible
persistence, attacking again and again, receiving no hope from his breakaway companions. They’re all dangerous riders, men like Michele Scarponi, Luis Leon Sanchez and Jens Voigt, and all
capable of taking the stage for themselves. Just when it looks like Voeckler has punched himself out of contention, he finds the resilience to go again, catching Jens Voigt on the long drag to the
finish, resisting all other attempts to better him, and using his ungainly style to grapple a huge gear all the way to the line. France is in raptures: two out of the last three stages, their hero
a winner again, and now the wearer of the polka dot jersey of
meilleur grimpeur
, too.

Wiggins reveals just how far the team is prepared to go to ensure the don’t-panic ethos is carried all the way to Paris: ‘We were prepared to lose the jersey if need be to Scarponi
who was the best placed up there. This is about being in yellow in Paris and if that means sacrificing the next days and keeping the boys back a bit . . .’

Nibali, Evans and Van Den Broeck are clearly the true danger men for Team Sky, even to the extent that they are prepared to let a Giro d’Italia podium finisher like Scarponi
‘borrow’ the jersey. ‘We do have to gamble a little bit here and we can’t just chase everything that moves,’ explains the leader.

Wiggins has clearly got under the skin of his Liquigas-Cannondale rival Vincenzo Nibali. After chasing him down on the Col de Richemond, Wiggins tracked the Italian all the way to the finish
line and shot him a glance as they crossed the finish line. After earlier telling the press that he was ‘not impressed’ by Wiggins, Nibali went further after his attempts to unseat the
yellow jersey had come to naught in Bellegarde-sur-Valserine. ‘When we crossed the line, Bradley turned and looked at me,’ Nibali said. ‘If he wants to be a great champion, he
needs to have a bit of respect for his adversaries. Sometimes turning around and looking into your face is an insult.’

Team Sky will have to continue to use their judgement as to how much danger any move represents every day. Tomorrow will be a massive test for that: a mountain top finish in the high Alps. Can
Bradley Wiggins demonstrate that his discomfort on stages like this has been consigned to the dustbin of history once and for all? If not, all the hard work carried out so far by Team Sky will be
like so many flies crashing into windscreens.

The best laid plans of mice and men . . .

TO DESCRIBE BRADLEY WIGGINS
’
S
relationship with his father as complicated would be like saying that Ayrton Senna was good
at driving. It’s undoubtedly true, but only begins to scratch at the surface.

Garry Wiggins was trouble. Sometimes it surrounded him and followed him; often it was of his own creation. Being single-minded and resolute must have been admirable preconditions to leaving
behind a provincial life in Morwell, Victoria, to ride a bike for a living in Europe. Less admirable was his willingness to leave behind a wife and a baby daughter to do so.

One wouldn’t want to assume too much about a man’s character by looking at his actions in isolation, but by leaving his new wife, Linda, and his son, Bradley, before the boy was two
years old, Garry invites negative speculation. To discover that he went on to abandon a third wife, Fiona, and a third child, Madison, in Australia nearly twenty years later is a depressing
confirmation that Bradley Wiggins’s father was an irresolute, irresponsible man.

Some might argue that his attempts to reconcile with his estranged son in 1997 via a long-distance phone call represented a worthy attempt to put his past behind him and start afresh. Others
would say that such an act was that of a selfish man who wanted a part of his biological offspring’s success for himself, despite having had no influence whatsoever on his upbringing or
having made any attempt to support him during those missing years. Whatever the motivation, Bradley decided to try to maintain a friendship of sorts with his father from that point on and to see if
he could understand the man who had brought him into this world.

Bradley had not grown up in denial of his father. Linda had been careful not to let his opinion of his dad be clouded with prejudice. She had told him all about his dad’s exciting and
slightly misty career as a track rider in Belgium and Europe. He was aware of his father’s exploits without ever taking a massive interest in cycling as a kid, and it was only now that he was
beginning to appreciate what that lifestyle would have entailed.

The irregular distant friendship between two men generations and continents apart drifted along with occasional phone calls, Garry usually reminding his son how good a rider he had been and
offering the occasional congratulations, as when Brad became World Junior Pursuit Champion a year or so after that first call. It was to be 1999 when the two would meet for the first time since a
bizarre trip to London Zoo seventeen years earlier on his one and only visit to see his son after his break-up with Linda. Brad left a GB training camp in Australia to have lunch with his father
and two half-sisters he had never met: Shannon, a little older than Brad and with a life of her own into which her father had also crashed, and Madison, the little girl Garry had fathered with his
current partner, Fiona.

It must have been an unsettling encounter to say the least, a family group where nobody knows each other. Tensions were already running high between Garry and Shannon, largely because he had
walked back into her life after twenty years and expected to give her away at her forthcoming wedding, something Shannon was understandably not keen on. Brad stayed detached, trying to take in this
strange situation and figure out how to proceed.

When Brad decisively called his father a year later and offered to come and stay for a few weeks in advance of his pre-Olympic training camp, he didn’t expect Garry’s life to have
changed as much as it had. The attempts at reconciliation with Shannon and himself had been during a good period of steady work and a committed relationship, but everything had begun to unravel
shortly after that odd luncheon date.

Brad felt that he might regret never having taken the opportunity to get to know Garry better, and he certainly had a good snapshot of how life was in the Wiggins Senior household. It involved a
lot of beer, a lot of self-pity, a lot of anger and not much else, unless somebody was foolish enough to get in his way. By the end of three weeks, the nineteen-year-old Wiggins had had a bellyful
of the 48-year-old one. He maintained the distance that yawned between them despite his father’s attempts to claim him as his son after all this time, and they parted on distant, if not
hostile, terms.