Bradley Wiggins (20 page)

At Team Sky, there is muted satisfaction with the day. Morale is on a high after everybody’s efforts for the popular Edvald Boasson Hagen and the leader’s show of strength to set up
a valued teammate has set the media purring. Bradley himself is coy about his ride that recalls his DS Yates in his juss-doin’-me-job heyday.

‘It was just the last kilometre, slightly downhill,’ he said dismissively of his big lead out for Boasson Hagen. ‘It was the safest place to be and I just wanted to repay a
friend of mine.’

Sean Yates reflected on the quiet contentment in the camp. Speaking to the Team Sky website, he said, ‘It was a technical finish with a few roundabouts. Brad had to be at the front in case
it split, which we actually saw heading into the 3km mark. Froomey was right there too so all in all it was a good performance. It was nice to see Bradley leading out Edvald at the finish,’
he added with a touch of personal pride for a job well done.

Brad reiterated the team’s professionalism and commitment to the job in hand. ‘You have to pay attention to every single day, even a day like today because of the bends in the last
400m. You have to be careful every day until Paris.’

GARMIN-SLIPSTREAM AND BRADLEY WIGGINS
followed up his superb 2009 Tour de France ride in belligerent fashion, silencing the whispers about his perceived
leap in performance by openly publishing his blood tests for the whole of 2009. They clearly displayed the level, even results one would expect to see in an athlete untainted by chemical
stimulus.

They were trying to reinforce the point that Brad’s improvement was based upon simple hard work, weight loss and improved confidence. For the first time in his career he was a total road
racer and had seen a complete turnaround in his performance as a result.

‘I don’t want there to be any suspicion or doubt that what I did was natural. I have nothing to hide and I want this transparency,’ explained Brad in the post-Tour scrum of
attention, asking that the team publish the ‘blood passport’ that all riders need to demonstrate their lack of doping.

Garmin-Slipstream had been tremendously supportive and had played a major part in Bradley’s transformation from track star to Tour contender. He was contracted to them for another season,
but he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t been fully aware of developments in Great Britain.

Dave Brailsford, such a driving force behind Brad’s career and the stellar success of the Team GB World Championship and Olympic programme, had launched the monolithic Team Sky upon the
world. The team would begin racing in 2010 and nobody doubted Brailsford’s promises that it would be the most professional, efficient racing unit the world had ever seen. It would be a
British-based team supporting British riders, providing a conduit for those cyclists who had progressed through the national ranks and were now seeking success on the road. The British riders would
be joined by the cream of the world’s available cycling talent.

It was that availability question that was getting everybody talking. Britain’s two best cyclists, the raw emerging talent of Mark Cavendish and the polished, stylish Bradley Wiggins, were
contracted to Team Columbia and Garmin-Slipstream respectively. When Team Sky began announcing that riders of the class of Edvald Boasson Hagen would be accompanying British talent like Geraint
Thomas and Steve Cummings, Wiggins and Cavendish were the elephants in the room. How could it be a Best of British without them? And who would this ‘British rider winning the Tour de France
within five years’ be if it wasn’t going to be Bradley Wiggins?

More than that, Brailsford had been personally instrumental in both men’s careers, nurturing them carefully through the ranks. He was especially close to Wiggins, who would have been
uncertain of winning any of his multiple world and Olympic titles without the direct assistance of Brailsford and UK Cycling.

The will-he-won’t-he saga dragged on for much of the remainder of 2009. At one time, Brad would describe reports of him moving to Team Sky as ‘bollocks’; at another, he would
cryptically refer to the difference in budget between the two outfits by saying, ‘It’s like trying to win the Champions League. You need to be at Manchester United, but I’m
playing at Wigan at the moment. I’ve had a good time at Garmin, but times have changed.’

The old Wiggins hobby of provocatively toying with the press when answering repetitive questions reared its head when asked about a Team Sky contract for the umpteenth time: ‘I’ve
still got a contract with Sky for about another year. The wife wants the movie package, and I’ve just got the sports package at the moment. We’ll see. The kids like all the cartoons
like Disney Channel and all that, so we’ll probably keep it for another year. But I think TNT has a new package when you can get the movies, the sports channels and all the other stuff for
like a combo value; it’s 49 quid a month. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’m thinking of changing my Garmin to Tom-Tom as well.’

It was therefore no big surprise when, after weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling and coy public statements, Team Sky announced the transfer of Bradley Wiggins from Garmin-Slipstream for the
2010 season. They had forked out £2m to free him from his contract for the coming season and had reportedly tripled Wiggins’s salary to one that they felt befitted a genuine Tour de
France contender. They now had their leader.

There had been a noticeable cooling of the relationship between Wiggins and the press over the latter half of 2009. The cycling journalists who were now following his every move were a different
breed to the BBC and national press who came out of the woodwork around Olympic time and generally paid cyclists no heed otherwise. The problem with the latter, as far as Wiggins and his ilk were
concerned, was a lack of understanding of their sport and the tendency to patronise or unintentionally belittle the subjects of their interviews. The issue with cycling journalists was a much more
intrusive one. These guys were proper hardened hacks with column inches to fill every day and every week. They wanted stories, gossip, dirt and scandal. And unlike their more generally minded
counterparts, there was nothing these people didn’t know about the sport.

The post-2009 Tour Wiggins was a wary beast, a reticent creature, especially in light of his rent-a-quote past. Journalists who had known him a long time scratched their heads at the
transformation, but it wasn’t completely mystifying. Brad was protecting himself and his family as he saw it, playing his cards closer to his chest in an effort to avoid his words being
twisted or taken out of context. The downside was that he appeared to be unhappy and unfriendly as a result, just when he was expected to be delighted and excited about his new team. The Team Sky
launch turned out to be a rather uncomfortable affair with Brad fending questions without the banter that had accompanied previous similar events. Brailsford alongside him seemed uncertain of how
to play it and ended up similarly downbeat. It was all a bit strange.

Stories circulated about Brad being petulant at official team duties such as photo shoots. With the rest of the team behaving immaculately, his attitude stood out all the more. He was clearly
not enjoying his part in the media circus of the new team. Maybe he just wanted to be racing again. During this down time in his year either side of Christmas, he would often have been involved
with the track squad with the aim of medals at next season’s big tournaments but, for now, track riding was in his past.

He’d joined Team Sky to win the Tour de France.

Vandalism, civil disobedience and protest have a long history in sport, and the Tour de France has had more than its fair share over the decades.

Just like the ‘George Davis is Innocent’ campaigners who dug up the Headingley pitch overnight before the final day of the 1975 Ashes Test with the Australians on the ropes, there
are sometimes unusual outcomes. On that day, the Aussies were grateful to the alleged armed robber’s supporters as the match was abandoned and they scraped a draw at the last Test to take the
Ashes 1–0.

Bernard Hinault – he seems to crop up so often in stories – was at the sharp end of the dispute with striking shipyard workers on the Col d’Eze during the 1984 Paris–Nice
race. As the men jumped about in the road, bringing the race to a standstill, a bewildered rider was grabbed by one of the protestors. The Badger rushed up and gave the interloper a knuckle
sandwich full in the chops.

At Courchevel in the 2000 Tour de France, an ingenious bunch of nutters jumped the barriers complete with bikes and clad in the outfits of their heroes. As Marco Pantani soloed towards the top
of the mountain, he was suddenly and unaccountably caught by Fernando Escartín. The Spanish climber had appeared out of nowhere – almost literally it was revealed, as it wasn’t
Escartín, but a punter clad in Kelme replica kit. The always excitable finish line voices of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen were entirely flummoxed. The commentators were also completely
thrown when a pretty convincing fake Lance Armstrong joined a small group sprinting for the minor placings. A similarly counterfeit Richard Virenque was clearly not on the same juice as the real
King of the Mountains as he was easily outpaced by the confused pros.

In 2009, a mass participation event in Perthshire attracting 3,500 riders was targeted by a local church elder unhappy about not being able to drive to Sunday service that morning. He scattered
up to 10,000 carpet tacks upon that road, causing hundreds of punctures, untold withdrawals and the suspension of the event.

This last instance of protestation is particularly apt today. Somebody at the roadside on the top of the first category Mur de Péguère decides to pull a similar stunt. The
difference lay in the numbers involved – it looks like a box of tacks rather than a shopful – and the fact that this isn’t a public Sunday out, this is the world’s biggest
annual sporting event.

A day meandering through the beautiful
départements
of Aude and Ariège has taken the Tour de France into the Pyrenees. There are two big passes to climb, both on typically
small winding Pyrenean lanes, but this isn’t the classic monster mountain stage. You’ll just have to wait a couple of days for that. A select group of classy riders who are nonetheless
not dangerous to the overall standings has been allowed by Team Sky and the other teams shepherding the peloton to escape.

The sense of comradeship at Team Sky that has been carefully nurtured for the past two weeks in spite of the tweeting about internal rivalries is further enhanced after yesterday’s big
team effort for Edvald Boasson Hagen. Today Mark Cavendish is getting in on the act, as the World Champion rides up alongside his leader Bradley Wiggins and calmly tows the yellow jersey and the
rest of the race up the first big Pyrenean climb of the day, the pretty Port de Lers. It is an impressive self-effacing piece of work by the avowed non-climber, who will end up crossing the line in
148th place today, nearly half an hour behind the leaders in
l’autobus
.

With nearly 40km left to cover from the top of the second big climb, the Mur de Péguère to the finish in the valley town of Foix, this isn’t a particularly dangerous route
for the leaders, but they are still looking at each other cautiously as they crest the narrow summit of the pass. It is now that Cadel Evans punctures. His team car trapped behind the long peloton
as it squeezed over the top of the hill, Evans waits a horribly uncomfortable minute and fifteen seconds before he is able to pursue the men who have left him behind. But then he punctures again.
And then, almost comically, a third time. The Australian must feel like the man in the dream who walks into a classroom and realises he has forgotten to put his trousers on, such is the
nightmarishness of his situation.

It is clear that something odd is going on. Evans’s teammate, the experienced New Yorker George Hincapie, will later confess to having ‘never seen anything like it’. Up to 30
punctures strike the group. The most serious incident claims the participation in this Tour of the excellent Robert Kišerlovski of Astana, the Croatian climber hitting the tarmac after
getting a flat and crashing out of the race with a broken collarbone.

On the narrow descent, the lucky ones that have avoided the beastly tacks quickly realise that all is not well. Race radio has gone berserk, the team directors stuck on the wrong side of the
mountain behind the race are all bellowing into their own radios to find out if their riders are affected, and the bunch are all seen putting one finger into their ears or grabbing buttons attached
to their jerseys as they try to get some understanding of what is happening behind them.

Without knowing it, Bradley Wiggins is about to cement his reputation as a worthy leader and true sportsman. He immediately slows the descent and quickly and calmly spreads the word to those
around him that there is trouble behind affecting Evans among others, effectively neutralising the race.