Bradley Wiggins (23 page)

That doping stories are still likely to come out at some point in the Tour de France is depressingly predictable, but it can’t shake the belief that this is a new environment. Sean Yates
affirms what we’ve heard elsewhere. ‘It’s a different world these days,’ he replies with a smile when asked about the prevalence of doping compared to his days as a rider.
‘The cheats get caught. Catch all the cheats, and there’s no cheats left.’

Frank Schleck is removed from the Tour de France by his RadioShack-Nissan team in order to ‘prepare his defence’. The popular Luxembourger has lost a legion of fans overnight,
especially in Britain, as Wiggins and Millar both recognise. He’s also managed to bring shame and doubt upon his brother’s great achievements, just by association.

Wiggins would assert that this is a position that he will never, ever find himself in. ‘If I felt I had to take drugs, I would rather stop tomorrow, go and ride club 10-mile time trials,
ride to the café on Sundays, and work in Tesco stacking shelves.’

Terry Leahy shouldn’t hold his breath.

BRADLEY WIGGINS SEEMED TO
benefit from his experience at the Tour de France in 2010. He was aware that part of his problem had been an increased
propensity to fret. He went back to the old mantra of controlling the controllables. Stick to the basics. Train hard. Stay thin.

Team Sky was also strengthened. Brad had always felt at home amongst familiar faces, but now there was renewed quality, too. Edvald Boasson Hagen was still there, as was the burgeoning talent of
Geraint Thomas. Their big winter signing was Mick Rogers. The experienced and popular Australian was drafted in from HTC-Columbia with the express brief of helping Brad to win the Tour. Rogers had
been a team leader in his own right for some years, always with the same squad since its T-Mobile days. He felt that it was time to realign his personal goals and came to Team Sky, a set-up he had
been admiring from afar throughout 2010.

A ninth place in the 2006 Tour de France and three back-to-back world time trial titles would have you think that Rogers was a veteran, but in actual fact he was only a few months older than
Brad. He had also ridden poorly at the 2010 Tour, but had come to the conclusion that his days as a contender were behind him and he would be better suited to using his intelligence and steady
speed to help a team in a more all-round capacity. Sadly, that wasn’t going to be in 2011, as the glandular fever that had plagued him earlier in his career returned to put him out for a
while. Brad would benefit massively from Mick’s arrival, but not yet.

Instead, Bradley went to Paris–Nice to begin his European season and came away with third overall behind the German duo of Tony Martin and Andreas Klöden to prove that he was in hot
form. The result was forged upon a narrow loss to Martin in the race’s time trial which shaped the rest of the race. He was pleased with his performance: he was not expecting to be setting
the world alight in March, it was July Team Sky were interested in.

To that end, there was to be less racing in 2011 and more training. The team wanted to control Bradley’s form, not batter it, so this time, they rejected a ride at the Giro d’Italia
and looked instead at the Critérium du Dauphiné as the ideal preparation.

The race could not have gone better. Third spot behind the big Dutchman Lars Boom in the prologue was an ideal foundation, then he and Edvald Boasson Hagen had kept pace with the climbers as the
race ramped up. He was second again to Tony Martin in the Stage 3 time trial, but his superior climbing form saw Brad slip into the yellow jersey. It looked good. Sky rode strongly and
intelligently to protect his lead over the remaining four stages over plenty of high passes in the Alps. The technique of staying calm and not responding immediately to everything was honed over
this week, especially on the final climb to La Toussuire, when they resisted enormous pressure from Cadel Evans, Alexandre Vinokourov and Jurgen Van Den Broeck. Rigoberto Urán Urán in
particular was proving a useful henchman to have.

Emboldened by their sublime team performance and the biggest win in Team Sky’s short history, Yates and Brailsford resolved to take the same squad to the Tour de France in three
weeks’ time.

Meanwhile, Bradley nipped back to England and claimed a proud win. It was his first National Road Race title, won in great style in a Team Sky clean sweep on a Northumberland circuit. It meant
that he would be going into the Tour de France resplendent in the white jersey with red and blue bands of GB Champion. He looked particularly proud whenever he raced in it: it could have been
designed with the mod in mind. As well as displays by other riders like Sean Yates in that national jersey over the years, it brought to mind Olympic greats like Daley Thompson, Steve Ovett and
Steve Redgrave. Right up Brad’s street, in fact. It was going to be a great Tour.

There was no prologue. Instead, a tough road stage was followed by a shortish team time trial won by Garmin-Cervelo, just four seconds ahead of Evans’s BMC, Team Sky and the Schleck
brothers’ Leopard-Trek teams, all on 24’52”. The only loser in the first couple of days was defending champion Alberto Contador, who lost time after a crash on the first stage and
then a few more seconds with his Saxo Bank team’s performance in the TTT. Evans took a great win on the steep little Mur de Bretagne to take Stage 4, with Brad not far behind, and the race
moved on, everybody doing their best to avoid the crashes that were punctuating a horrible first week. Cav took his first win of the race the next day and railed against the organisers about how
dangerous the route was, after a day in which numerous crashes disturbed the action. Christophe Kern, Janez Brajkovi
č
and Tom Boonen all made early exits with injuries. Contador
was down again. These tumbles could decide the fate of the Tour, surely not what the organisers intended. It was getting silly.

Team Sky kept Brad towards the front at all times, to the extent that he ended up with a top twenty placing on Cav’s stage, but it was no guarantee of safety.

The sixth stage was memorable. This was the day that Team Sky would put it all together. Edvald Boasson Hagen made Dave Brailsford a proud man by winning the uphill sprint into Lisieux after a
perfect lead-out from Geraint Thomas. ‘He deserves to be the first guy to win a stage in a grand tour for the team, because he’s performed so well since he joined,’ said the boss.
Brad hadn’t put a foot wrong, sitting in sixth place, ten seconds off the leader Thor Hushovd, and the team was purring like a well-tuned V8.

Twenty-four hours later, it was all in tatters. With 40km to go before the finish in Châteauroux, Brad came down heavily in a big crash at the centre of the bunch. As the road narrowed
there was a squeeze, wheels touched and many riders were left with nowhere to go. The GB Champion’s left shoulder hit the tarmac hard, too hard for his collarbone, which broke. The perennial
broken bone for any cyclist, the collarbone was just not designed to withstand falling off bicycles. Edvald Boasson Hagen, Xabier Zandio and Juan Antonio Flecha waited anxiously for their leader,
but the game was up. They were waved on, and Brad was ushered into an ambulance.

It seemed that the dream was over again. Not through bad form or bad preparation, but bad luck. Perhaps the Tour de France just wasn’t for Bradley Wiggins. Perhaps that fourth place was a
fluke after all, never to be bettered; a great story for the kids, but not the portent of something even greater.

The new focused Wiggins thought this was unlikely. He was sure he could win this race now.

Bradley Wiggins is getting used to this yellow jersey. He’s been wearing it for ten days now, long enough to look more at home in it than he did in his Team Sky kit. That
cool jersey bearing the legend ‘Wiggo’ along its flanks, the ‘O’ discarded in favour of the mod RAF symbol, is something of a distant memory. The other riders get Porte,
Rogers, Eisel. Brad gets a nickname.

There are stars who are well known enough to be known by their surnames: Lennon, Connery, Cobain. Then there are those big enough to be recognised by purely a colloquial shortening of their full
names: Wills, Wiggo, Becks. On the rung above those are celebrities known purely by their first names: Elvis, Marilyn.

Wiggo T-shirts are beginning to appear upon the chests of Great Britain, the ‘O’ supplanted in the same way as the man’s Team Sky jersey. Joke shops are selling out of fake
sideburns. Something is happening in a country hungry for the Olympics to begin, a sporting tension and excitement that is seeing a nation’s appetite for summer success whetted by the Divine
Sideburns. Some have even begun to refer to Bradley Wiggins as the Modfather, surely an error as this epithet is already well and truly wrapped around the shoulders of one of his own idols, Paul
Weller.

Team Sky have played their hand masterfully in this Tour so far. The lessons of 2010 and 2011 have been learned well. The direction of Brailsford, Yates, Ellingworth, Kerrison and everybody else
from the Murdochs down has put the team in a golden position, and the riders have each, to a man, played their part. Wiggins holds the nap hand.

Today is the day when the cards are laid down.

When the route for this Tour de France was announced on a cold Paris day seven or so months ago, the organisers had made it clear that they expected Wednesday 18 July to be a pivotal day in the
race’s destiny.

In the distant historic days of Tour legend, days when the race passed over the classic quartet of Pyrenean passes were virtually
de rigueur
. Historically and hysterically dubbed
‘The Circle of Death’ – they’re not even in a circle – the Col d’Aubisque, the Col du Tourmalet, the Col d’Aspin and the Col de Peyresourde are arranged in
such a perfect geographical way that the temptation to take a race over them in succession is almost too much to bear. In recent times though, that is exactly what the organisers have managed to
resist, with all the passes featuring regularly, but rarely together like this. In mitigation of the difficulty, the more common mountain top finish of a key Pyrenean stage has been foregone.
Instead the natural ending in Bagnères-de-Luchon at the bottom of the Peyresourde will host
les arrivées
.

If Nibali, Van Den Broeck, Evans or, whisper it, Chris Froome have designs on winning this race, today will have figured high on their lists of launch pads for some time.

Bradley Wiggins not only knows this, he has his own ambitions to fulfil. He has said plainly that each day is a step towards Paris, and there will only be four paces left after today. And none
of those will be as gigantic a stride as this one will be.

It’s hot today. Not ideal for anyone in the high mountains, especially not a skinny pasty-faced Londoner.

Today there is little urge to chase any breakaways, with Team Sky unthreatened by any rider outside of the top ten. Andreas Klöden in eleventh spot is nearly ten minutes behind Brad
overall, so there is no urgency to hunt down a move. Every Team Sky rider has very specific instructions for this stage, and it won’t be until later this afternoon that their trial will
properly begin. Thus it is no great shakes when a massive breakaway move forms early after the roll out from Pau, with virtually all the teams represented by at least one rider. Except Team Sky, of
course. Both their cars trundle comfortably along behind the main field.

There are 38 riders up the road from the yellow jersey group, the best placed being Egoi Martínez, holding down eighteenth place overall and the same number of minutes behind Bradley
Wiggins.

Over the Aubisque and the Tourmalet – in theory harder climbs than their smaller sisters the Aspin and Peyresourde, but further from the finish – it is Christian Knees and Edvald
Boasson Hagen that perform the donkey work for Team Sky and the rest of the race.

It is Thomas Voeckler, chasing points for the King of the Mountains competition in the lead group who takes the Jacques Goddet prize for being the first man over the highest point of the Tour,
this year, the Col du Tourmalet. The Pyrenees have long held an inferiority complex about their status of being lower than the Alps, and there has long been talk of surfacing the track that leads
upwards from the summit of the Col all the way to the summit of the Pic du Midi above it. This would be a finish of 2,877m above sea level, another 700m higher than the Tourmalet. The gradient of
the road and the accusations of spectacle-over-sport that would follow such an inclusion have dissuaded the race organisers up until now. They regularly make sure that there are no super-high
passes in the Alps included in the route – no Galibier in 2012 – to ensure the Pyrenees get to host the Prix Jacques Goddet occasionally.

The Tourmalet drops down into the famous Tour de France village of Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, where blond Pyrenean cattle roam carefree across the common that marks the beginning of the Col
d’Aspin. Today, we’re trekking up the thickly wooded western shoulder, giving the riders some respite from the July temperature.