Bradley Wiggins (3 page)

PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT TO
talk about Bradley’s dad, but it’s his mum they should be talking about.

Linda was a seventeen-year-old local girl with a love of bike racing when she met Garry Wiggins near her home in West London. She was a regular at the local track and her pretty blonde looks and
independent nature soon brought her to the attention of the attractively cavalier Australian rider who was one of the more impressive guys to be seen on the Paddington track. He hit on her, she hit
on him back and she found herself with a rather exciting and rakish boyfriend five years her senior.

Garry had arrived from provincial Victoria with a bike, a few Aussie dollars, and a burning ambition to make a name for himself in European cycling. He bullied his way on to what was then a
thriving track scene, using his skill, his power and his fists when necessary.

In 1979, Linda married Garry and they decided to set up home in Belgium to further Garry’s racing career. His plans lay not on the road but on the lucrative six-day circuit. The six-day is
a popular niche event in some areas today, but it was big news in the 1970s and 1980s. A circus of riders would move from town to town and set up shop in an arena for a week where they would ride
either on the boards of a permanent track or one constructed for the occasion. There was an annual event at Wembley Arena, or Empire Pool as it was then known, called the Skol Six. The gloriously
named event brings back images of cheap beer sloshing around in plastic glasses and men hurling encouragement and abuse at sportsmen while scarcely noticing what is going on. A bit like Saturday
afternoon in the Tavern at the Lord’s Test.

The riders would perform in pairs over six nights of racing, riding a form of tag-team racing called the madison after Madison Square Garden in New York, where the discipline had developed.
Effectively, only one of the pair is racing. The other tends to roll around the top of the banking out of the way. When his teammate is flagging, he hurls his fresher partner into the action with a
handsling. One of cycling’s more dangerous stunts, the handsling, along with the harem-scarem nature of the random tags going on at any moment, makes the madison extremely exciting to watch,
but hard to follow. Hence the booze and the hollering hordes.

Garry Wiggins was pretty good at it. From the Wiggins’s little apartment in Ghent he would race most days in the summer, competing in the small circuit races known as
kermesses
that each small town staged on its local roads. Then in the winter it would be on to the tracks of the six-day ring in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, and a chance to earn some proper
money.

It was into this strange world that Bradley Marc Wiggins arrived on 28 April 1980. Unlike anything that happens at Team Sky these days, in 1980, Bradley was very much Not Part Of The Plan. Garry
had already managed to leave one family behind in his life – a wife and daughter from a teenage marriage in Australia – and now the second one was coming under some pressure.
Amphetamine use was rife in those long days and nights of sustained racing and the lack of proper doping controls meant that riders were often looking for the other type of speed to get them
through their working weeks. Garry filled that need for himself and plenty of others by being the go-to man in Ghent if you needed a helping hand with what cyclists have always euphemistically
termed medication. According to Brad himself, writing in his excellent 2009 autobiography
In Pursuit of Glory,
after a family visit to Australia, Garry smuggled back a whole bunch of
amphetamines in his baby’s nappy. That must make Brad the youngest drug offender on the cycling circuit by some distance.

Amphetamines, booze, a hard man’s nature and a temper. It must have been pretty tough for Linda, struggling to look after a baby at her young age in a small apartment in a foreign country.
People are often mistaken that being in Belgium, a dual-language country, means that people speak both French and Flemish. In fact, it’s much more like England and Wales: you wouldn’t
expect to walk into a supermarket in Norwich and be understood if you asked for your lottery ticket and 20 Marlboro Lights in Welsh. That’s Belgium. Wallonia in the south is pure French;
Flanders in the north is all guttural Flemish, a language that has been described as sounding like a rural version of Dutch. Linda’s French lessons from school weren’t very useful for
integrating into Ghent society. A drunken, angry and sometimes violent husband was the last thing she and her baby needed.

The couple struggled through to Christmas 1982, fighting, breaking up and reuniting regularly, until Garry didn’t turn up in England as planned for a family Christmas. He’d decided
to spend it with his new girlfriend instead. That was it as far as his attempt at happy families went.

A child’s bike turned up on Brad’s third birthday, but that was the only thing he or Linda got out of the itinerant elder Wiggins for the rest of the boy’s childhood. And Linda
certainly didn’t miss the black eyes.

Linda’s parents, George and Maureen, were a godsend. While she worked around the clock to provide for her young boy, his grandparents did all they possibly could to help and support her.
She moved back home – even though her two sisters were still there – and the family dug in and helped each other out. It wasn’t long before the hard-working young mum had grafted
her way into a proper flat for herself and her toddler, within walking distance of the old place in Paddington.

Granddad George was Bradley’s constant companion in those early days. Sport ran through George like working-class blood, but the sports he took Brad to week in, week out during those
formative years were far removed from the Tour de France. For racing and excitement, it wasn’t the velodrome, it was the greyhound tracks of London; and for guile and craft it was snooker and
darts in the British Legion.

Linda unsurprisingly found herself a new man, despite not having much time for looking with her long hours and her inquisitive schoolboy running around her skirts at every other moment. Brendan
was a thoroughly decent guy who respected and nurtured Bradley through his school years, and he and Brad’s mother also gave the boy a brother, too, Ryan, seven years Brad’s junior.

Bradley Wiggins was a typically bright London schoolboy, popular enough at school, well loved at home, playing football in the streets and parks with his mates, getting in and out of the odd
scrape but nothing to write home about. Where was the genesis of the Tour de France hero? How did this gangly smiling kid become a World Champion and Olympic gold medallist?

Each team in the Tour de France is made up of nine riders. The designated leader of the team wears a number ending in one, hence Bradley Wiggins’s 101. Each of the riders
has a specific role. Team Sky is as follows:

101: Bradley Wiggins. The leader. The man. The one. The reason we’re all here. Fourth in this race three years ago, he revealed his potential. His first Tour with Team Sky was also Team
Sky’s first Tour and it proved to be a steep learning curve for both parties. In 2011 he arrived in great form with an improved team but was an early crash victim. This year he starts as the
favourite to win the race.

102: Edvald Boasson Hagen. The wild card. A massive talent, champion of Norway, he’s at his best in the long hard classics and a powerful hitter with a chance to pull off a win on any
given day. Licence to seek out stage wins without any specific assisting role but will be expected to provide pace and effort to aid the team effort when required.

103: Mark Cavendish. The fastest man in the world. The World Champion. The quickest sprinter in this, or any race, and the most prolific stage winner riding. Still only 27 and already the winner
of twenty stages. Here to add to those, but unsure of how much support he can rely on from a team committed to winning the overall prize.

104: Bernie Eisel. Cav’s right-hand man. Mark Cavendish brought his trusty lieutenant with him to Team Sky from the engine room of their HTC squad after plundering Tour wins together for
years. The motor-mouthed Austrian is a massively popular member of the team and expected to single-handedly do the job a whole team did last year and lead Cav out.

105: Chris Froome. The secret weapon. The African-bred Brit climbed to a completely unpredicted second place in last year’s Vuelta a España, as good as any result by a British
cyclist in a grand tour in the history of cycling. Here, his job is to accompany Wiggins every step of the way in the mountains, and provide a Plan B if the sideburned Plan A doesn’t pan
out.

106: Christian Knees. The horse. Sean Yates would never want to take an army into battle without at least one man to do his old job. Get on the front. Raise the tempo. Close things down. Put
some hurt on. With a man like Knees on the front, the others can take a break, knowing the lanky German will do the work of ten men if necessary.

107: Richie Porte. The class act. The young Australian has carried out his apprenticeship alongside Alberto Contador at Saxo Bank and is ready to become the hitter he has always promised to be.
Strong in the time trial and when things curve uphill, he has all the attributes to be a leader of a grand tour team himself. This year, he is one of those whom Wiggins will look to lean on in the
Alps and Pyrenees, and a possible Plan C.

108: Mick Rogers. The captain. Three times the World Time Trial Champion, the 32-year-old from New South Wales has always been known for his wise head. Briefly a contender himself when leading
the T-Mobile and HTC squads, his role as decision-maker on the road for Wiggins and the rest sits comfortably on his experienced shoulders. Will be expected to be one of the pace-setters on the
lower slopes of the big climbs.

109: Kanstantsin Siutsou. The pro. The Belarusian has been on the scene since becoming World Under-23 Champion in 2004, picking up stage wins and overall places in the grand tours ever since.
Impressed Team Sky while at HTC last year when his prodigious climbing dragged Wiggins back up to Evans and Vinokourov in the Dauphiné Libéré when the Brit was in danger of
losing the lead. Will form part of a powerful climbing phalanx with Froome, Porte and Rogers to fight for Wiggins in the mountains.

*

The route from Visé to Tournai is a flat rush over 200-odd kilometres of bleak Flanders lowland. The day will be characterised by the non-sprinters trying to escape the
bunch and the sprinters’ teams trying to pull them back and set up a sprint. Therefore, there are two guarantees about today’s racing: it will be really fast, and it will be
dangerous.

Team Sky will want to win today. Mark Cavendish will really want to win. This is the sort of day that will probably be known by future generations as a Cav Day, a day where it feels that
whatever anyone does, there is only going to be one winner. Flat sprint stages often have this feel of inevitability after they’ve finished, but in the heat of battle it’s clear that,
in truth, anything can and probably will happen.

The teams that have come to this race with hopes of a sprint victory are:

Orica-GreenEDGE
. The newly formed Australian team is built on the Team Sky blueprint, using a well-established national track programme as a springboard for road success. For now,
though, they lack a leader to challenge for the overall prize. They are here to look for opportunistic stage wins through the likes of adventurers like Simon Gerrans, old stager Stuart
O’Grady, and their most successful rider of the spring, Michael Albasini. But they also have a tasty fast man: Matt Goss. No, not that guy out of Bros, the one who has been leading out Cav at
HTC for a couple of years.

Lotto Belisol
. The Belgian-based classics team have Mark Cavendish’s greatest rival in their sprint plans, the speedy German André Greipel. No love is lost between these
two, with Greipel having to play second fiddle to Cavendish at various team incarnations for much of his early career. The German believes that he can beat Cavendish, that he can beat the World
Champion in a straight
mano-a-mano
battle and, sometimes, he can. But not often.

Liquigas-Cannondale
. The Italians have discovered a rare talent in yesterday’s stage winner and early wearer of the green jersey for most consistent finisher, Peter Sagan. Though
Cavendish has greater pure speed than the Slovakian
arriviste
, Sagan’s ability to score on all sorts of terrain makes him a formidable obstacle if the green jersey is to go back to
the Isle of Man like last year.

Lampre-ISD
. Alessandro Petacchi used to be really fast, one of the few men to give Mario Cipollini a regular hiding when the Lion King was at his peak. The key phrase here is
‘used to be’. One wonders why they bother with all the chasing and the leading out when Petacchi is clearly devoid of the oomph he once displayed on a daily basis.

Garmin-Sharp
. Despite contesting Tour de France sprint finishes for many years, Tyler Farrar boasts a grand total of one stage win versus his contemporary Cavendish’s twenty.
Still, Garmin-Sharp gamely do their bit and lead him out every time, surely more in hope than expectation.