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Authors: John Deering

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These are the main players in the last 20km of a flat stage, as they fight to keep the race together and position their designated strikers for the final dash to the line.

Today, everybody from Team Sky remains upright, the best feeling of all for Dave Brailsford, who knows that for all his talk of attention to detail and marginal gains, no amount of preparation
can fix a problem like last year’s withdrawal of their leader after kissing the tarmac at high speed.

Into the last 20km and Edvald Boasson Hagen and Mark Cavendish are in the mix for Team Sky, but there is no sign of a long train of teammates leading out the Manx Missile as would have been
expected if this were 2011 and he was wearing the white jersey of HTC. Instead, the two Team Sky riders wearing white jerseys – Cav’s with the rainbow bands of World Champion and
Boasson Hagen’s with the Norwegian flag as national title-holder – are fighting for themselves to hold their places near the front of the breathtakingly fast peloton as it snakes
towards Tournai across the battlefields of the Great War. Team Sky have revived a long-forgotten Tour tradition denoting the leading team on overall classification by donning yellow headwear.
Evoking memories of Anquetil or Merckx and their teammates in yellow cotton caps, the Team Sky riders are wearing helmets in the same colour as Cancellara’s leader’s jersey. It is an
unfamiliar look, but it makes it easier to pick out Boasson Hagen and Cav as they jockey in the speeding pack.

Lotto Belisol are dominant, a full train of riders pumping their legs in harmony like the Mallard hauling an express train at record speed. Greipel is in pole position as they head under the red
kite that signifies the last kilometre. Sagan is crouching his big frame to stay on the German’s wheel, hoping to be able to blast away from him like Chris Hoy on the track when they approach
the line. Cav is further back, without conspicuous teammates, but following the experienced Óscar Freire. ‘I knew that there was some headwind and it was clear to me that I could also
have a chance if I started from a bit further back,’ explained Cavendish regarding his positioning. ‘I knew Freire always goes up in the last kilometre so I stayed with him.’

Greipel explodes off his teammate Greg Henderson’s wheel with 200m remaining and Sagan has no reply to the acceleration. However, there’s somebody else bearing down on the German
– his nemesis, the World Champion. Greipel has his wish, a head-to-head battle to prove who is the fastest man in this race, a chance for one or other to prove his credentials as
cycling’s Usain Bolt.

Only the first part of Greipel’s dream comes true. Cavendish’s front wheel breaks the finish line a fraction of a second before his, and sprinting is not a game for celebrating
second place.

Bradley Wiggins, Fabian Cancellara and all the main rivals are home safely, so Brad still sits quietly in second place, seven seconds separating him from the Swiss leader. All is going to
plan.

Mark Cavendish has won 21 stages of the greatest race on Earth, and win number 21 came without the assistance of his team. Does this prove that there is harmony within the Team Sky household as
they try to win on two fronts? We probably won’t know the answer to that until one of their twin objectives becomes thwarted. What if there is a sprint stage and Cavendish gets beaten? What
if Wiggins gets caught out because his teammates are concentrating on earning Cavendish a stage win? At present, the latter scenario looks highly unlikely, as the overall objective remains crystal
clear. What is more probable is that there will be a chance to see if the Manx rider can keep his famously fiery disposition in check if things don’t go his way.

*

Wiggins and Cavendish go back – a long way back. They have roomed together for years on national duty at Olympics and World Championships, and nearly ended up as
professional teammates at T-Mobile back when the latter was first scaring the established order of sprinters and the former was being groomed as a
rouleur
to add horsepower on the flat and
lead out the fast men. It is perhaps surprising then, that it wasn’t until Brad was in his thirties that they actually joined each other on a professional team, and by then one of them was
champion of the world and the other one was a genuine Tour de France contender. Their separate goals don’t seem to have separated them. Based on huge mutual appreciation for their differing
strengths, their comradeship is natural and without hierarchy. Wiggins famously does impressions of his brasher teammate to entertain the others, while Cavendish pretends to ridicule
Wiggins’s guitar skills. The trick for the Team Sky backroom is to ensure that this goodwill continues. The management would surely be the first department to feel any anger from either party
if things don’t work out: they like each other too much to blame each other for a falling out.

THE BARCELONA OLYMPICS UNDERSTANDABLY
didn’t grip the country in quite the same way that London 2012 held our attention, but they were a major
occasion nonetheless. For the best part of a week, we gasped at the opulence of the opening ceremony, sighed at the dramatic backdrop of the beautiful city behind the high dive board and listened
to Freddie Mercury and Dame Montserrat Caballé blasting out the theme tune.

But we craved a gold medal.

The athletics hadn’t started yet, so we were still waiting for Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell to take the stage. The so-called ‘minor sports’ had held sway for the opening
few days and the country developed a passionate interest in sailing, archery and rowing. It was very exciting, but what we needed was a hero. We found him in an unlikely shape.

Chris Boardman was known as The Professor. The studious approach he had developed alongside his coach and mentor, Peter Keen, became synonymous with his name throughout his cycling career, but
the first time he entered the general public consciousness was here in Barcelona. Their Teutonic application to the 4,000 metre individual pursuit had left no stone unturned in the hunt for
perfection and victory, least of all the bike he would ride.

A slightly more British character was Mike Burrows, the archetypal mad inventor. Despite looking more like a member of Pink Floyd than Dr Snuggles, Burrows had turned his formidable mind to
making the world’s most effective racing bike. Lotus had then built it out of carbon fibre for Boardman, and as a result the country found itself cooing over a bicycle that, to them, looked
more at home on board the USS
Enterprise
than underneath a district nurse.

On a hot August evening in Catalonia, Chris Boardman saddled up against the reigning World Champion Jens Lehmann of Germany. He may have shared a name with his countryman and latterly madcap
Arsenal goalkeeper, but there was nothing inconsistent about this German: he was the real deal. Could the boy from Hoylake on the Wirral overthrow him at this, the pinnacle of sporting goals, the
Olympics?

Nobody was watching more intently than a fascinated twelve-year-old boy in Paddington. Glued to the telly with his mum, Bradley Wiggins couldn’t believe his eyes. The skinsuit, the aero
helmet, but most of all, that amazing bike. He wanted one. He wanted to be that man in that helmet on that bike.

Brad sat rapt as the commentator explained the intricacies of the pursuit. The two men would start on opposite sides of the track then head off, each on their own 4km time trial. At the line,
the faster man would be the gold medallist, except in the unlikely event that one rider caught the other, then the race would be over. Nobody ever caught each other at this sort of level though;
they were all simply too good for that.

Boardman caught Lehmann. It was extraordinary. A country rejoiced, a nation had its gold medal, and one tall skinny twelve-year-old in West London had a dream – to be an Olympic gold
medal-winning cyclist.

Sally Gunnell, Linford Christie, Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent all paraded across the same television screen in the coming days. By the time the closing ceremony lit up the Catalonian sky,
Bradley was mesmerised. Hooked for good. Dreams of playing in goal for Arsenal disappeared into the ether due, ironically, to the defeat of Jens Lehmann in Barcelona.

To this day, Brad is unsure whether Linda simply supported her boy’s new-found enthusiasm for the sport, or whether she cunningly led him down the path before he’d even known he was
walking upon it. She’d called him in to watch that broadcast of Boardman from his kickabout downstairs. She organised a trip out to the Hayes Bypass, a curious bit of new road that was being
extended into Middlesex where, until it was completed, local cyclists would charge up and down in organised races. On his old Halfords bike and a ridiculously old-fashioned helmet of his
dad’s discovered in granddad’s shed, the eager teen rode his first event. In the second one he came third.

Linda ran into a familiar face one week: Stuart Benstead, the local man who had introduced Garry to the London bike scene when he had arrived from Australia. Now Brad had somebody who could help
him make sense of the arcane mysteries of bike racing, and Stuart had a prodigious young talent to nurture. It was a good match for both of them. Brad joined the local club, the Archer Road Club,
and began to ride on the old track at Herne Hill.

His first proper racing bike, a Ribble from Lancashire, was purchased but only with the compensation money that came about after his first proper accident. Brad was expecting a strong lesson
from Linda, but his mum instead turned her wrath upon the woman who had carelessly knocked him off on the way to club night.

Bike events were a strange world in those days, full of dispassionate men who were passionate about bike racing. There were more bobbly old tracksuit tops and clipboards than you could shake a
pump at. Brad worked his way steadily up through the ranks of the various events and age groups, trying most track disciplines and getting some good road rides in, heading out of the city with the
club to the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. He went to his first National Championships in Manchester aged fifteen and came home as National Schoolboy Points Champion, an event he
hadn’t regarded as his forte. By then he was convinced that his future lay in professional cycling, and that’s what he was going to do. He loved riding his bike, but he wanted to make
money out of it, too, not play at it. He saw it as his best chance of making a good life for himself. He got himself on to the national junior squad with another good run of performances at the
following year’s championships and was now on track to be a cyclist.

Which was lucky, because he’d completely lost interest in education. School had fizzled out and a lacklustre enrolment on a business studies course ended prematurely after racing got in
the way of lectures.

It looked like Bradley Wiggins had no choice. He would have to be a bike racer.

STAGE
3:
Orchies–Boulogne-sur-Mer, 197km
Tuesday, 3 July 2012

Second place in the prologue and second place overall for Bradley Wiggins mean Team Sky have had a relatively relaxed first couple of days on the Tour de France. It has fallen
upon the leader Fabian Cancellara’s RadioShack-Nissan team to do all the hard yards at the front of the race to ensure their man stays in yellow for as long as possible. As they are well
aware that Cancellara’s leadership of the race is certain to end in the mountains, it’s the perfect arrangement as far as Team Sky are concerned. What’s more, their prolific stage
winner, Mark Cavendish, has already given them a victory, and they didn’t even have to do anything to help him. It all adds up to a dream start.

Today will be a wake-up call.

Kanstantsin Siutsou is not one of the most prominent members of this squad. If people were likely to say ‘Who?’ about anybody when the team revealed their nine men for the Tour de
France, it would have been about the Belarusian. For heaven’s sake, we weren’t even sure how to write his name: he was often Constantine Sivtsov in race results and remained Kanstantsin
Sivtsov at his previous team, HTC.

When the Team Sky hierarchy sat down to figure out the final line-up for Liège, most of the names picked themselves. They weren’t going to go without Wiggins, Froome, Porte or
Rogers; they were the men who would form the mountain commando unit charged with bringing home yellow. They would surely take Edvald Boasson Hagen. The Norwegian’s all-round power would be
enough to make him leader of many rival teams. They hadn’t spent that money on Mark Cavendish to leave the rainbow jersey hanging in a cupboard in Douglas. The seventh spot would go to
Cavendish’s lieutenant, Bernie Eisel, brought from HTC with his boss for this exact purpose. There would have to be a
rouleur
that could be relied upon to do the donkey work, day in
day out, especially if everything went to plan and the team found themselves defending the yellow jersey for many days. The team was spoilt for choice in this department, with Ian Stannard and Matt
Hayman fancied by many outside the team, but the metronomic Christian Knees got the nod from those in the know. Who would be the last member? Geraint Thomas had been a revelation in last
year’s race, taking the fight to the opposition after Wiggins had been dumped out of the contest. He had also been indefatigable in the classics, where his efforts in the jersey of GB
Champion were appreciated by Boasson Hagen and Juan Antonio Flecha. Rigoberto Urán Urán was surely worth a spot for his glorious name alone, never mind his sterling efforts for the
team in just about every performance he had made over the last two years. In the end, the Olympic team pursuit squad would be Thomas’s goal, and Urán Urán would ride both the
Giro and the Vuelta so a third grand tour was out of the question for the young Colombian.

BOOK: Bradley Wiggins
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