Bradley Wiggins (5 page)

To see why Siutsou got the call, we need to go back to the Critérium du Dauphiné of 2011. An important goal in itself, June’s Dauphiné has long been the destination of
Tour de France hopefuls fine-tuning their form. Previously known as the Dauphiné Libéré, it was here in the south of France and the Alps that Miguel Indurain used to test
himself against his rivals a month before the battle proper. Bradley Wiggins won the prestigious event in 2011, beating eventual Tour winner Cadel Evans in the process. Not without a scare,
however.

Stage 11 of this Tour de France will not be the first time Brad has battled the Alpine giant of La Toussuire. While wearing the leader’s jersey on these slopes in the 2011 Dauphiné,
Brad was subjected to a brutal attack by Joaquin Rodriguez and Cadel Evans that put his lead at severe risk. Wiggins, like Evans, prefers to use his remarkable engine to control his speed on the
slopes of big climbs; neither of them enjoys the jerkier stop-start attacks of pure climbers like Rodriguez, known as Il Puro for his cigar-like shape. Brad prefers to let moves go and grind out
the yards separating him from his tormentor until he drags himself back into contention. This attack, however, was the real deal. A real gap had opened up and the jersey was sliding off his
shoulders. Ever calm, he set about the task of nullifying the move, but he needed some help.

It came in the unlikely shape of Kanstantsin Siutsou. The HTC man had first hit the headlines in 2004 when he delighted all of Belarus by taking the World Under-23 Road Championship. Since then,
he had carved out a decent, if unspectacular career for himself, winning his national jersey and stages in races like the Giro d’Italia. Looking back, though, it was his strong showing in the
overall classification of big races that really demonstrated the sort of rider he had become: winning the Tour de Georgia and cementing top twenty finishes at both the Tour de France and the Giro.
He was a
rouleur
with a big engine who could lay it down in the mountains, and that’s what he did right there and then on Toussuire.

There were rumours that an on-the-spot offer was made of a contract with Team Sky if he pulled it out for Wiggins that day, but stories like that abound in cycling. What is more certain is that
when La Toussuire appeared in the roadbook of the 2012 Tour de France, everyone at Team Sky would have remembered how the experienced Belarusian had ridden there a year before. He rode alongside
Wiggins for the 2012 Dauphiné where the Brit retained his title, and also during his successful assault on Switzerland’s Tour de Romandie. Siutsou was well worth his place in the nine.
Which is why it was so disappointing that he became the first rider to abandon the 2012 Tour de France.

We’ve heard a lot about crashes in the first week of the Tour, but this wasn’t really what we had in mind. This was not some crazy snarl-up in the last few kilometres as everybody
rides flat out to hold their place or move up the line, or a death-defying descent in torrential rain. With 50km to go in a fairly typical northern stage, there was a touch of wheels and Siutsou
hit the deck hard enough to break his tibia. It happens. But that doesn’t make it easier to bear for you or your team when you are the victim.

After that, the crashes come thick and fast. The roads of this stage are narrower than the first two, as the organisers attempt to take the race up some smaller local climbs, and the attendant
nervousness spreads. Team Sky group around Wiggins, and Yates and Rogers are adamant that they need to ride at the front, the safest place in the bunch.

However, as Chris Froome would later ruefully point out, ‘You can’t have 200 riders on the front though.’ With the finish atop a sharp little rise similar to the springboard
Peter Sagan had used for victory on Stage 1, everybody was desperate to be at the head of things. Into the frantic final kilometre, and Wiggins and his entourage are within touching distance of the
front when the experienced Katusha sprinter Óscar Freire is squeezed into the barriers directly in front of them, bringing everybody on the left-hand side of the road to a standstill. Brad
was able to clip out of his pedals and stop, but Froome found himself straddling the barriers in an effort to avoid hitting the deck.

Panic quickly subsided when it was clear that nobody else had been injured, and the riders, shaken by Siutsou’s exit, calmly proceeded to the line. Bradley’s second spot was
protected by the Tour rule that dictates all riders delayed by a crash in the final kilometre shall be given the same time as the bunch they were in when it happened. Phew.

In front of them, Sylvain Chavanel was trying to ride roughshod over that, anyway. The Frenchman, level on time with Wiggins, launched a ferocious attack to try and win on the slopes into
Boulogne. If he could finish one second clear of the bunch, second place overall would be his. If it could be eight seconds, then the
maillot jaune
itself would be his. He hadn’t
reckoned on the awesome power of the 21-year-old Liquigas-Cannondale Slovak though, and Peter Sagan soared clear with immense power to take his second great stage and solidify his grasp on the
green jersey. Behind him, our hero Edvald smashed his way to the finish line to take second place, with the yellow jersey of Switzerland’s own tough guy, Fabian Cancellara, just behind
him.

Team Sky retreat to the Big Black Bus to consider the day, lick their wounds, consider their losses and count their blessings. They’re a man down, but the hitters survived some scares.
They could have lost a serious chunk of time if the big pile-up had happened a couple of minutes earlier. Breathe steadily. Move on.

Sean Yates speaks to
Sky Sports
about Kanstantsin Siutsou. ‘He is a big loss. We have to deal with it. It will just impact on the workload of the other seven members of the
team.’

Non-cycling followers watching Sky Sports News furrow their brows. ‘I thought he just said they were down to eight riders? Now he’s talking about seven?’ Of course, for Yates,
it’s obvious that there is one rider who won’t lift a finger unless he has to: Bradley Wiggins. He is here to win and must be protected and assisted at every turn.

And then there were eight. As Yates says: ‘One minute all is calm, the next minute all hell is let loose. It’s a little bit nerve-racking.’

REALLY
,
THERE USED TO
be only one way to be a full-time cyclist. You had to join a team and be a professional road rider. There
were the odd few who would go to Europe and live off scraps at sponsored amateurs and hope that their results would bring them that pro contract, or an even more select band that Bradley
Wiggins’s father, Garry, had tried to break into who could make a living out of the European winter indoor track circuit, but even they would usually supplement their income by riding on a
pro team in the summer.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was quite a tidy home-based professional scene. Based largely upon criteriums, town centre racing that would take place on evenings throughout the summer months, and
the round-Britain Milk Race, there was a fair amount of cash to be had. Riders like Keith ‘Leggo’ Lambert and Sid Barras grafted hard for their wins and led powerful teams of tough
pros. They were professional sportsmen and, if not salaried like today’s sports stars, they could earn a good living and be counted alongside the footballers, cricketers and rugby league
stars of their day. Rugby league is actually a good comparison, as, like rugby, cycling had a seismic split down the middle. Professionals and amateurs. Never the twain shall meet. The amateurs had
their racing scene, with the peak being the amateur National and World Championships and the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, while the professionals had an entirely different calendar.

Great British riders of the era like Chris Walker, Malcolm Elliott or Sean Yates were unable to illuminate the Olympics at their peak, because they were pros. A serial UK winner like Chris
Lillywhite, now working alongside his old teammate Shane Sutton as part of the GB set-up, turned professional at seventeen and never got a sniff of the Olympic rings. The great Sean Kelly had been
pre-selected for Ireland to go to the Montreal Olympics but was caught racing in apartheid South Africa under an assumed name for money and turfed out, causing him to turn professional earlier than
intended.

Two things changed to unite the sport during the 1990s. Firstly, the Olympics became ‘open’. Anybody could enter regardless of their professional status. The traditionalists argued
that the amateur ethos of sport for its own sake was irreparably damaged, while the reformers retorted that as a celebration of the best in sport, the Olympics should feature the best sportsmen and
women. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the deed was done, and people like Miguel Indurain, Tim Henman and Ryan Giggs became, largely to their own surprise and delight, Olympic athletes. It meant
that the Olympics were no longer a sideshow in cycling, they were part of the main event, and professional careers could be tilted towards the medal podium.

The other big change was the introduction of National Lottery funding. Amateur sports that had always been the backbone of the Olympic programme like athletics, swimming and cycling had always
relied on dedicated individuals prepared to go to breaking point in their home and family lives, foregoing work or relaxation in return for squeezing training in somewhere and somehow. This had
ultimately resulted in Great Britain’s worst return at a modern Olympics in 1996, when Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent’s brilliant victory represented the country’s only gold
medal of the Games. UK Sport was established the year after the Atlanta Games, with the responsibility of distributing money raised via the National Lottery to fund sport.

As well as promoting grass roots schemes and growing public participation in sport and exercise, the stated aims in UK Sport were to increase the number of medals at Olympics and World
Championships. This was revolutionary for cycling, as Chris Boardman’s coach Peter Keen and his successor Dave Brailsford were able to establish the phenomenally successful track cycling
programme that won so many medals at Athens, Beijing and London, and turn Great Britain into the world’s most successful track cycling nation.

One of the ways they did this was to pay a stipend to athletes likely to make the grade to enable them to train and prepare properly without going to work. In other words, a cyclist could now
make a living without having to choose between turning professional or going to the Olympics.

The seventeen-year-old Bradley Wiggins had been dreaming of the Olympics for five years after seeing Chris Boardman make them his own in 1992. He went to the National Junior Track Championships
and won the 3,000m pursuit, the scratch race, the points race and the 1km time trial. He was also making waves in the Pete Buckley Trophy, a national series of road races for juniors. It gained him
selection for the World Junior Championships in Cape Town, a high honour for a rider’s first year in the juniors, and a berth that had often been left empty in previous years as the expense
of sending a team was weighed against the likelihood of success. Brad finished sixteenth in the individual pursuit and then a wonderful fourth in the points race behind the man who would one day be
his road captain at Team Sky, Mick Rogers.

Coaching, training and diet became Brad’s new life. He had had a taste of how things could be in South Africa and he wasn’t about to let that life slip through his fingers for want
of application. He ate, drank and breathed cycling, and by his own admission must have been a very boring teenager. A year after Cape Town, he was on a plane for Havana for his second Junior
Worlds, a year older, a year stronger, a year wiser. With that in mind, another fourth spot in the points race was a huge disappointment, and the eighteen-year-old was crushed by what he perceived
as his failure. The team management persuaded him to have a crack at the pursuit, which he saw as his weaker event. Amazingly relaxed and pressure-free after the expectation of the points race,
Bradley sailed through the rounds and ‘before I knew it I had won the bloody title’ as he later described in
In Pursuit of Glory.

And before he knew it, the Junior World Champion was in Kuala Lumpur with the senior England squad for the Commonwealth Games and was winning a silver medal as part of a hastily rejigged team
pursuit squad. The five-man squad from which the quartet of riders were chosen was comprised of Bradley Wiggins, Matt Illingworth, Colin Sturgess, Jonny Clay and Rob Hayles. They represented the
best of Great Britain as well as England, and Bradley knew only too well what that meant: a place at the Olympics was in his grasp. With only two years until Sydney, he was part of the best team
pursuit squad this country had ever produced, running the all-conquering Australians close in Malaysia, with the best yet to come.

That wasn’t even the sum of 1998’s good news. UK Cycling took their new Lottery money from UK Sport and gave £20,000 of it to Brad to allow him to train properly and prepare to
win medals for his country.