Read Bradley Wiggins Online

Authors: John Deering

Bradley Wiggins (6 page)

BOOK: Bradley Wiggins
12.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

There was a new star in the firmament.

STAGE
4:
Abbeville–Rouen, 214.5km
Wednesday, 4 July 2012

The road to Rouen is paved with uncertainty. Crashes, crashes, crashes: the story of the first week in the Tour de France for many years. Is it getting worse? Or is it the fact
that we have a man in this race with the hopes and dreams of a nation riding on his shoulders? Is that why we watch with white knuckles gripping the armchair? We’re dreading ‘
Chute
dans le peloton!
’ to be swiftly followed by ‘101, Wiggins.’

It doesn’t help that we’ve been here before. It is a fact of cycling that people who crash tend to crash again. They don’t necessarily cause crashes – though some do
– but they don’t have the supernatural awareness some have which helps them avoid the accidents when they happen. As somebody who has crashed out of this event once already, concerns
run high for Bradley Wiggins.

Mark Cavendish is no stranger to ripped shorts either. He has been accused of being reckless by his sprinting opponents, and, when he was younger perhaps, they may have had a point. These days,
his problems in the sprint tend to stem from fearlessness rather than recklessness, as he continues to put his nose in where it hurts and take the risks needed to win races. Being the most marked
man in the sport brings its own dangers, too, as rivals fight to get on the wheel of the fastest finisher. In a sprint stage, if you finish in front of Cav, you probably win the race. More
insidiously, there are those who will actively try to baulk him, as the Italian sprinter Roberto Ferrari did in May’s Giro d’Italia. Ferrari callously flicked off his line when he
sensed Cavendish beginning to overtake him in the classic ‘switch’ – the most underhand and despised of all sprinting misdemeanours. At an estimated 75kph, with no protective
clothing other than a skid lid, the World Champion was lucky to get up from that crash and continue in the race.

It wasn’t his only crash in the Giro, either. One problem riders don’t have to contend with on the Tour as much as its Italian counterpart is corners. The Giro organisers love a
90-degree bend 200m from the line. At least the Tour bosses realise that this is probably a bad idea if you want to keep your competitors alive, even if a smattering of road furniture and
roundabouts in the final run-in are often unavoidable. The beauty of road cycling as a sport is that it takes place on public roads that we can all use. The downfall of road cycling as a sport is
that it takes place on public roads that we all know have bends, potholes, bumps and narrow bits.

You can guess where this is leading to . . .

Brad avoided today’s big smash, but Cav didn’t, and neither did his constant companion Bernie Eisel, who was naturally alongside him at the time. With numerous abrasions and a
damaged hand, the World Champion rolled over the line a few minutes after the stage winner, but within that small vignette was contained his most painful injury: André Greipel had won the
stage. The German was definitely the fastest in this sprint in the absence of his more garlanded former teammate and took the prize accordingly. This made Cavendish as livid as the rips in his
jersey and shorts, and the blood dripping down his battered body. The fact that Alessandro Petacchi had finished second just showed him that, in his mind, taking his 22nd Tour stage would have been
like removing sweets from the proverbial toddler.

‘We see this kind of thing time and time again,’ Sean Yates wearily told the Sky News reporters at the finish. ‘Nobody wants to see crashes for anybody and we were among the
victims again today.’

Somebody else who, perhaps surprisingly, decided to have a public opinion on the accident was Mark Cavendish’s girlfriend. Peta Todd took to Twitter to declare imperiously, ‘This is
people’s lives. If you haven’t got the intention of making sure you have the team to look after the World Champ don’t just wing it. He is just a man.’

The Team Sky hierarchy’s reaction to being lectured on tactics by a Page 3 glamour model sadly went unrecorded. Questioned about Todd’s comments, Dave Brailsford shrugged and said,
‘Sprinters crash, that’s just part and parcel of the job.’ He could have swapped ‘Cavendish crashes’ for ‘Sprinters crash’, but we knew what he meant.

It is interesting to reflect on what Team Sky could have done differently to keep Cavendish out of such a crash when he was fighting for position in the run-in to a finish that he fancied. Or
perhaps Todd blames all his teams for all her boyfriend’s crashes over the years? What seemed more likely is that this was an opportunity to let off some steam about the more general issue:
that, for once, Mark Cavendish was not the star of the show. Team Sky were here to make Bradley Wiggins the first British winner of the Tour de France, not retain Mark Cavendish’s green
jersey of best sprinter. Surely Cavendish, and by extension his partner, must have known that when he signed for Team Sky?

To follow the logic of Todd’s rather rambling tweet, Team Sky should either build their team around Cavendish or not include him in their nine selected riders. We can only imagine what her
reaction would have been if they had left him out of their Tour de France team. And Team Sky’s stated mission was to win the Tour de France with a British rider. Seriously, what did the
Cavendish camp think? And what did Cavendish think when he heard about the row? Did he close his eyes and inwardly groan? Did he feel a warm glow of pride at hearing his partner support him so
staunchly? Did he even discuss it with her beforehand, perhaps a subtle way of letting the world know how he felt without upsetting Team Sky’s precariously balanced apple cart?

Those of us with an interest in modern sport know how Twitter can bring comradeship, enlightenment and understanding to its participants, or instant opprobrium crashing down on the heads of
those who use it unwisely. Goodness knows how many times Kevin Pietersen’s friends, family and teammates must have wanted to wrench his iPhone out of his hands and smash it into a million
pieces before he bashed out another self-destructive 140 characters.

Several of Team Sky’s riders’ partners are regular tweeters. It would seem likely that many of their followers do so because of the identity of their husbands and boyfriends rather
than any personal prowess, though Todd’s modelling career has of course brought her plenty of fans of her own. This race still has more than two weeks to go, and the action hasn’t even
started in earnest yet.

THE EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD BRADLEY WIGGINS
sat down at Christmas 1998 and thought about his future. He didn’t need any motivation to achieve his
immediate goal: to go to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. He’d been dreaming about it since his first laps round his flats in 1992 as a twelve-year-old Boardman fan. He knew that to make this
happen, he would have to be motivated enough to make 1999 a very hard year indeed. He would need the results to keep him in the frame for selection for Sydney and grow from being one of the
world’s best juniors into a man.

After Sydney, he would choose from one of the teams that had begun to follow his progress and turn professional, leave the track for the road and become a Tour de France rider. Those had been
his twin ambitions ever since he’d begun racing in earnest at Herne Hill and on the Hayes Bypass: the Olympics and the Tour.

He settled in well with the Great Britain track squad after his baptism with the big boys in Kuala Lumpur. The professionalism of the track squad was growing year on year and the new line-up for
the 1999 World Championships in Berlin reflected that. Brad, Paul Manning, Bryan Steele, Matt Illingworth and Rob Hayles largely represented the new breed of Lottery-funded full-time athletes whose
goal was medals at the World Championships and the Olympics. They would tackle the team pursuit in a better-prepared state than any team before them.

They were fifth in Berlin, a good result reflecting an upward curve in performance from previous World Championships, and the team and management firmly believed in their medal chances at the
Games in a year’s time. Rob Hayles and Brad also rode the madison in Berlin where they did well enough to suggest they could take the partnership to Sydney. They would need to keep at it and
avoid injury, but it looked like Brad was now a shoo-in for Olympic selection.

The winter of 1999 was a strange and exciting time for Bradley Wiggins. In their quest to ride well in the Olympic madison, he and Rob Hayles decided to have a crack at the six-day circuit.
Here, there were many echoes of his absent father, and he met many people who remembered his dad, with reactions ranging through horror via fright all the way to affection.

The Olympic squad formed in earnest in January 2000. Matt Illingworth had clashed with the coach Simon Jones over the team’s preparation and training methods, and as the most senior member
of the squad felt as though he should have some sway. Jones was keen to be seen as his own man and there was only going to be one winner, especially as Illingworth’s replacement turned out to
be the star of the domestic road scene, Chris Newton.

By the time they got to Sydney seven months later, the newly GB-suited squad had been through a punishing year during which they had been drilled to within an inch of their lives. The enormity
of the Games was hard to take in for Bradley and he was relieved that the team opted out of the opening ceremony as the team pursuit was to take place at the beginning of the Games programme. He
was in danger of becoming terminally star-struck and needed to focus.

Atlanta was put to bed on the very first night, when Jason Queally muscled his way to an amazing gold medal in the very first event, the 1km time trial. The whole track squad went berserk
– they knew their confidence was not misplaced and they could take on the world.

The team pursuit squad went through their solid preparation routine and minutely planned changeovers and speed control in their first round. Jones’s coaching was justified by the setting
of a new Olympic record. The excited team took a breather before their quarter-final later that same night. They cruised past the Netherlands into the semi-finals. A medal, so far out of reach in
this event for so many years, was within touching distance.

It wasn’t going to be gold, though. The Ukrainians, favourites for this event after their World Championship showings over recent seasons, took a whole two seconds out of the GB quartet,
who were still able to beat the British record in that same ride. Unbowed by losing to a better team, they went back out and beat the British record again in defeating France for the bronze.
Bradley Wiggins was an Olympic medallist.

Rob Hayles’s crash in the madison a few days later, to whom no blame could be attached after other riders ricocheted into him, robbed the pair of another medal. Brad hung in without his
partner for the final laps to ensure they got fourth, but it was a disappointment. Not one large enough to dampen the joy that bronze had brought, though. The Olympic medal Brad had dreamed of
since he was a boy was his and he could now turn professional and say goodbye to the track career that had served him so well.

Or would he? Sydney had left such an impression on Bradley Wiggins that the image of that Olympic flame remained burned on to his retinas. How could he turn his back on that? He realised that at
twenty years old, he could conceivably see competition at another three or even four Olympics if he was able to maintain or improve on the level he’d reached. He immediately began wondering
about the possibilities of Athens 2004 and whether he could combine those goals with a successful career on the roads of Europe.

There was an ideal step waiting for the returning Olympian. In tandem with Great Britain’s progress on the track, there was now a British professional team racing on the continent. The
1990s had been a dark time for British cycling. The demise of the last team to take on the Europeans at their own game, ANC-Halfords in 1987 in a scandalous mess, had hit the scene hard, and only
isolated rides by the likes of Sean Yates and Malcolm Elliott shone. Compared to the 1980s when Robert Millar had ridden to the King of the Mountains jersey and fourth place in the Tour de France,
the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain had attracted millions to the roadside and the Irish neighbours Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche were dominating world cycling, it was slim pickings.

But an unusual thing had happened. An ideas man from Kent by the name of Julian Clark had persuaded the McCartney family that a vegetarian British cycling team would be the ideal promotional
vehicle for Linda McCartney Foods, the vegetarian ready meals business run by the ex-Beatle’s charismatic wife. In their second year, 1999, Clark had managed to persuade British number one
Max Sciandri and Swiss legend Pascal Richard to front his burgeoning team. The pair had taken bronze and gold medals respectively in that first open Olympic road race in Atlanta. With the Olympic
Champion on board and a host of eager fresh faces, Linda McCartney even managed to get an invite to the 2000 Giro d’Italia. It got even better for the exciting popular newcomers when the
flinty Australian David McKenzie won the stage from Vasto to Teramo with a scarcely believable 164km lone break that had won the hearts of the Italian public. And it was all pulled off under the
tutelage of a man in his first year of cycling management. After landing something of a coup in persuading Sean Yates out of retirement to ride the 1998 Tour of Britain as a guest Linda McCartney
rider, Julian Clark had made the legendary Brit sporting director of the team.

BOOK: Bradley Wiggins
12.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

LASHKAR by Mukul Deva
Phantom Warriors: Riot by Jordan Summers
3 Strange Bedfellows by Matt Witten
La música del mundo by Andrés Ibáñez
Stripped by Hunter, Adriana
Zod Wallop by William Browning Spencer
The Alpha Gladiator by Erin M. Leaf
Another Eden by Patricia Gaffney
Valley of Decision by Stanley Middleton