Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  Since the end of 2010 the way Tim and Shane have been working together is that Tim will write the training programmes and then Shane will adapt them to fit me and the world I live in. He’ll simply change the details, based on his experience of bike racing and his knowledge of me. It may seem small, but it makes a massive difference to the state of mind of his riders. Tim might have pencilled in some interval training three days after I’ve won a big race; Shane will look at it and say, ‘No, Brad just needs to ride his bike that day. He doesn’t need the mental stress of doing intervals.’ The outcome is the same: in physical terms I end up with the workload Tim devises, but Shane reduces the impact the training has on my mind and on my life. The key thing is Tim has never been a bike rider whereas Shane has; that means he understands what it’s like and runs the programme through the filter of normal life. That’s where the two of them work well together. Their skills just marry up.

  Between them, Tim and Shane figure out the specific areas I need to work on. They look at everything through the year, they review what went right and what didn’t. Once we’ve reassessed the goals and decided what we’re doing next year, Tim and Shane will go away and write a plan for the season, a phased plan – like a business plan, but working back from the main goal – and Tim will look at it for weeks before coming back with another plan that includes all the specifics. One phase can be two weeks or ten days, one phase could be a week-long rest; for example, you might start off with five weeks general conditioning, getting back up to, say, twenty hours a week; phase two will be pre-race conditioning so it will be Majorca, say 1 January to 19 February. That will be working harder, starting to touch on threshold areas, and then it will be 20 February to 24 March, an initial race phase that includes Paris–Nice. It will be like that all the way towards July. That’s what we’ve always done with the track as well, from the days when we always worked back from the date of the team pursuit at a World’s or an Olympics.

  Before Shane and Tim took over, I worked mainly with Matt Parker, the sports scientist who had begun working with the team pursuit squad in early 2007. Matt had always been at the velodrome; he used to test me on the rig. He looked after bits of my training until 2010 although he wasn’t a constant presence like Shane and Tim are now. I’d ask Matt what training I should be doing for a particular period; he’d send something through and I’d follow it, or at least I’d follow bits of it. It was much more informal, and there was never any criticism from Matt. He was very respectful of me and he always used to say to me, ‘You know yourself better than anyone.’ Which is perhaps why I felt like I could do no wrong. Perhaps Matt had too much respect for me; he is a lovely guy and would never have a go at me or criticise me if I missed out sessions we’d agreed on. Whereas Shane would go, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you go and do that? I didn’t tell you that was a key ride for the hell of it.’ So that’s the difference between Matt and Shane.

  That’s not to say a hairdrying from Shane is hard to take. He’s just honest. It’s always a matter of, ‘Right, I’m going to tell you something now, you’re not going to like it, but you need to pull your head out of your arse, all right? You know I love you to bits, but these next three days are vital.’ It’s in that tone. He’ll tell you you’re the best athlete in the world and you’ve just got to get this bit right. He’ll praise you at the same time as making you feel how important this is. He’ll say, ‘To be honest, last week you fucked up. I’m telling you that as a mate, you messed up big time, you shouldn’t have gone and done what you did, but it’s done now and you learn from your mistakes.’ The reason why athletes like Sir Chris Hoy and I are happy to take a bollocking from him is because when he tells you that stuff you know he cares about you. He’s not ranting at you because he’s going to get in trouble himself or because he’s had a bad day. And you know likewise that when you do well he will never blow smoke up your backside. He will say, ‘Good job, mate, and you know the next three days are important; you need to get your feet up and recover.’

  At other times it’s swung the other way. I’ve been in a bit of a box physically, needing to recover, but I’ve still gone out and completed what’s on the programme. In that case Shane will pull me to one side and say, ‘You know, Brad, this is where you’ve got to be careful, because that’s your desire to win the Tour coming through and it may be your downfall; you’ve still got to be very sensible and listen to your body. Just because you think, “You know what, I’m tired, I’m not going to do it today,” that doesn’t make you not committed or dedicated to what you’re doing.’

  It’s quite funny when it’s Shane who’s telling me to take it easier because he has such a reputation as a hard nut, but a lot of the time it’s Cath who ends up doing that for me. I’ll say I feel guilty because I didn’t go on my bike today and she’ll tell me not to be stupid. She’s the one who always knows me best in that sense. As an athlete you are always trying to find that balance, to walk that fine line between training hard enough and not overdoing it, so it’s not enough to have a coach who simply shouts at you and tells you you’re soft, now go out and do it. Getting it right comes partly down to experience, and partly to having the right people around you.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  BACK ON TRACK

  ONE OF THE key things that Shane came up with in autumn 2010 was that I really needed to get back into the velodrome. He feels that track work in the winter gives you real routine, and some of the intense work we do with the Great Britain track squad is beneficial for the road. So with a view to possibly riding the team pursuit in the London Olympics – which were now just over eighteen months away – I went back to the GB squad again. That gave me a good base for what turned out to be a pretty mundane winter: I would be in the velodrome a couple of times a week doing some fairly intense workouts, I would be riding hard from my home in Lancashire and that was it.

  I did what I had to do and when I began racing on the road again at the Tour of Qatar, the form was there straight away. That didn’t mean I was winning, but it put me in the front group on most of the stages. The team were pleased and that began to set me up for the spring. After Qatar it was the track World Cup at Manchester, where I joined up with my fellow Beijing gold medallists Geraint Thomas (or ‘G’) and Ed Clancy, plus young Steven Burke, for a convincing win that wasn’t light years away from the world record we’d set in Beijing. I was getting a lot of praise that winter, which was rewarding after I had made more of an effort to be a leader. Everyone was telling me I was more communicative, a joy to work with again. As an athlete, you feed off that: if you do something and it works and you get positive feedback, you want more of it.

  That spring, it all started to go right. At Paris–Nice I finished 3rd overall, which was a huge step up in performance from anything I’d done since finishing 4th in the Tour the best part of two years before. It wasn’t run in my kind of weather, being cold and wet, and the guys ahead of me, Tony Martin and Andreas Klöden, were both serious stage race specialists. It was clearly a step forward: we were heading in the right direction, and that’s how it continued. At Paris–Roubaix, my favourite one-day Classic of them all, I did a good job for the team, giving Geraint Thomas my wheel when I crashed and he punctured at the start of the Arenberg Forest cobbled section. At the Tour of Romandie I helped with leading out another of my teammates from the pursuit squad, Ben Swift, to win a couple of bunch sprints, something I’d begun doing at Qatar for Edvald Boasson Hagen.

  By that summer, I felt I was beginning to lead the team: at the dinner table, before and after the races, when Sean Yates was talking to us in the peloton on the radio. I wasn’t afraid to make it clear at the start of some events that I was just there for preparation, but I was ready to give something back as well by helping my teammates in those races. The point was that I had been 100 per cent committed throughout the season and had been communicative with the guys about that. That meant riding on the front when G was leading Bayern Rundfahrt – a five-day
stage race in Bavaria – and then getting the payback at the Dauphiné Libéré when I put my hand up and said, ‘This is a big race for me.’

  Another big change in our approach was that I had begun racing to get results all year round, rather than just putting everything into the Tour. Again, I had learned a lot from 2010. I remember being 7th overall with a week to go in the Giro d’Italia that year, and sitting up on the mountain stage to the Zoncolan, because I wanted to save myself for the Tour. I ended up thinking that perhaps I could have managed a top ten in the Giro; it was a reminder that there are races out there other than the big one in July. For the sake of just racing for five or six days flat out, when I was in a position to get something, rather than sitting up and thinking, ‘Yeah, well, you know what, I’m going to save it for the Tour,’ I might have won Paris–Nice that year, for example. So I thought, holding back for the Tour is not going to change a lot. You’ve still got to ride the races.

  In 2011 we never really backed off on any one race, apart from the Tour. The goal was always July; I wanted to peak for my best form in that month but I wasn’t going to sacrifice everything for it. The Brad Wiggins of 2010 might have tapered off, gone into races like the Dauphiné or Paris–Nice fresh to get the best possible result, but in terms of the bigger picture you don’t hold any consistent form if you drop off training several times in the year in order to hit one peak after another. It has to be one long build in which you race as hard as you can, you race to win with whatever you’ve got at the time. If it’s good enough for a result, that’s great.

  So I raced the Dauphiné quite tired. I’d done a five-hour ride the day before the prologue time trial, and after the prologue I added on another 80km on the bike. I was riding it at the end of a six-week block of quite intensive training, first at altitude in Tenerife, then racing the Bayern Rundfahrt in Germany, where I beat Fabian Cancellara in the time trial, which was a nice little bonus. That was one of the big differences with having Tim and Shane working on my training: what they did was keep me pushing on during those times when perhaps in the past I would have felt that I needed to back off.

  In spite of the fatigue I was able to produce the best win of my entire career up till then, taking the yellow jersey in the time trial at Grenoble, then holding on to the lead in the mountains. With three summit finishes before the end of the race – Les Gets, Collet d’Allevard and La Toussuire – I had to race intelligently to keep the lead I had: 1min11sec from Cadel Evans. This was where the new approach that Tim had devised came into its own: I couldn’t go with all the attacks on all the climbs. I had to race my own race in the yellow jersey, even if that meant coming off the back of the group at some points. It was a great success, thanks to some selfless support riding from Eddie Boasson Hagen and Rigoberto Urán in the mountains. The Dauphiné is a major event in the second tier of stage races, one rung down from the three big Tours; that made it the most prestigious road win of my career by some margin. It took a while to sink in, although strangely I didn’t feel it was a great performance.

  After the Dauphiné we moved straight on to the final three-week run in to the Tour: our next destination was a training camp at altitude in Sestriere. That meant there wasn’t a great celebration because we didn’t have time. It was a bit like winning the first Olympic gold medal when I was going for three in both Athens and Beijing: it was put in the drawer and forgotten about because I had to focus on the next one. It was hard to do, but it worked.

  By June of 2011, with that win behind me, finishing in the top ten of the Tour looked more than achievable; getting on the podium seemed to be within reach, but still with the idea of riding my own race. We had realised that the key thing was to avoid getting involved in the massive explosions at the foot of the climbs when the pure climbers would begin attacking. I had to treat every col as if it were a time trial, thinking of getting from A to B as fast as possible without blowing up. It was not the most attractive way to ride a race, it was not riding with panache, but that was the reality of it. We’d all like to be able to attack at the foot of a climb and ride Alberto Contador off our wheel but actually it’s about being sensible, riding intelligently.

  That was the biggest lesson I learned from the Dauphiné: there was no shame in dropping off the back even if you were wearing the yellow jersey, bearing in mind you could always come back to the leaders. Even when I was in yellow, the centre of attention with the cameras watching me, it didn’t faze me when I decided the pace was getting too much and I had to put our plan into action, and watching it succeed boosted my confidence as well. Miguel Indurain was criticised for riding in this way throughout his career, but looking back you realise how great he was on his best days on the Tour.

  This change in approach was largely due to the input we had from Tim Kerrison. I’d first met him at the Tour of Britain in 2009 when I had yet to sign for Team Sky but was being kept in the loop about what they were up to. There was a stage that started in Peebles, and Shane turned up with this lad in a Great Britain Swimming fleece. He and Dave had just poached him from the swimming team. Apparently Tim had been on his way to a job interview with English Cricket. He was going to take the job doing much the same thing with them as he ended up doing at Sky. Sky rang him on the way and he made a detour to the velodrome to see them. That’s how Shane tells it, anyway: before Tim went to this interview, he and Dave convinced him to come and work with them. They told him: we want to win the Tour, that is our goal, this is what we would like you to do, and they got him on board before he could go anywhere else. On paper, Tim’s job description was ‘performance analyst’, but first he had to find his way around bike racing.

  In 2010, Tim spent the year on the road, mainly with Matt Parker, just observing. He spent all his time in his and Matt’s camper van; I used to call it the Skip. Their nickname for it was Black Betty, but it was always in a bit of a state. You would go in there and you could imagine what Swampy’s little tent looked like in those trees. Tim didn’t open his mouth practically all year. Even now he’s not a big talker but back then you would never hear him say anything. He was there all the time observing, taking it all in, learning how cycling worked. A key part of that was getting on top of how to interpret the data from SRMs, the cranks that measure a cyclist’s power output. They have been an integral part of British Cycling’s training since Peter Keen founded the programme, because they are the best way to measure how hard a cyclist is working, and to control the workload in training. Tim wrote a lot of things down. He could have written a book by the end of that year.

  By the end of 2010 Tim had started asking all sorts of questions, simple things that would prove to be more and more important as we went along. It was stuff that an outsider to cycling might ask, such as: why don’t the riders warm down at the end of the stage? Just think about it, why don’t they warm down? He would be told, it’s not the done thing; the riders don’t want to look foolish. There was no scientific reason for not having a warm-down, it was just that no one did it. Another thought Tim had was that he felt that a team should not just be about the leader. In his view, it should be about getting all the guys to the same level as the leader they are supporting. He asked more basic questions: why is it only the team leader who gets to go on the training camps where we reconnoitre the mountain stages? Why does only the leader get set blocks of time for training while the rest of the team race themselves to death? Why don’t we get the eight other guys who will race in the Tour – or as many of them as we can – to ride together all year and race in the same races, go to the training camps, go and recon the mountains together and get to know each other as a football team would? That single point made me realise that during that first year at Sky we had all raced all over the place. The first time I raced with Geraint Thomas and Edvald Boasson Hagen and all those guys was when we got to the Tour. I’d hardly seen them all year.

  Tim was looking at a host of little things that traditionally no one had ever questioned. He was responsible for
us beginning to use altitude training camps, with one in Tenerife in May 2011, and another at Sestriere, in the Italian Alps, that June. And he would ask: why don’t teams have training camps in December? Well, we said, they normally have training camps but they’re more sort of drinking camps where everyone gets to know each other and you collect your bikes, that sort of thing. January’s the serious training camp. Why? Tim would ask. Why don’t we do that one in November, and have a serious one in December, because that’s quite an important month. Traditionally in professional cycling teams, everyone gets their training bike in January; Tim wanted to know why they couldn’t get it in October and then have a training bike that they use at home? And what about specific time-trial bikes, not just for the leader but for the whole team?