Tim went away, looked at the data he had gathered from me and the other riders in the 2010 Tour and began examining the numbers. He worked out what rate you need to be climbing at in the Tour de France. That calculation was done in terms of VAM – velocità ascensionale media – which translates into English as ‘average climbing speed’, or how quickly you gain height in a climb. It’s basically a measure of how fast you are going upwards as if you were in a lift, measured in metres per hour. He figured out what power output you needed to be averaging for a certain body weight if you were going to win the Tour. He wrote down all the demands of the event and we went from there. We’d not done any testing with reference to the Tour, so the first thing he did was get me in the lab. We started testing and slowly started to build a picture of what I was capable of doing and what I couldn’t do.
It took a while to build a trust between the three of us. As the season went on, as the training and racing and going to altitude took effect, we started to come away with better and better results. The progression was clear: 3rd place at Paris–Nice, a time-trial stage win at Bayern Rundfahrt, the overall title at the Dauphiné. We had set off into 2011 with the idea of aiming for a top-ten place in the Tour, but eventually we realised that I could be up there with the likes of Cadel Evans and Alexander Vinokourov who were going for the podium.
There was another aspect that made us more optimistic as the Tour drew closer in 2011. Various things were coming out on the anti-doping front. It emerged that the UCI had established an ‘index of suspicion’ – I rated five out of ten – which at least meant they were on the case. Most importantly, they had brought in a needle ban, forbidding the use of injections across the board, even for substances used for recovery such as sugars and vitamins. British Cycling have always had a no-needle policy, it’s been a mainstay of theirs; so it was something I grew up with as a bike rider.
In British cycling culture, at the word ‘needle’ or the sight of one, you go ‘Oh shit’, it’s a complete taboo. When I was a kid we used to play around in a car park where there were always needles on the floor from heroin addicts who used to go and shoot up – orange needles – so from a young age my mother and others would tell us, ‘Stay away from those needles, don’t go near them, don’t touch them.’ In France you can buy them over the counter; it’s a different culture. Here you buy vitamin C effervescent from Boots, rather than getting it through a syringe. I’ve never had an injection, apart from I’ve had my vaccinations, and on occasion I’ve been put on a drip, when I’ve come down with diarrhoea or something or have been severely dehydrated.
Shane kept saying to me that this was all working in our favour. As long as they kept going in that direction, deterring the drug-users, that would be great. The needle ban was fantastic, although from our point of view at the Dauphiné there was no sign of it being policed. It would have been great if they had started raiding teams to see that people were toeing the line. Medical people in our team were adamant that riders were continuing to use syringes for recovery on the Dauphiné and other races even though the practice was banned. Guys with a history of this sort of stuff weren’t going to say, ‘Oh, it’s against the law now, we’ll stop doing it.’ The hardcore will continue to push the boundaries, and until someone gets banned for breaking the syringe rule I don’t think it’s really going to deter them. But all those developments contribute towards a team like ours, which is determined to race clean, coming away with something big at the Tour de France.
As the Tour drew near, I had dropped to my lightest climbing weight ever: 69 kilos. I’d taken it gradually down to 71.5 by the start of the 2009 Tour. That was 6.5 kilos lighter than I’d been when I rode in 2007. It takes a good deal of hard work to get it down there, but it’s the most effective way of improving your performance on the road: one kilogramme less of body weight means you gain about 25sec for a given power output on a thirty-minute climb. It’s not just about the climbs; every time you accelerate out of a corner or up a little hill you are hefting that extra weight. Over a three-week race those efforts add up to a huge amount of extra work. On the track you build up a lot of upper-body muscle simply due to the work on your arms and shoulders from the standing starts you do as a pursuiter. On the road it’s not useful and it took a good while to work it off after I quit the track post-Beijing; one thing I did initially was have regular checks with Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist at British Cycling, to make sure I was staying healthy. It was the biggest single change I’d made.
I’d won the time trial at the Bayern Rundfahrt, taking the scalp of Fabian Cancellara, who was the man to beat at that time. I’d won the Dauphiné, the biggest road victory of my entire career, and then I’d taken first place in the British national road race championships on a super-tough course in the north-east, where Sky had been dominant. I had been massively optimistic for the Tour when I had faced the press at Kew Gardens a couple of days before the British Road Race Championships. I told them that I’d relaunched my career and said I was ready to go. It was true: I was in a better position for the Tour than I had ever been. And I raced well to win that national title. But after that trip to the north-east I got ill: diarrhoea for two days. As a result, I couldn’t travel to the Tour until right up to the last minute. I think I got in on the Wednesday night, and then we were straight out, doing team time-trial training on the course for the Sunday’s stage, and I felt dreadful. I was quite close to getting dropped. We did more team time-trial work on the Friday but I’d regained some of my strength by then.
Since the previous Sunday’s win, it had all been a mad rush. By the time the Tour started six days later, I actually felt as if my form was dwindling a little. It’s more in your head than anything physical. I remember getting to the Vendée for the start, and doing the press conference on the Thursday. Everyone around me was saying, ‘Oh, it’s great, things are fantastic, never been this good, it’s a great position we’re in.’ I, on the other hand, couldn’t sit there and say, ‘I’ve had stomach trouble the last couple of days, I don’t feel great on the bike.’ It was all a bit like 2010. I was still talking it up at that stage because I didn’t want to admit to myself, ‘You know what, I’m a little bit worried about this.’ So you put on a front for the press.
There is a lot of speculation about how I would have fared in that Tour, but I never felt great. I felt a bit weak, although I got through the first stage in decent shape. I was strong in the team time trial the day after and then I was poised in 6th overall. I was in a good position for the rest of the week but I never seemed to be in control of it. That was what was going through my head, but Shane was saying, ‘No, don’t worry about how you feel, what the numbers are suggesting is something else.’ I always wonder what would have happened once we hit those mountains: whether I would have been in the front or not.
On the stage to Châteauroux seven days in, I wasn’t well placed in the peloton as we began the final 50km into the finish, which can be a sign in itself. As always, everyone was trying to stay in the front. But I kept slipping to the back. I had no fight in me that day.
On the flat stages, you rely on your teammates to pull you forward; if the peloton is travelling at 50kph, you have to ride at 55–60kph to overtake the other riders; having someone in front of you to cut through the air means you save energy. With the help of the other guys in Sky, I’d get to the first few rows of the peloton, but then we’d drift back a bit, and I would think, ‘I can’t be bothered to go round the outside again and fight my way up to the front one more time.’ And before you knew it we’d be down the back. Eddie would be saying to me, ‘Come on, we need to move up.’ He would take me up back to the front, we’d drift a bit, then there we’d be at the back. Next time it was Juan Antonio Flecha; they were all trying to take me up to the front.
We’re moving up, moving up, moving up, we’re about halfway up the field and then before I know it I’m on the deck, the team doctor, Richard Freeman, is coming over to me, I’m clutching my shoul
der; I can feel it isn’t right. I can’t get off the floor for love nor money without it being agony. It’s game over.
But what I’m feeling is bizarre: the minute I hit the tarmac, I feel something that could almost be described as close to relief. Phew, I’m not going to have to see just how good or bad I am.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
BREAKTHROUGH
WHEN WE BOUGHT our new house at the end of 2010, one of the things I did early on was get myself a shed in the garden. It’s about five metres by five, made of wood, and it’s big enough to take a bike and a turbo trainer plus a couple of heaters and a sound system. I can still see the sweat stains on the carpet from the hours I spent in there in August 2011, sitting on the bike, spinning the turbo and dripping like a wet sponge. There was no alternative if I wanted to perform in the Tour of Spain, the Vuelta, which ran from mid-August into early September. And I had no option other than to ride the Vuelta if I wanted to have any chance at all of getting anywhere near the podium in the 2012 Tour de France.
From the minute I crashed out of the 2011 Tour de France on the road to Châteauroux I began thinking about what to do next. I was sitting in the airport waiting for the plane to take me home to Cath and the kids and I was already talking to Tim. It was an obvious question: what are you going to do? And we both knew the answer. Do the Vuelta. You’ve got to do the Vuelta now. The Tour of Spain is the third Grand Tour of the season, after Italy and France, and was moved to the end of the year a while back, to offer a chance for anyone who’d flopped or crashed out of the Tour to get their revenge. I’d never ridden it, so I was kind of looking forward to it, there was a bit of novelty there. I’d crashed out of the Tour, so I’d be on the comeback trail, which meant there would be no pressure. I could just go there and race. The Vuelta was vital in terms of preparation for 2012. The physical demands of racing a three-week Tour are unique, and I needed to get through at least one in 2011 to maintain the level I needed to be at.
I had about nine days off after the crash, then I started riding my bike again. Tim put a training programme together for me to get me up to the start. I knew I was still in pretty good shape, as I had been going into the Tour; it wasn’t just going to disappear overnight. It was the first real injury I’d had as a pro, the first since I broke my wrist in the winter of 2001. A lot of people – Dave, Shane – commented on how well I seemed to be dealing with it, but I just didn’t let it trouble me too much. I’d won the Dauphiné, I’d moved forward and felt I was starting to make progress. It was a good place to stop and take stock; there were no regrets about the Tour, because I had no idea how it would have gone.
I held my weight down, looked after myself, and went to the Vuelta with no real ambition other than to race as hard as I could and see what happened. That was where the shed came into its own. I had no time to go back to altitude after the Tour, and in Lancashire I didn’t have any mountains to train in, so a lot of the work was done on the turbo trainer, which is a tripod with a weighted roller on it. You slot your back wheel into the tripod, settle the back tyre on to the roller, then ramp up the resistance to the required level, and you pedal away. With a broken collarbone to heal, I couldn’t get out on the road initially, so I did a lot of the specific training in the shed.
The heat was a massive issue in the Vuelta a España; it was one of the weak areas I had identified after the 2010 Tour de France where I had been struggling through a very hot July as well as with the altitude. We had already begun thinking about it before the 2011 Tour. Tim said that you could acclimatise to heat in the same way as to altitude, but you needed to do specific work at high temperatures. So we devised training sessions in a heat chamber, which just happened to be my garden shed. We put some heaters in there and a humidifier, getting the temperature up to thirty-five or forty degrees, and I would sit on the turbo for anything up to two hours, just riding the bike. We aimed to do three or four sessions a week, and eventually put them on the end of training rides on the road. It was every bit as uncomfortable as I needed it to be, so I couldn’t do any sort of efforts or anything. Pedalling in there was quite enough. As well as being valuable acclimatisation, there was a mental side to it: this was something I was able to do with a broken collarbone because I could just sit on the turbo without having to put weight on my arms, and I could still feel as if I was doing something towards the Vuelta.
That Vuelta was funny. Although physically I was not in the shape of my life, I was still in a good place. What Shane and Tim were trying to emphasise to me was that being in that Vuelta was as much about 2012 as 2011. If I wasn’t in contention there was no question of throwing the towel in and climbing off. I needed those three weeks of racing and I went into it with the attitude, ‘Yeah, right, I’ll be the team leader, I’ll take the responsibility that comes with that, and let’s have a crack at it. Maybe I’ll end up in the top ten, who knows, let’s see what happens.’
We just took it day by day, and the first day was terrible. In the team time trial in Benidorm we finished 3rd to last, partly because Kurt-Asle Arvesen crashed early on, which disrupted us all, but ultimately because we didn’t go fast enough. However, we didn’t dwell on it, we just thought about the next day, when Chris Sutton won the stage for us. Four days in we went up the Sierra Nevada, 2,000m high and the first summit finish I’d done since the Dauphiné; I finished with a front group up there, so that gave us a bit of confidence. We could see that Chris Froome and I were perhaps not the best but better than most on that climb. Another five days in, the day before the individual time trial, we had a summit finish at La Covatilla, and that was where Chris and I ripped it up. There were just a handful of us left at the top, so we knew we were in the mix, and it went from there.
The day after that we had the time trial at Salamanca. And there, maybe, I made a bit of a mistake: I went out to try and kill the race but I went too deep. I led at the first check-point, then faded to 3rd behind Tony Martin and Froomie; I definitely didn’t ride it right, given we were racing at altitude in blistering heat. That put Chris in the race lead, but at the next summit finish two days later, a gruelling 19km climb to Estacion de Montaña Manzaneda, he slipped back after responding to a series of attacks, and I went with the leaders. That put me in the leader’s jersey, a position I had never expected to be in. From coming into the Vuelta feeling that if I could get a top ten that would be great, out of the blue I was leading the race and looking as if I was one of the best guys there. Suddenly I started to think in those terms: I can win this.
If it hadn’t been for the stage to the top of the Angliru in the last week, I’d have been close to winning that Vuelta. But that finish in Asturias is one of the hardest and steepest in bike racing. For nearly four miles the climbs are averaging a gradient of one-in-seven, there’s one section where it is close to one-in-four, and other bits are around one-in-five. I still finished 5th there but that’s where my weakness emerged. It was just too severe for where I was physically. Both Juan José Cobo of Spain and Froomie were stronger than me, although Chris did his best to keep me up there for as long as he could on the climb. That settled it, really. From that point on, the race became about keeping a place on the podium, which I managed, running out 3rd overall behind Cobo and Froomie, although Chris won the mountaintop finish at Peña Cabarga to close to just 13sec behind Cobo.
One of the questions that came out of that race was over Sky’s choice of leader. Both myself and Chris had been in the mix for the win. He had led after that strong time trial, I’d taken over, and then he had been stronger on the summit finishes at the end. The basic problem was that we were all going into new territory, both Chris and me, and the guys managing the team on the road. I even asked the team at one point whether I should ride for Chris. And they said I shouldn’t, because they were not confident Chris could last the distance. Up to that point Froomie had never done anything like this before, so there was no reason to believe he could sustain it. Even Chris was surprised: he’d be
en so inconsistent with his performances before then, thanks to the bilharzia parasite that had affected his health. So I guess I was the safer bet for the team. It was a difficult call.
Merely getting on the podium was success in itself, although it was a huge disappointment at the time to me. Shane put me straight: ‘No, you’d have took 3rd coming into this race, don’t talk stupid.’ But I’d started to believe I could win the Vuelta, to dream of that win. The point is that you don’t think at the time, ‘I’ve got the jersey, but you know what, I haven’t really got the condition, I haven’t done the work coming into this.’ You just race for the moment. When we got to Madrid there was a bit of both disappointment that I’d lost the Vuelta, and also a feeling that looking where I’d come from, 3rd wasn’t too bad. It was from that point on I thought: ‘Well, if I get the preparation right next year, and I don’t have a broken collarbone for six weeks before it, maybe I can win the Tour.’
After the Vuelta I felt like a completely different rider. I’d got my first podium finish in a Grand Tour – a very big step in a mountainous race, after breaking a collarbone and being handicapped in what training I could manage beforehand. I’d proved that I was capable of racing as well as I had in 2009. That had been a big question mark up to that point: was I ever going to get back to that level? What’s more, I’d done it in a different race, and one that was extremely tough. In some ways I had always had in the back of my mind the possibility that my 4th place in 2009 might have been a fluke, or perhaps I was wondering more, how on earth did I get there? But I’d done it again in a race I had not even expected to ride until six weeks before, so obviously my confidence was sky high.
Part of that was down to the way I’d been climbing compared to the other riders who were in the mix. Even with what physical ability I had at the Vuelta, I had finished 5th on the Angliru, which I would never have given myself half a chance of doing a year before. We hadn’t trained for that kind of climb at all. We hadn’t done any torque work; we hadn’t looked at power output at a lower cadence than I usually ride. I think for the last three kilometres of that climb I averaged 56rpm, rather than the usual 90 or 100, and we hadn’t trained for that. All the training we’d been doing was for 6 or 7 per cent gradients, which is what you hit in the Tour, not for close to 25 per cent. In the Tour the climbs are longer, but they aren’t as severe.
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 6
