Because I was sitting in second or third wheel all the way up the climb, I never turned round. I try never to look behind on a climb, so that then all the other riders get to see is my backside. Sometimes you’re sitting there thinking, ‘This is getting tough’, but I’ve been told I don’t really show it when I’m on the rivet, and I guess that’s a good trait to have. You don’t need to assess the others: if you’re feeling it then they’re feeling it. It wasn’t until I looked at the photos afterwards that I could see just how much the other guys were grimacing behind. I had a decent lead in the overall standings, 1min43sec on Cadel, and I knew the race was over once we got down into Morzine, because the day after should be pretty straightforward; that meant it was just a case of counting down the kilometres. On that kind of climb the pain is similar to that in a time trial, but with the difference that you have five hours in your legs when you hit the climb so there’s a bit more fatigue in there. It’s not easy, it’s not painless, but with the team in control it’s pretty businesslike.
As I’ve often said, I know my cycling history. I’ve always been into it, since I was a teenager watching videos of the Tour de France rather than doing my homework. So the night I won the Dauphiné, I asked the journalists in the press conference a question: who was the last winner of Paris–Nice and Dauphiné in the same year. A lad from l’Equipe called Alex said it was Eddy Merckx. I smiled straight away; it was Eddy, and before him Jacques Anquetil – another five-time Tour winner – and they both went on to win the Tour in the same year. I thought, the three of us now, it’s a nice little club to be in.
There is so much focus on the Tour. It’s the only race that the media and public really pay attention to, but I have a soft spot for those other great events that tend to be forgotten a little bit when the Tour comes round. What I love about races like the Dauphiné is their tradition: the list of winners that goes back years and years and includes a host of great champions from the past. Apart from me, the only British riders to have won it are Brian Robinson and Robert Millar; they are names you want to be up there with. No one had ever won Romandie, Paris–Nice and Dauphiné in the same year; that was a little record of mine that made me hugely proud. Whatever happened at the Tour, I would always have those three stage-race wins.
Rather than thinking about the bigger picture, I tended to live for the here and now when I was in the races, which is one reason why I did so well in them, I think. But after the Dauphiné one part of the bigger picture became clear: we had an incredible team for the Tour and I was going to be the favourite. Everyone was saying it. I knew it. I would have to deal with it.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
THE WINGMEN
ONE THING THAT makes the Dauphiné difficult to read is the fact that there are a lot of guys in the field fighting for their Tour de France places, particularly among the French teams who leave it late to name their line-ups. Sky didn’t do it that way. There wasn’t that much to be decided about the team that they chose for the Tour. The core group that had trained and raced with me all year selected itself, and as a star in his own right Cav was always going to be added to that list.
There was, however, what seemed to be quite a heated debate among the selection panel – Shane, Dave, Rod, Sean Yates and Carsten – about whether or not the ninth rider should be Bernhard Eisel, Cav’s right-hand man. It was tough on them and I wouldn’t like to be in the position of having to do what they had to do. I stayed out of it. I felt we both deserved back-up. Cav had raced his heart out to finish the Giro, he had nearly won the points jersey, he had won three stages. I was the favourite for the Tour but I wasn’t going to start making demands about who went in the team. I respected Cav, he’d respected me; I thought the best thing was just to let the selection panel decide who went.
The riders who missed out were Danny Pate, Juan Antonio Flecha and Rigoberto Urán but the issue confronting the selection panel went back to the question that had been asked when Cav was signed: could we race for both green and yellow? As the season went on it became more and more clear that I was the favourite for the Tour. It was not a done deal, but it was highly likely that if we got it right I would win overall. That left the selectors with an obvious dilemma. Bringing Cav to the Tour raised the question of who they should bring to back him up, and in the end they opted for Bernie over Danny Pate from the climbing group. But that was fine with me, Bernie and I go back ten years and he was magnificent for me throughout the Tour.
I made my intentions clear with Shane and Tim as to who I wanted around me, my key figures: there were seven of them, the core group of riders who had been with me all season.
The thirty-one-year-old MICK ROGERS was to be the team captain on the road. The tall and studious-looking Australian is a triple world time trial champion, and he has always been a bit of an idol of mine. In 1997, when we were kids, we raced the Junior World’s together in South Africa; Mick won the points race, where I came 4th, and he was 2nd in the pursuit. Later on in that year he was 2nd in the World’s junior time trial in San Sebastián, so as far back as that, I was thinking, ‘Wow, this guy’s good.’ Mick turned pro at Mapei; there was a lot of talk of him turning out to be Australia’s first Tour de France winner, and he kept doing quite well in the Tour in his early years – not brilliantly, but always in the top forty. We were teammates in 2008 at T-Mobile but he was ill with glandular fever that year and then he spent two years at HTC alongside Cav, after which I was keen for him to join me at Sky. I said to Shane in the winter of 2010 that I wanted him by my side in the Tour because he’s such a calming figure. He’s a great team captain, very vocal, and in the 2012 Tour he called the shots on the road. He was really involved in what we did each day, always speaking up in the bus when Sean discussed strategies for the day. He’s also the guy who judged the pace up the climbs, getting us to ride at what he felt was the right intensity, and he would calm us down when it began kicking off a bit and the others started attacking.
RICHIE PORTE was the other Aussie in the group. I didn’t know him very well until he came to the team in 2011, although we’d raced the Giro together in 2010, when he came 7th, led the race for a couple of days and won the young rider’s jersey. From day one this year when we were in the Algarve together, we just hit it off as we got to know each other better. We roomed together on the training camps in Tenerife, had the same programme all year; by the end, it was apparent that he believed I could win the Tour and he was fully behind what I wanted to do. There was no hint that he might want his own opportunity. He’s just a lovely guy who I get on very well with on and off the bike. He’s also a huge talent. I think he had a bit of a tough time at Saxo Bank after riding that great Giro as a first-year professional. He had a bit of a poor season the year after, played a team role for Alberto Contador when he won the Giro in 2011 – although Alberto was disqualified much later after his doping ban – and I think his confidence took a bit of a knock around that time. Richie is a phenomenal climber, and a great time triallist as well; he’s been invaluable this year. At the Dauphiné he did a lot of damage on the climbs, especially on the Joux Plane at the Morzine stage. And he was good enough to win in his own right: for example, coming 1st at Algarve.
KOSTA SIUTSOU has the same devoted attitude: when he came to Sky he said to Dave, ‘I just want to ride for the team – whatever you want me to do I’ll do.’ He’s from Byelorussia, via Italy, and when we first met when I was at HighRoad in 2008, he didn’t speak a word of English; he’s improved to pidgin now. He’s a very old-school Eastern European, likes his long five- or six-hour rides; when we were training in December in Majorca he started coming down to the gym with me at 6 a.m. and he was doing it the Russian way – squats, weights and everything. He’s an incredible bike rider: he’s won a stage in the Giro, and finished top ten there; he’s a former under-23 world champion, and he came 16th in the Tour in 2008. A lot of team riders are super-talented athletes in their own right, but don’t want the pressure of leadersh
ip; he strikes me as being like that. He’s happy in the service of others as long as it brings him security and a job.
CHRISTIAN KNEES is another with a great record; he finished in the top twenty in the Tour in 2009, which is quite a result for a big lad like him. He’s a double German champion, another lovely guy, and he was phenomenal in that Tour. People never really noticed how much work he did in the first week. For the first five days he was constantly riding in the wind at the front of the race. He’d be on the side of the train leading the bunch, whichever team was riding, with me in his wheel keeping out of the wind. We realised that after five days of that we simply had to give him a rest, because he was not going to make it through the Tour if he kept doing that. But we got to the first hilly stages and he was doing it again there. Christian was the man of the match in the Tour.
Another contender for that title, though, is BERNHARD EISEL. Bernie is just a joy to be around. The last couple of years he’s been pigeonholed a bit into his role as head of the lead-out train, Cav’s right-hand man. He is the guy who will ride early on to make sure the sprint happens for Cav. When Cav gets dropped, Bernie drops back. They go on holidays together. They’re the best of friends; wherever Cav goes, Bernie will go with him.
However, Bernie is a hugely talented bike rider, a very fast sprinter and one-day Classic star, who won Gent–Wevelgem in 2010. He’s another one who came out of Mapei’s youth squad, like Mick, and we roomed together all through 2003 when I joined Française des Jeux as a new professional; he was in his third year. We did the Giro together that year, he came close to winning a couple of stages, and he was already up there in the Classics alongside riders like Andrea Tafi, Johan Museeuw and Peter van Petegem, which was quite something for a twenty-two-year-old kid. He lost his way for a few years with FDJ then he went to T-Mobile, found a role there, and the last few years at Columbia and HTC he’s always been under Cav’s wing.
Once we got into the 2012 Tour, as well as doing the job for Cav in the final kilometres of the sprint stages, Bernie seemed to have a presence when he was around that could make me feel special, like a million dollars. I could see why Cav loves him so much. It’s hard to put your finger on it but, for example, on day one, we were riding to sign on in Liège and there were hordes of people trying to get there. He was behind me, but came past and said, ‘I’ll ride in front of you to make sure that you don’t get knocked off your bike.’ It’s little things like that. He’s just a very caring person. Throughout the three weeks of the Tour, he was always in the same good spirits every morning, always smiling, always joking, never down about anything. When we had the jersey he was constantly riding on the front. He seemed to be relishing it. He always knew what pace to ride, never panicked in any situation. Just before he was going to get dropped he’d swing over and it would look as if that was his job done, but two minutes later he’d be back up the front with nine bottles. In the first five or six days of the Tour when it was crazy at the front, he knew exactly where to ride to keep me out of trouble. He lacks confidence in himself and his own ability, which is surprising because from the outside you think he is an incredibly confident guy. I did get the impression that he was a bit insecure about his selection. I think it was Dave said that to me, that Bernie was questioning whether he was good enough to be there, whether he was just there because he’s Cav’s wingman, that sort of thing. It took a while for us to boost him a bit.
Although twenty-five-year-old Norwegian EDVALD BOASSON HAGEN wasn’t racing with the climbing group all year, he was a rider we simply had to have with us in the Tour. I’ve been saying for years that Eddie is one of the most talented young bike riders of his generation if not the most talented. The only potential downside is that he can do everything and there is a risk that he may never end up specialising in one thing. He is capable of winning Classics, prologues and shortish time trials; he can get wins in bunch sprints like he did at the 2011 Tour in Lisieux and he can land stages from a break as he did in the last week of that Tour. On top of all that he can climb with the best of them in the mountains. We all saw what he did on the Joux Plane in the Dauphiné; in the Tour he rode the whole of the Col de la Madeleine, on the biggest day in the Alps. That’s one of the toughest cols in the race and he is supposed to be a road sprinter. He is just phenomenal and he is an absolute gentleman off the bike. He may well be too nice at times but he is a lovely, lovely guy and invaluable.
The team had learned their lesson since my broken collarbone in the Tour the previous year, so CHRIS FROOME, the climber from Kenya, was there as back-up after his 2nd place in the Vuelta; he would step up only in an extreme case, basically if I crashed out. Chris had had such a rapid rise; he had started the Vuelta of 2011 without a contract for the following year because Sky had been ready to let him go. He had been very erratic before that Vuelta; we would feel he might be physically capable of something but then he would bomb. At times, it’s been frustrating for the people around him. His performances were up and down due to the bilharzia parasite; he got on top of that in 2011 and became more consistent. Chris has got some funny stories about situations he’s been in out in Kenya – people knocking him on the head and nicking his bike and so on – and he came to road cycling late so he’s raw in his talent and can seem quite naive at times, or less knowledgeable about the history and culture of the sport. I remember at the end of the Vuelta in 2011 we were coming into Madrid for the finishing circuits and he came up to me and asked: ‘Will Cobo attack?’ You think, ‘Are you serious? Why would he attack? He’s got the leader’s jersey.’ But that lack of experience is also his strength, because he has absolutely no fear; he’s not intimidated by anyone.
As the race went on we became joint leaders, because there was never a position where he had to ride hard for the team; when he did ride, it was more to distance people who were threatening him overall, such as Vincenzo Nibali. I wasn’t surprised how well he went at the Tour; I knew he was capable of it.
The group had been handpicked over a couple of years to get to the point we were at in 2012. The riders we selected as climbers at the start of Sky hadn’t lived up to expectations so there was a rethink after that first Tour in 2010. They started off by bringing in Mick Rogers, who’d had a great year, and Rigoberto Urán, and slowly developed it – they were interested in Richie that year as well but couldn’t get him out of Saxo Bank. It’s like forming a soccer team. If someone takes over Barcelona it takes time to buy in the players you need; Manchester City is the classic case of that. It’s a continual process of building. You have to be constantly looking forward rather than just sticking with the group you’ve got; by adding to it, you keep everyone on their toes. There have been cases where you see a team re-sign the Tour squad for two years, but people become not exactly lazy, but set in their position. If you keep adding to the team there’s no complacency, it goes forward all the time, and people are always wary of their place. And that goes for me as well.
I can’t say enough about the quality of what we called the climbing group within Sky; it consisted of guys who on their day were all potentially capable of challenging for a place on the podium in the Tour de France. Mick’s finished top ten in the Tour and top ten in the Giro, Richie’s run top ten in the Giro, Kosta as well, while Froomie had that 2nd place in the Vuelta, and maybe could have won it. All of these riders were superbly talented, which helps explain why we were so dominant in the mountains. If you put all those guys together, get most of them training and racing as a group all year, and get them committed to one cause, you end up with a dominant climbing group. It was similar with CSC when they had Frank and Andy Schleck, Carlos Sastre and Ivan Basso. A group like that feeds off each other; you create momentum, you become your own little unit. We all clicked and the core of the group had raced and trained together all year as well, which I think made a huge difference.
The climbing group’s performance on the Joux Plane in the Dauphiné had highlighted the team’s strength, but what it didn’t revea
l was the depth of the commitment they showed for the whole nine months, right up to the end of the Tour, and beyond, in some cases. Riders like Mick, Kosta, Christian and Richie in particular, as well as Froomie, had totally bought in to what I was trying to do, to win the Tour in 2012. On top of their work in the races, they accepted that trying to win the Tour meant they had to sacrifice practically their entire season as a result, just to do that for me. They would need to put the same training in as me, make those same efforts emptying the tank in Tenerife and Majorca, all to be as good as they could be just to help me. That was a massive commitment from those guys and it’s something I will never forget.
It’s hard to know what to say when other people show that measure of dedication to your cause. It’s kind of humbling to think that they all did that for me. I know they get paid to do it, but you cannot forget that those guys are capable of winning races themselves. I’ll be forever grateful for what they did and I don’t think I could articulate that in an email. Just saying something like, ‘Hey, guys, thanks for last month, it was fantastic’ wouldn’t do them justice, so it might take a while before I’m able to express my gratitude completely. It must be a little bit like when someone saves your life. I’m sure that’s not the best analogy but I do wonder how you ever repay those people for what they did. Saying thank you isn’t enough; that’s the way I feel about it. I guess the fact they were willing to do it is a mark of how my leadership skills have come on and I suppose in a nice way it must come down to the fact that they like me. That’s a wonderful thing to feel.
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 11
