It was a really confusing episode. I remember thinking at the finish, ‘What the hell was all that about?’ My initial reaction was that I felt as if I’d been flicked, although I changed my mind when I stopped and thought about it. It was a little bit like having a battle plan going into a war, all being in a trench together, firing your guns at the enemy, and then one of your troops going off and doing his own thing somewhere else in another trench, completely unprompted, unplanned, and contrary to your original plan.
The point was that we had the yellow jersey. In normal circumstances after Richie did his stint at the end, Froomie should have taken the reins as last man, which he did when Nibali made his first attack. What had taken me by surprise was that he’d come back and attacked over the top of me; at that point I was in the yellow jersey and the hierarchy in the team – the GC order in other words – dictates that you have to put your aspirations aside to defend the jersey. That’s how it works.
From that point on it felt as if we were defending both positions, and if it ever came down to it, if we got exposed, if we were attacked left, right and centre, it would be every man for himself. I never liked being in that position. I felt I was as much under attack from my own teammate as from anybody else.
It comes down to a decision for the directeurs sportifs; they have to step in and say, ‘This is how it is.’ I remember at the Vuelta the year before when it became apparent that Chris was stronger than me and that I didn’t have it, well before the Angliru, after the time trial where he beat me, I said at the time, ‘It’s clear we should concentrate on Froomie now, he was better than me in the time trial.’ The answer was, ‘No, no, no. We don’t have faith in him, we don’t know what he’s going to do. We don’t know if he can last the three weeks, so we stay with you as leader.’ I said, ‘Well, as long as you’re sure of that.’ And that was how it stayed.
The Vuelta was a hard call, because whatever happened the management could be sure that I wasn’t going to get a lot worse by the end of the race, while they simply didn’t know what Froomie was going to achieve, although on that day he had performed better than me. I actually think we lost the Vuelta the year before through those decisions; we ended up finishing 2nd and 3rd, where in actual fact we should have won it, not necessarily with me, but maybe with Froomie. The day after we said all that, I took the jersey on a climb; Froomie lost 30secs and in the end he only lost the Vuelta by 13secs.
After La Toussuire I wanted to come home. I thought, ‘Fuck this, I’m not doing another two weeks of this, not knowing what to expect.’ But it wasn’t the only instance of something getting blown out of proportion because of the hothouse atmosphere of the Tour; the debate over the insinuations on Twitter had showed that. I had a chat with Cav about it. I remember he said I was still in the jersey, still in the same position I had been in in the morning and I shouldn’t be worried about it. I spoke to Shane and Sean, but it was Dave who told me I was being ridiculous.
At the time I was deadly serious: ‘That’s it, I’m going.’ I don’t like uncertainty. I don’t like to wonder: are we doing it for him? What’s the decision here? It needs to be one tactic or the other, not this matter of, ‘Oh well, you’re free to do it and see what happens.’ And I had said that we could ride for Froomie if that was the case, just let me know either way. I said we needed to make up our minds. That was what I was most angry about: are we chasing 1st and 2nd here or are we trying just to win the Tour at the expense of everything else? I felt at times we were getting a bit greedy; we had done that at the Vuelta the previous year and it had ended up costing us the race.
In pretty much everything I do, I like to have a plan, a tactic. It’s like when I start training: what’s the plan going to be? It’s very structured. Dave is always talking about clarity. We use all these overhead displays and projectors in the team bus in the morning, everyone has their role, so we leave the bus clear about what we’re doing. Everyone likes clarity; Dave says that a lot. We implement this battle plan: Edvald’s done the whole Madeleine, got dropped; Christian’s done his bit and got dropped; Mick was 6th overall, he’s done the start of the climb and got dropped; Richie’s the same; we’re down to 5km to go, Cadel’s been left behind. I’m leading by two minutes – and all of a sudden my own teammate’s attacking: he’s attacking not necessarily to get ahead of me but to put time into Nibali so he can move into 2nd. That shouldn’t be at the detriment of the job we’re trying to do for me. I didn’t like the fact that we had been going for one thing, I had been carrying the plan out in front of the entire world, when all of a sudden something else happened that I wasn’t expecting.
If Nibali attacks, you’re expecting that, that’s not a surprise; Nibali and the rest are your rivals, so you know it’s going to happen. It’s a team sport and we’re going into war as a team, so when someone does something unexpected it takes you aback. You think, ‘I thought we’d all agreed that we were doing this.’ That morning Froomie had said in the bus that he wanted to attack at the finish; he wanted more time on Cadel because he didn’t think he would take it out of him in the time trials. I said, ‘All right, but the priority is the yellow jersey that we have, and I don’t think you should do that today.’ He was confident that he could do it, which was fair enough; Dave had a word with him, Sean had a word as well, saying, ‘Don’t go off on one here, you’re going well, but the priority is Brad and the yellow jersey.’ What they didn’t want was for him to attack, drag Nibali away and all of a sudden we were in a position where the yellow jersey was threatened. He said he was fine with that; then he did it anyway.
I don’t think he had the idea in his head that he was going to flick me, far from it. I think he got carried away in the heat of the moment. He was moving into 2nd overall in the Tour de France; he was probably the best climber in the race. But I was the stronger time triallist; I took time out of him in all the time trials, and I ended up winning the Tour by three and a half minutes. I’d put my head on the block from the start of the season, answering all the questions, saying I wanted to win the Tour de France. It was there; I was doing it. And we had set off with the plan in Liège: ‘Brad’s a dead cert for this race, he’s proven it, you guys are all here to support him, but if Brad crashes out, Froomie you’re there as back-up.’ Everyone agreed to that. Everyone had signed up to that. When I’m in 1st position with two minutes’ lead, with the last time trial to come, where I would perhaps further my lead, you can’t suddenly change it. The Tour was about the team winning, and I was in the position to win at that time.
One thing is certain: Chris is a better climber than me, that’s for sure. He’s a more natural climber than I am and he’s lighter than me, but on both those mountaintop finishes, I was leading the race by two minutes, so why risk all that? It just seemed strange. There’s no doubt that if we all wanted to support Chris he could potentially win the Tour, but at that time the simple question was: why jeopardise the race lead? That was what I couldn’t get my head round.
The problem was that, from that moment on, through the rest of the Tour, I didn’t quite know what to expect from Chris when it got into the heat of battle. When you’re in that situation you need cool heads all around you. I felt that at any moment he might go off on a tangent to what we had planned earlier in the day; I became very wary.
Something similar did happen on the last mountaintop finish a week later, at Peyragudes in the Pyrenees. We’d gone over the Col de Peyresourde, the last big mountain pass of the Tour, which meant we’d done it: we’d won the race.
Chris said: ‘I want to attack,’ and we began talking on the descent.
‘What for?’
‘I want to attack.’
‘What for? I’ve won the Tour, you don’t need to.’
‘I want to put more time into Nibali.’
‘What for?’ I asked yet again.
‘Security for the time trial.’
‘You’re going to pump him.’
‘Yeah, but you never know, y
ou never know.’
We got to the last climb, and I said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t attack, you don’t need to.’
We went down; then the road rears up and you’re into the last 3km, so I went on to the front and just rode at a good strong tempo. That got rid of Van Den Broeck and most of the others, then Froomie came over the top of me and started going, then waiting for me, telling me to go and I was saying, ‘I’m not coming, I’m staying here, I’m riding this, we don’t need to attack.’ Then he kept going ahead, waiting, going again, gesturing at me to come on. It left me a bit confused.
Being on the Tour is a bit like being in the Big Brother house; you forget after a while that the cameras are watching you. For those three and a half weeks, everything you do when the live television coverage is on is analysed; everything you say before and after the stage is examined. Everyone who follows the race is interpreting whatever you say in a good way or a bad way.
After both episodes, because I was the one who had the yellow jersey and had to go into the mixed zone and face the microphones, it came down to me to answer all the questions at the finish: what was Chris Froome doing today? Why didn’t you let him go for the stage because you’re leading the Tour by two minutes? Why did you need to hold him back? Is he stronger than you? It felt as if Chris was doing his own thing but I had to deal with it because as the race leader I was the one who was up for scrutiny in front of the press and television every day.
The questions I was asking myself about Froomie, and the questions I was being asked each day after the stage finished, certainly didn’t make the Tour enjoyable. On top of the constant pressure to remain focused at every minute of every day, those external things made it much more stressful than it could have been or should have been. It was only at the very end that the race became something to treasure, and going into Paris with my teammates made that last weekend incredibly enjoyable. But looking back at the rest of the race, I didn’t really enjoy a lot of it. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
LIFE IN YELLOW
EVERY DAY WHEN you lead the Tour you are given several maillots jaunes. There’s a presentation one, which you receive on the podium in the evening, which is long-sleeved, with a zip up the back. The next morning you are issued a bag containing the yellow kit for the race; one short-sleeved, one long-sleeved, one rain jacket and one gilet. Every day from La Planche des Belles Filles onwards, I folded up the ones from the podium and put them into my suitcase; the race jerseys might end up a bit shredded and dirty and would get washed; at the end of the race I signed a lot of them and gave them to the mechanics and soigneurs who’d helped me win them. I took one off at the finish at Luchon and gave it to a little British kid I saw. It still had the numbers on it; I said, ‘Sorry about the smell, but if you still want it …’ and threw it over to him.
All the gilets and so on got put in a black bin bag and are in a Sky team truck somewhere. I gave most of the others away: the only ones I’ve kept are the short-sleeved yellow jersey I wore on my first day in yellow, with the numbers on – I put it in a plastic bag and it’s hanging in my spare bedroom – the yellow jersey from Paris with the number on and the presentation one from Paris. Those are the ones that mean the most.
It felt a bit bizarre the first day I was presented with the yellow jersey because it is something that you are so used to watching on the television; that famous ASO music, the tune they always use for the podium. And the podium itself is like no other, a huge, huge thing. You go up there; Daniel Mangeas – the speaker who announces all the riders – is presenting you. Bernard Hinault zips up the jersey as you pull it on, which is strange – shaking the hand of one of the all-time greats, a five-time winner of the Tour, a rider who’s done the Giro-Tour double and won the World’s and all those Classics.
I’ve seen Bernard a lot this year, what with winning Paris–Nice and the Dauphiné which are organised by ASO, the same company that runs the Tour. Each time you are on the podium with him he says something different. I always felt he had a bit of respect for me, because I won Paris–Nice and the Dauphiné and I value those races. He’d say things like, ‘You are in good company’, ‘Not far now’, and so on. The funniest memory I have of Bernard comes from the Dauphiné this year, before one of the stage starts, when he was feeling my tyres and moaning about how hard the ones we use today are, how hard they are pumped up: ‘Too much air,’ he was saying, ‘too much.’ Bernard Thévenet – who won the Tour twice before Hinault began his reign in 1978 – was there and he was saying, ‘Ah, shut up, Bernard, you’re always moaning about something.’ Then someone asked for a photo of the three of us and said, ‘If you win this tomorrow, there’s not many people who’ve won this race twice – how many times have you won it, Bernard?’ Hinault said something like three, then asked the other Bernard, who’d won it twice maybe, and we were discussing how many we’d won. As a fan and a cycling historian I know all about who they are, what they’ve achieved, so it was quite a nice moment.
On the road, being in yellow meant that overnight the race took on a hierarchy, a structure. As the team with the jersey, suddenly Sky had the right to ride on the front of the race, which meant that a lot of the fighting within the peloton would fall by the wayside; immediately, the racing became more controlled. We began to get respect in the peloton. Other riders began coming up to us, saying things like, ‘Well done, good, this is it.’ Overnight I had become the patron of the bunch, the more so because I had started the race as the favourite. There was no sense that I was just keeping the maillot jaune warm for someone else to take it later on in the race. I was the person everyone expected to be in that position. From that point onwards I had an open road.
That left us all in a completely different world compared to the chaos of the first week. Everything had changed. Sky were being shown respect on run-ins to bunch sprints; everyone was giving us that extra little bit of space on the road. If I stopped for a piss the whole race would seem to stop as well, because every rider knows there is no way anyone is going to attack when the maillot jaune has stopped; that’s one of the unwritten rules of the peloton. If I went back to the car because I wanted to talk to Sean, everyone would think I’d got a mechanical, and again, no one would attack. In chaotic phases of the race, at the start of a stage – the bit few fans or media tend to see because it’s rarely on live television – when the break was trying to get established, there would be riders coming to us and saying, ‘OK, shut the race down now, that’s enough attacking.’ Holding the yellow jersey from nearly two weeks out from the finish in Paris was something that no cyclist had managed since Bernard Hinault in 1981. It would be a mammoth task and it would throw up situations that I had hardly expected.
On the stages that took the Tour from the Alps towards the Pyrenees, at Sky we moved into a daily routine that would look familiar to anyone who watches the big Tours. Firstly, a break would establish itself early in the stage, and Sean, Mick and I would decide how much of a margin it should be given. Sometimes there would be a long, intense period of attacking as one team or another tried to get riders in the move of the day, to get their sponsors time on live television and perhaps have a crack at the stage win; sometimes the move would go in the twinkling of an eye. Once the break had gone there would be a brief interlude while they pulled away, at which point I would usually stop for a piss; most of the peloton would stop with me, and then our workhorses – Bernie, Christian, Edvald – would go back to the front. They put in the daily chore of pulling the field along to keep the break at a reasonable distance, until the point when one of the sprinters’ teams – usually Lotto on behalf of André Greipel – would begin setting the pace into the finish.
For those who wonder when they see me or another team leader sitting in the line behind their teammates, it’s easier there, but not that easy. It’s harder than sitting fifty or sixty back in the bunch, because you get more shelter when you are hidden deep in the peloton, b
ut what Tim says is that you can’t account for the mental stress of being back there, and the mental strain adds to the physical demands. What you can’t calculate is the stress of leading a bike race. I remember that when I led the Dauphiné for just five days in 2011 I was mentally exhausted at the end because it was a new thing for me and it was a massive deal. In 2012 leading races like Paris–Nice, Romandie and the Dauphiné felt like second nature, but the Tour was different. I’m glad I came to it with all those days leading smaller events behind me; everything at the Tour is on such a huge scale that if I’d led it for two weeks in 2011 I don’t think I would have coped.
David Millar won the stage out of the Alps to Annonay, and the next day, coming into Cap d’Agde, I did my best to lead out Eddie for what could have been a stage win in the bunch sprint. I didn’t have to do it, indeed it’s not normal for the yellow jersey to do that kind of job, but I felt I owed it to him on a finish where he might have won.
The biggest drama in the Pyrenees came on what had looked to be a relatively quiet stage into the little town of Foix, on what is now infamous as ‘the day of the tacks’, when someone – we still don’t know who – tried to sabotage the race. There was one major climb on that stage, the Mur de Péguère, a steep, narrow one, ranked first category, but I remember feeling really good going up there; looking around me I could see that Van Den Broeck was struggling along with a few others. I figured that no one was feeling that great, because if anyone had been good there, they would have attacked. Close to the top, I went to the front of the group because it was getting quite narrow among all the spectators, and Sean told us to get bottles from the helpers the team had sent to wait at the top, because the cars were a fair way behind. I saw Rod standing by the road with a bottle, and swung over to the right-hand side to grab it; the other Sky riders did the same, and by all accounts most of the tacks had been dropped on the left, so we all missed them. We went over the top and thought, ‘It’s downhill all the way to the finish so that’s the stage done now.’
Bradley Wiggins: My Time Page 18
