Bradley Wiggins: My Time

by Bradley Wiggins

  Dave’s great strength is that he can walk into any environment, talk the back legs off a donkey, but still keep your attention. Dave can go into a meeting with all the chief executives at Sky, with James Murdoch and the others, and talk about financial forecasts and where they see their team in ten years’ time. He can stand up in a suit talking about what kind of financial backing this or that is going to take, but a week later he could be in his Bermuda shorts and Great Britain T-shirt in a mechanics workshop discussing what tyres they’re going to use next week.

  He can give a presentation to five hundred people in a room with the chief executives of some of the biggest companies in the country and keep them enthralled for an hour about Steve Peters’s chimp and computer – which is the model Steve uses when he’s sorting our minds out – but he can also sit there and give the most motivational talk imaginable to eight of us at Sky before we go out to race a Pyrenean stage in the Tour de France. And finally, when it is all done, he’s first to the bar with us, buying us all a drink and getting us drunk at the right time. That’s where the big brother thing – in the nicest sense of the words – comes in. He’s not the sort of manager that everyone is scared of within the team or who you never see. He has got that ability to adapt to whatever environment he’s in, to give the right kind of talk or guidance.

  Apart from Dave and Pete’s contributions, it’s hard for me to put my finger on what has made British Cycling so successful, because it’s been part of my life for so long that it’s difficult to see it from an objective viewpoint. What I have seen over the years is how the European pro teams do it. There’s just no comparison. The difference is just incredible. One of the major things that British Cycling, or World Class as it was, has always had is a central base: the velodrome. Pro teams don’t have one, although Garmin have tried to build something like that in Girona. Gradually, over the years, all the British Cycling team riders and staff started moving into the Manchester area so the velodrome became the daily training venue, whether you were meeting to go out on the road, putting the hours in on the track, going in to see a physio, or working out in the gyms. I think that makes a huge difference. It’s a bit like a football team training at the same facility every day, whereas traditionally in cycling people had been spread out, and you only met when you turned up at one race or another. It’s still like that in the pro scene.

  I remember that when I was riding for the French teams from 2003 to 2007, they felt very old school in contrast to the Great Britain team. They were supposed to be the best in the sport, but GB were ahead of them. At a pro team, no one contacted you when you were at home; you were just handed your race programme and told: ‘Turn up here on such and such day.’ At the time there was no science behind anything in a French pro team: no sports scientists involved; no nutritionist. There was no attention to detail with the equipment and aerodynamics. It was just very much a question of ‘Here is your bike, now crack on and race’, even to the point where no one asked what length cranks you wanted on your road bike when they were sorting it out in January. You were given a bike and you just had to get on with it. I think a lot of the teams are very different now, but at the time it was a massive contrast.

  The British Olympic team has snowballed since Jason Queally won that gold in Sydney; every year British Cycling have improved a bit on all fronts: a bit better planning; a bit more learning from mistakes; and there has been a constant ongoing attempt to find the fastest equipment. If I was asked to name one thing that has made them so successful, I’d say they may have great management, great athletes and are incredibly good at planning, but the biggest asset they have always had is common sense.

  During the week before the Olympics, Dave rang me from the track team’s holding camp in Newport and said, ‘Look, they want you to ring the bell at the Olympic opening ceremony. It’s massive, you know you can’t say no to it.’ I would, he told me, be on every television channel around the world. It was kept very, very quiet: no one else knew other than Dave and Shane. It was important that doing it wouldn’t disrupt our preparation for the road race, which was the morning after, so I said to Dave, ‘So long as you are happy for me to do it from a performance point of view, you organise it and I’ll do it.’

  Even now, looking back, I haven’t quite figured out how big it was or the importance of it. That whole period was very surreal in some ways. It was one high after another; winning that time trial in Chartres, the next day the Champs-Elysées, drinking champagne in the Ritz, private-jetting home back to Lancashire, out on the bike the next morning overwhelmed by the amount of press at the end of the lane and the cars following me, then down to Surrey in a helicopter. We had a taste of how big it all was when we went out training as a team before the Olympic road race, with people who were just going about their daily business saying, ‘Bloody hell, there go Great Britain.’ The support was massive in the villages around the team hotel, and on Box Hill there were people everywhere looking for a glimpse of us and all the others. You could feel the buzz.

  That Friday evening we drove across to east London; just being in the Olympic village was incredible. I love that atmosphere, the feeling you get from being in the village with all the other athletes; I wasn’t going to get it at this Games, as we were staying in Surrey, so this was my only chance to experience it. The minute I got inside, there were people coming up to me, athletes asking to have their photo taken with me. Dave came with me; I’d arranged to meet Chris Hoy to have dinner in there, because I hadn’t seen him for a while. I hugged Chris and we had our meal in the Olympic village together, with all kinds of people looking at us. Chris was carrying the flag that night for Great Britain in the opening ceremony parade, and after he went off to join the team, Dave and I walked over to the stadium. It was a matter of taking everything in my stride; ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to go to the opening ceremony …’

  So I stood backstage, wearing the yellow jersey that they gave me, with these things going over my ears and into my earholes; I was wired up in the way that bands are on arena tours, so they can hear the backing tracks. It felt rather like wearing earplugs. Someone said, ‘OK, Bradley, on in two seconds.’ They opened the door: ‘Go.’ I walked to the front of the stage, stopped at the cross marked on the floor; waved to the crowd. All I saw was a wall of flashing lights because everyone was taking photos and I couldn’t hear anything except the type of sound you have when you have earplugs in when you are going to sleep; all I could register was the sound of my breathing in my ears in the middle of this wall of flash lights: ‘All right Bradley, turn around, go up to the bell, stand at the bell, and wait for your command to ring it.’ I rang the bell, walked down the steps and out of the stadium.

  Someone threw a jacket over me and I was whisked straight out; within two minutes I was in a private car with a police escort all round me, and we were going through the streets of London, uniformed motorcyclists stopping traffic all the way. I was on stage at two minutes past nine, and by half past I was back in the hotel at Hyde Park Corner with the Great Britain boys. As soon as I walked into the hotel, Rod – who is team manager for GB road teams as well as working at Sky – said to me, ‘Right, we’ve got a meeting in ten minutes,’ so in no time I was changed into team kit to talk through the next day and work out how we were going to do everything we could to win the Olympic road race for Cav. Then I had to go and shave my legs, pin my numbers on and go through all the pre-race routine for the next morning.

  I simply couldn’t dwell on anything. In the space of five days I’d gone from standing up talking to the whole of the Champs-Elysées to opening the Olympic Games. Stuff that would have seemed completely bizarre to me, that you can’t even dream about, was becoming the norm and it was all happening in a blur. It was literally a matter of nipping in and out of the stadium to be the opener at the Greatest Show on Earth and driving back with an escort that made me feel as if I was the president of the United States. As you do. Right after that we were doing the road race, wi
th the whole country expecting us to produce a gold medal in the first event of the Games. The minute that was done, my thoughts had to turn to the time trial, so among all that you forget about what you’ve just done in the stadium.

  It’s very hard to understand the significance of it all. Maybe in twenty years’ time I’ll look back and tell my grandchildren, ‘Oh yeah, the Olympic Games in London, I was there, I did the thing with the bell.’ It was fantastic to be asked. It was definitely special to play a part in some way. But I had no idea what public opinion was about what I’d done at the Tour. I hadn’t been anywhere in public other than the Co-op in the village to get a pint of milk. I hadn’t stood on a station platform, or been through an airport, or gone anywhere in the world outside the Tour, my home and the team hotel. I’d been helicoptered from my house down to Surrey, straight into the Foxhills resort where there were police on the gates so that we were completely shut away – which was a huge relief after the Tour – and I’d only been out of there on the bike with the lads. Apart from seeing the media at the GB hotel for a few hours, I’d been in a bubble.

  That might explain what happened when I was waiting to go out into the stadium to ring the bell. When we got there, the volunteer at the entrance said, ‘It’s quite good in that stadium, you know.’

  So I asked, ‘I’m not going to get booed or something, am I?’

  ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘No, you won’t get booed.’

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  THE ROLLERCOASTER

  SITTING IN THE minibus as we were driven to the start of the Olympic road race on The Mall, I could see Mark Cavendish’s leg twitching. It’s a little habit he has, almost a tic. Cav is quite a fidgety guy; he’s always bouncing around, he has to be with people and hates rooming alone. I think it’s a sprinter’s thing. When he’s sitting down, he’s always twitching his legs, rocking his leg on the heel of his foot as if he’s pumping up a camp bed with a footpump. He does it constantly: when we are on the bus in the morning, when he’s eating; this time, I had a feeling I knew what was in his mind.

  He looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘I’m shitting myself.’

  ‘You’ll be all right, mate, you’ll be fine. We’ll take this thing on.’

  In the days before, as we had pottered through the Surrey lanes on little training rides and hung around the Foxhills golf resort, Cav had seemed like a man with the weight of the nation on his shoulders. He was paying particular attention to every little detail: looking at his bike, making sure his overshoes were right, checking that his shoes were exactly what he wanted. It’s not often that you see a rider as pumped for a single event as he was.

  During the Tour, Cav had been extremely understanding about the situation we were in; that is why I wanted to ride for him at the Olympics until I had nothing left in my legs. All year, until we got to July, I had been thinking, ‘Ah, the Olympic road race, I’m just going to do what I have to do and get out.’ That was what Tony Martin did on the day; he stopped after about 100km to save his strength. That was what had been in my mind, but, after the way Mark had helped me out in the Tour, there was no way I could do that to him, I so desperately wanted him to win at the Olympics and he was only doing the one event. The very least I owed him was to give it everything. It wouldn’t affect the time trial; I realised that at Chartres I had put in one of the best rides I’ve ever done against the watch, and I had done it after three weeks of hard bike racing, so there was no risk that the road race was going to tire me out for my other goal of the summer. When I told the media I thought that with three days to recover after the road race, it would be a doddle compared to the time trials in the Tour, I meant it.

  The course started in the Mall and headed out through south-west London into Surrey for the nine laps of the circuit around Box Hill. Great Britain had to get on the case early. The four of us – David Millar, Froomie, Ian Stannard and I – started riding at the front of the peloton just 20km into the race. We didn’t want to try and keep the whole thing together at that stage; the plan was to keep the peloton within reach of any lead groups that formed around the Box Hill circuits, so that the race would regroup coming back into London and then Cav could put his sprint to good use.

  It was a long day: I’d been working at the head of the bunch for about 220km when I finally peeled off as we came back through Knightsbridge, with 4 or 5 km to go. I think I spent six of the nine laps on the front up Box Hill. We had experimented with the intensity that we needed to be riding at on the climb on one of the days when we were training there. First up, I tried it at 400 watts with Cav right behind me. That power had been too hard for him, so I expected to back off a little on the day. But it always feels a bit harder when you test yourself on a climb in training than it does when you are actually competing; as a result Cav was actually going far better in the race. The first lap, I went up it at 440 watts; the other guys were attacking up it after that so the next time I was at 450; again they were attacking over the top of that, but I was just holding them at 100m each time. A couple of times it got a bit lively up there so I was pushing it up to 460.

  Box Hill itself takes only about five minutes in total, and we were just below the power outputs we had been sustaining at La Planche des Belles Filles for twenty minutes so it wasn’t hard for me to do. The problem was not just the climb, but the rest of the circuit, where there was no let-up. On the first few laps up the big climb, Cav was saying to me that it was too hard and we needed to slow down; it wasn’t really possible to back off that much as we needed to keep the break within reach but actually, as the race went on in the last laps, he felt better. Eventually, he could have gone with the last attacks on the hill, and got with the front group. He wishes now he had; by the last time up the hill, a little peloton of thirty-three had come together at the front. It was one of those things that you simply can’t predict; we worked our utmost, but the group never came back. In a sense, we’d done our job; if someone had said to us in the morning that at the top of Box Hill for the last time, with 47km to go, we would have a group 51secs ahead of us, we’d have taken that. But it just didn’t work out over those final miles. It needed another team or two to come to the front and work, but none of them wanted to help Cav get to the finish. Ironically, if a team with a sprinter had put some graft in, they’d have beaten him on The Mall, as he finished with a slow puncture and wasn’t able to sprint properly.

  As the gold medal was presented to Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan – he of the blood-doping positive from 2007 – we sat in the tent in the pits for an hour after the finish with our skinsuits unzipped. We were too exhausted to get changed, and just too depressed. No one said a word. It was as if we’d all lost the race, all five of us, or as if we’d lost a man during war. I was empty and exhausted but television wanted us the minute we went across the line; I was gutted we hadn’t won. I was also a bit angry because one of the other riders had really pissed me off; he said as we were riding in towards the finish, ‘So what happened to your legs, couldn’t bring the group back?’ It felt as if some of our rivals were really pleased to see us fail rather than doing some work themselves, so that left us all a bit upset.

  On the other hand, I think the press really did build Cav up a bit too much, and I don’t think he’d fully appreciated how hard it is to win an Olympic road race with a small team. All the headlines that night were along the lines of, ‘Cav fails to win Britain’s first gold medal of the Olympic Games; the team let the gap get too big’. I actually saw one story that read, ‘Even Bradley Wiggins was struggling to hold the pace at the end’ with a picture of me being dropped at 5km to go, asking if our ‘failure’ might be due to fatigue from the Tour de France. You read that and you think, ‘Are you serious, did you not see me riding on the front for over two hundred kilometres?’

  The misunderstanding happened, I think, because from the outside the last two weeks of the Tour had looked pretty straightforward. There had been no massive dramas or nail-biti
ng suspense once I got the yellow jersey – although obviously it’s never like that when you are on the inside – and having watched that for fourteen days, most of the press just assumed that when it came to the Olympic road race Great Britain would carry on where Sky left off. The problem was that a one-day race on a hilly course with a five-man team is a completely different matter to a three-week Tour with nine men. There were some writers who tried to point out that we were taking on a huge challenge that might be beyond us, but they were a minority.

  After the race, I was going back to the team hotel and Cav was heading straight off to do some criteriums in Belgium and France; he hugged me, and I said, ‘I’ll see you later.’ He wouldn’t let go, and it felt as if he was crying on my shoulder because of what I’d done for him. So we went our separate ways and he sent me a lovely text the next day, a long, long message saying that what I did meant more to him than winning, gentleman isn’t enough and so on. He said he didn’t want to say it at the time because it would have been over the top; he sent me another one before the time trial saying, ‘Go and bash them all tomorrow’, and I didn’t see him again until the Tour of Britain.

  That night I was completely out of it, totally on my knees, and the day after I was still absolutely knackered. But we had a good routine at Foxhills: recovering, sleeping, out on the bikes. The next day went easily, and the third day I started feeling really good again. The chances were, I needed that ride in the road race to open me up, having stopped after the Tour for a few days. I remember going through all the numbers with Tim, and the figures said the Olympic road race had been one of my hardest days of the year.