Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

Sam Collins, now a doctor in Dorset, was Wiggins’s main opponent on the West London racing circuit. “The first race I won was the first one he ever did, we were both about 12. We raced together pretty much every weekend from 1992. He was a sprinter, he’d zip off my wheel, he’d come first, I’d be second. He had natural zip.”

  Wiggins himself has spoken about his love of the sport’s history, and that was something that struck his manager at the Great Britain road race team, John Herety. “He had a wealth of knowledge of road racing. He knew all about the riders with a fan’s passion. He knew all about my career – as a kid it seemed like he had watched videos of races over and over where others would watch Thomas the Tank Engine. He even knew what shoes I’d been wearing.”

  Bannister and Herety recall two episodes, a few years apart, which had hints of what Wiggins would show on the Tour this year. Bannister remembers a club ride for coffee and cake in Marlow, after which the route went up Winter Hill, a major challenge. “You can imagine it, everyone went tearing off up the hill and fell to bits before the top, but Brad was cool enough to go up at his own pace, keeping comfortable. I thought: ‘That’s a bit special, he knows just what he’s doing.’”

  Herety harks back to a stage race in Mallorca, when Wiggins was 20. “There was a mountaintop stage finish and we thought he’d never get up it. He said he would be OK, so the team rode for him in the same way Team Sky have ridden at the Tour; he limited his losses and won.” Clearly, what Wiggins has done this July is not new. [See chapter 7.]

  All who came across Wiggins say he was quiet and shy except in relaxed circumstances in company where he felt confident. “When you get one drink down him he’s hilarious,” says Rob Hayles, a former Olympic track cyclist.

  “Brad is close to his family, and that’s why he comes across as elusive,” says Shane Sutton, coach of the Great Britain Olympic team who has been close to Wiggins for the last 10 years. “The hardest thing in making a programme for him is putting in family time.” Wiggins and his wife, Catherine, have two children, Ben and Isabella. Cycling runs in the family; Catherine organises races near their Lancashire home and her father works for British Cycling.

  Born in Belgium, Wiggins grew up in Kilburn, north London, and has always projected a sense of urban cool off the bike, complemented by his fluent French. He is a self-confessed mod, owns a collection of classic scooters and his principal commercial endorsement is the Fred Perry range of clothing he has helped design.

  His trademark sideburns were this week reshaped by a cartoonist at the French sports paper L’Equipe into a map of France and children practising at London’s Herne Hill velodrome, where Wiggins cut his teeth as junior, have been spotted wearing replica facial hair. He is fast becoming the breakout star of Britain’s summer of sport.

  A sense of style has always been important to him. Simon Jones, who coached Wiggins to his first Olympic gold, recalls a meeting at the end of 2002, called to discuss Wiggins’s flop at the Commonwealth Games. The 22-year-old was called in front of Jones and the other senior British coaches – Dave Brailsford, Chris Boardman and Peter Keen – to discuss his options. “He came dressed up for a wedding,” says Jones. “I asked why, he said: “This is important.” In the meeting, we were all in our tracksuits, he was calling the shots. It was a pivotal moment as he then took on Chris as his mentor, but as for the meeting, he power-dressed us out of it.”

  Jones left the British programme in 2007 and Wiggins was then trained by Matt Parker, who oversaw his transition from Olympic gold medallist in Beijing in 2008 to Tour de France contender less than a year later. “It felt like it was a conscious decision,” says Parker. “He had done everything he could do to be successful on the track and he made the switch [to road] in his head.”

  To be so switched on in 2009 was quite remarkable, says Parker. “He had just come off a two- or three-year Olympic campaign, but he didn’t miss a beat that next year. Before, he had continually switched from road to track and back again, but now he didn’t have to keep making the transition. He had never been far off it on the road. He had incredible power, and in 2009 he stripped down in terms of weight.”

  Parker underlines that to achieve this over nine months took epic commitment. “Not many would sign up for that, to lose 8kg, mainly muscle mass.” Wiggins was lucky to find a professional team with openings for him, and joined his fellow British rider David Millar at Garmin. “Dedicated, driven, self-obsessed and ultimately sensible,” was Millar’s description of him, although the Scot wrote in his autobiography: “We had absolutely no idea he would become a Grand Tour contender.”

  Looking back, Jones now wonders if he and Wiggins could have achieved more. “Perhaps I was too limited but I never saw him winning the Tour de France. As kids we put that event way up there, with godlike characters.” His current coach, Shane Sutton, believes Wiggins didn’t fulfil his true potential early in his career. “One of the things he said to me is that he never really trained and he regretted it. We’ve never seen the real Brad in all those six Olympic medals. Think of the records that could have fallen … but he didn’t apply himself as well as he could.”

  “He could be one of the best athletes there’s ever been,” says Parker. “To be a multiple Olympic champion, world champion at Madison, Tour de France winner, it’s a hard record to beat.” For Hayles, it is simple: “When he puts his mind to something he is unstoppable.”

  In January 2013, while Wiggins was building towards the defence of his Tour title and a tilt at the Giro d’Italia, the Lance Armstrong saga reached another turning point when the disgraced former seven-times Tour winner – by now banned for life after the USADA inquiry – was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. Armstrong admitted doping, but showed the bare minimum of contrition and looked to be working towards agendas of his own rather than trying to help rebuild the sport he had damaged so spectacularly. The Oprah interview at least ended the years of denial, but the story wasn’t going to end there. This piece was written in response to the second and final episode of the interview.

  The Lance Armstrong Confection: a peerless display of shaping narratives

  19 January 2013

  There was an elephant in the Four Seasons hotel room throughout the two hours in which Lance Armstrong’s eyes swivelled downwards, upwards and sideways in the second episode of his ordeal under the Oprah spotlight. The elephant was this: what narrative would cycling’s greatest liar and cheat produce? How would the process of concession – look at the lack of revelation on night one and substitute this for “confession” – fit into the story he would want us to believe? For those who may wonder why Armstrong took the risk of appearing on Winfrey’s show, the tale he wished to tell may hold the key.

  The elephant broke cover a few minutes before the end of the second episode. If part one of the Lance and Oprah show could loosely be termed What and When (certainly not How), part two was How It Felt. The ground was prepared with the subtlety of an emoting rotovator: how Armstrong felt when telling his son Luke he was a liar and a cheat (not good – Armstrong looked close to tears); how Luke had had to defend his father’s name at school (at which point the stomach did leap, because how could it not?); how Lance’s mom, Linda, took it (she was a wreck, but it took a call from her partner to alert her son).

  How about the trauma of losing $75m in sponsorship in a day, and perhaps struggling to make more in future? That lost a little impact if you wondered how much of his ill-gotten gains from the doping years remain in his bank account, and cursed that Oprah was charitable enough not to ask him. He is in therapy, he confirmed, going through “a dark time”. Having established How It Felt, Oprah teed up the big moment by asking: “Will you rise again?” Unintentional it may have been, but the vision it conjured up, momentarily, was that of Voldemort emerging out of the cauldron in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

  The elephant sprinted out into the foyer of the Four Seasons when Oprah changed her questioning tone. From soccer mom reproving a child who had
mislaid his lunchbox she, very briefly, became Torquemada dealing with a mentally deficient suspect. “Did-this-help-you-become-a-better-human-being?” she intoned, the enunciation of every syllable at half-speed making it clear that this was THE CLIMAX. “Without a doubt,” Armstrong said, twice, and then the narrative emerged.

  “This has happened twice in my life. When I was diagnosed [with cancer] I was a better human being. I lost my way. This is the second time. I can’t lose my way again. I’m in no position to make promises … the biggest challenge for the rest of my life is not to slip up again.” He added a few seconds later: “It’s an epic challenge.”

  In other words, the story Armstrong wants the world to read when he tells the tale of his doping is the second coming of Big Tex the comeback hero. In this narrative, the dope scandal is the equivalent of a second cancer. His way back into hearts and minds after the fall, from the hell of losing his seven Tour de France titles, the terrible whirlwind that has engulfed him and his family, will be a second great comeback. Utterly nauseating it may be, profoundly offensive to anyone who has had cancer or knows anyone who has, but that is it.

  “It’s an epic story,” breathed Winfrey. In the sense that it features the hero’s descent into the underworld, perhaps the Armstrong story could be termed an epic. But any purgatory the disgraced cyclist is living in is of his own making. The distancing mechanisms he used with Winfrey are intended to create the opposite impression: that Armstrong resembles Icarus, who aimed too high thanks to his soaring ambition, and was felled by superior forces outside his control.

  Defrauding sponsors of millions, perpetrating the biggest robbery in sporting history, crushing minnows such as Christophe Bassons and Filippo Simeoni, bullying and intimidating witnesses, more than a decade of lies, some under oath, became a “slip-up”, a euphemism comparable to the “flaws” in his character he had revealed the previous evening. He rammed home the point: “I had it, it got too big, things got too crazy.” If he had cheated his way to seven Tours, the blame could be placed on “it” or perhaps the “things”.

  Armstrong’s wider agenda became clear as well. There was an obvious bid for a lower sanction – or at least an attempt to lodge in the public mind that he is being unfairly treated – when he referred to his life ban as a “death sentence” and said he was not saying it was unfair, an outstanding piece of doublespeak. There were few moments in the entire pantomime when he appeared to be genuine, and one was when he said he would “love the opportunity to compete” and would like to be running the Chicago Marathon at the age of 50.

  The first volume of Armstrong’s memoirs, It’s Not About the Bike, tugged heartstrings worldwide and became a must-read for cancer sufferers and their families. The follow-up, Every Second Counts, was more self-serving. The plotline for the third volume laid out in those few minutes under Winfrey’s prompting can be summed up as: How I Returned From The Doping Hell That Wasn’t My Fault. The title would need to express the utter selfishness of the man and his utter detachment from the reality of what he did in his doping years. One quote he gave Winfrey when asked about the prospect of competing again might work: “I think I deserve it.” As a summary of why cheats dope, lie and bully, that would suffice.

  7. GREAT BRITAIN – ATLANTA TO ATHENS

  The other main strand running through my cycling work at the Guardian is the progress of the Great Britain team from also-rans to world domination. This is where it all began…

  Official opening of Manchester velodrome

  8 October 1994

  Britain’s Chris Boardman tops the bill at today’s inaugural meeting at the £9 million velodrome in Manchester. Although the Wirral rider has a virus he will take on his GAN team-mate Francis Moreau in a re-run of the world pursuit final in Palermo where Boardman won gold.

  Boardman, who wore the yellow jersey in this year’s Tour de France, has contracted the three other major crowd-pullers in the meeting through his company Beyond Level Four Ltd. It set up his match against Moreau and the other likely focus of interest, a pursuit match between the women’s world No 1 Marion Clignet of France and Britain’s Commonwealth Games gold medallist Yvonne McGregor.

  Peter Woodworth, of Beyond Level Four, said: “We have paid for race fees, transfers and accommodation. The organisers of the meeting had no money, so someone had to step in.” In addition, Boardman’s company has had to get the French riders to fit the meeting around their other engagements.

  The other major attraction today is the unveiling of a bust of Reg Harris, Britain’s five-times world sprint champion, who died last year.

  What is telling here is that Boardman’s company had to finance the meeting as there was no money in British Cycling to do it, and no backers willing to put in the few thousand pounds it took to get those four big names in. But the opening of the velodrome was the key to Britain’s eventual success, as we shall see. The bust of Reg Harris was commissioned by a memorial fund set up when Harris died by then Cycling Weekly editor Andy Sutcliffe. As we shall see, without the velodrome there would be no Chris Hoy, no Victoria Pendleton and no Bradley Wiggins.

  Data bank funds Boardman

  11 February 1995

  While all eyes will be on the 4,000 metres head-to-head between Chris Boardman and Switzerland’s Tony Rominger at the Manchester velodrome tonight, the sports scientist who has played a key role in the Briton’s rise will as always be present in the background.

  Peter Keen, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, has been Boardman’s coach since January 1987, when the Wirral racer, now the leader of the French team GAN, was a 17-year-old stripling with a taste for riding fast in local time-trials. At that time Keen’s own career in cycle racing effectively came to an end.

  Since then Boardman has regularly made the trek to Sussex to be put on a test rig where his power output, pulse rate and oxygen uptake are monitored, giving Keen data on his rider’s reaction to every nuance of racing, training and diet.

  Their joint haul has included a string of British championships on road and track, the Olympic pursuit gold in Barcelona in 1992, the world one-hour distance record in 1993 and last year’s successful attack on the Tour de France, which netted Boardman Britain’s first yellow jersey since 1962.

  For all their success, Keen describes his work with Boardman and the other riders in his computer files – Britain’s top woman road cyclist Marie Purvis, top mountain biker Caroline Alexander and national cyclo-cross champion Barrie Clarke – as essentially a sideline to his academic career.

  “It’s a symbiotic relationship. I gain intellectually, they gain in terms of their career. My path is an academic one and coaching is part of it. You can’t stand in front of a class and teach if you haven’t seen an athlete for 30 years.” He agreed that Boardman was to some extent a test bed for his academic work: the research they put in together during Boardman’s build-up to the hour record in 1993 enabled him to form mathematical models of track events such as today’s pursuit match.

  “You get a better picture of how fast various people can go and what training, what equipment, what position on the bike gives an increase in performance. You can discover what is restricting performance.” Paradoxically Keen maintains that his most interesting discovery with Boardman has been “not to predict the limits of an athlete.

  “I learned that some people can develop beyond what you think is possible. You can’t attempt to predict what people can achieve and what they can’t achieve.” Boardman’s rise from regular winner of local time-trials to a man expected to take on Miguel Indurain is living proof of that.

  For a British time-triallist to take the hour record was inconceivable to continentals convinced that a deep foundation in road riding was necessary. Keen simply worked on the figures. The next target is the Tour de France, the ultimate test for rider and scientist.

  Together they have won over the management at GAN, who come from the most traditional of professional cycling backgrounds. Last year Boardman pr
ofessed shock at their casual attitude to sports science norms such as monitoring mineral levels by taking blood tests.

  His results in 1994 mean that is no longer the case. “Sport in general is traditional, dogmatic,” said Keen. “I aim to question things, examine them, test them and, if they don’t work, I reject them.”

  He offers as an example the long-established idea that athletes should base their diet around high carbohydrate and extremely low fat intake. “It’s stock advice and I was doing it up to a year ago but, if you do that, within a few hours you’re hungry again because the body burns up the carbohydrate so fast. By carefully increasing Chris’s fat intake, he became less hungry and more fresh.”

  Before Keen the thought of a cyclist training on a treadmill to simulate the mountains of the Tour de France would have been dismissed as fantasy. But this winter Boardman has been pedalling for up to 45 minutes on a device which replicates, in pedalling speed and effort, the notorious Alpe d’Huez.

  Not surprisingly, Keen has never made it into the British cycling establishment. “I resigned twice as a national sports coach by the age of 28,” he chuckled. “There was no funding and I wasn’t prepared to put in the effort for £2,000. It will never change unless people like me make a stand.”

  Nowadays it seems that behind every great cyclist, a sports scientist stands in the shadows. Rominger is umbilically linked to Doctor Ferrari of Ferrara University in Italy, as are a whole host of other top riders.

  Keen is unwilling to be compared to the eminence grise of cycling: “I have a view of knowledge as an academic would see it. I suspect the problem with professionals like Ferrari is that they see information as having financial value, a way of earning a living.” That Corinthian approach will be tested to the full this summer when Boardman takes on Rominger and Indurain in the Tour de France.