Bradley Wiggins: My Time (12 page)

The critical thing is that I couldn’t have done any of this without all the background training going back to November. Everything I did from then onwards was building on that foundation, with the workload continually getting longer and more intense; that meant when I got to Tenerife in late May I was able to train so hard that I could not only finish the efforts, but I didn’t dig myself into such a hole that I needed a week off when I got back. That is part of the
philosophy
that swimmers train to: daily grind. It’s bloody hard work.

After one of those rides we do in Tenerife you feel incredible satisfaction: that’s another day in the bank. To take one day in the second camp as an example, I was doing the last effort, we’d done five and a half hours, the average temperature had been thirty-five degrees all day. We got to the last climb, we’d done 4,000m of climbing, we had one more twenty-five-minute effort to go, and three of the guys were wasted – Froomie, Richie Porte and Christian Knees – they couldn’t do the last effort so they rode up the climb to get home. Me, Mick Rogers and Kosta Siutsou did the last effort; those are the moments when you realise, if I can do this one now, that’s the Tour winner. We used to get days like that on the track where that’s the difference: whether you can do that effort or not.

The last stint we did was twenty-five minutes, starting at 1,500m altitude and going to 2,200. We would ride one minute at 550 watts, basically prologue power, which you can sustain for a few minutes, then four minutes at threshold torque – 50rpm at threshold, maybe 400–440 watts depending on the altitude, which is bloody hard to do because riding in the big ring, say a 53x16 gear, at threshold on a climb is like going up a steep hill in your car with your foot to the floor in fourth – then down to the little ring to start again and do 550 watts for one minute. So five sets of five minutes, alternating normal cadence and high power for a minute, low cadence and threshold power for four. We’d already done five and a half hours, one hour at threshold, so the last five
minutes
is horrible; you’re at 2,000m, you can hardly breathe but you realise that in the Tour you will be glad you’ve put yourself through this.

It’s hard to put into layman’s terms how you feel. It’s a nice way of being wasted. When you are fit and your form is great those efforts are hard in a very sweet way. Sometimes you haven’t got the form and you are suffering, but if you are hurting when the form’s good, it can be an incredible feeling. When you are getting dropped in a race it’s horrible, a lot of people who ride
sportives
and so on would be able to relate to that. But when you are off the front as I was in Paris–Nice that March or leading a time trial, it’s a different kind of pain altogether. At the top end it’s a very sweet pain. It’s mixed with the endorphins you get from the effort; it’s what makes you able to push even harder. I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum.

I quite like the boredom when we’re on camp in Tenerife. It’s quite peaceful, and when you’re training that hard it’s nice to come back and not have any distraction. There’s no sitting on the Internet and we haven’t got Sky television in the room so you find yourself doing the most basic things: reading a book or watching DVDs. We tend to watch a lot of films and that’s about it really. You’re living like a monk. It’s not even somewhere you could bring the family as there is nothing for them to do. You feel you are doing something that no one else is doing. It’s the most extreme thing and I like that too, the sacrifice of it. Training to win the Tour takes a lot of sacrifice in all our lives – by the other team members, but most of all by my family. You get to a point in your career – I had it with
the
track – where you tell yourself you are no longer going to compromise. I didn’t want to look back in ten years’ time and wonder what I might have achieved. I don’t want to have any regrets.

CHAPTER 8

THE MIDAS TOUCH

AT THE TOUR
of Romandie I couldn’t help feeling that something special might be on its way. I was growing in confidence. At times, what was happening seemed almost too good to be true. There were days on those roads on the west side of Switzerland in late April when everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. Sometimes I felt as if I could do no wrong. It was a feeling I had never had before. I had sensed it at times on the track maybe, at an Olympic Games or a World’s, but had never come anywhere near it when competing on the road, not even in 2009. I was starting to feel almost untouchable.

Romandie began well for us when Geraint Thomas used his pursuit skills to win the prologue; again I was a victim of the weather. It started raining ten minutes before I got to the start line, and I finished 11th. Without that, I’d have been very close to G, so from that moment on I knew I was in bloody good shape. I actually suspected it from the days after
I’d
come back from altitude training. The first stage was when eyebrows were raised as I managed something I hadn’t achieved since I was an amateur: a bunch sprint win.

That day into La Chaux-de-Fonds was a tough stage. We went up some decent climbs in the finale and it whittled the group down quite a bit. There weren’t many bodies left at the end. I had a little bit of swagger about me, a feeling that, ‘Yeah, I’m here to win the race’, so I put the boys on the front early on to ride tempo behind the break. When a team does that it’s always a statement of intent – ‘We’re going to take responsibility and try to win this.’ Ultimately, it was our
directeur sportif
Sean Yates’s decision to take control, but it was also an example of how I was beginning to ride like a leader: I put my hand up, saying, ‘I want to win it, I will take the responsibility.’ In doing that, there’s a thought process you have to go through. You think, ‘Right, the break’s up the road, BMC aren’t going to ride because Cadel Evans has said he’s not here to win the race, there are no other big sprinters here, so we’re going to have to take it on, and we’re going to have to ride.’ You think: ‘I’m quite happy with that, let’s do it.’

We lost Cav over the climbs, so he wasn’t there to go for the sprint finish. After we got over the penultimate little hill with about 20km to go, I punctured; there were a few attacks while I was getting a wheel change, which meant that as well as the adrenaline you get after a chase through the support cars, I had the hump a little bit when I got back to the front. As soon as we came back, we hit another climb, then another descent; I lost all my teammates, which left me alone with
about
15km to go, so I ended up closing gaps on my own. That all made it a really tough finale. The peloton lined up for the stage finish with about 3km to go; I was about fourth wheel behind a little train from Rabobank, sitting there expecting to be swamped by whichever team was going to lead out the sprint. We got a little closer in; nothing had happened. Liquigas went over the top with about a kilometre and a half to go, so I swerved right and got on to their train. Everyone was just pinned to the wheels because it had been such a hard ride through the stage; we got into the final kilometre, no one came past, so I thought, ‘Sod it, I’m going.’ I put my foot down at 500m from the line, just went as hard as I could, and no one came round. That was that: it was a good ten years since I’d won a race in that way. It didn’t happen entirely by chance: I’d led out Rigoberto Urán in one stage of the Tour of Catalonia, a few guys came past me and I ended up 16th; since that stage I’d been thinking I should have just gone for it.

The win earned me a useful time bonus that, together with the fact that G had dropped out of the lead group, put me in the leader’s jersey for day two. That was pretty satisfying, but there was more to it than that. I was surprised at the win. I knew I was fast enough to win a sprint, I knew I had the length for it – it was about a 20sec push, and in training we do up to a minute in those efforts – but I was amazed that having led out for so long no one came round me. I’d won Paris–Nice, gone away, trained, come back, won the first stage in a sprint finish; it was all too good to be true. I was really happy. The press were wondering where it had come
from
, but I was surprised people didn’t realise I had that kind of speed in me from racing on the track. After all, that was the same kind of flat-out effort I would make when we were full on in a Madison and I was going for a lap gain, as I did with Rob Hayles in Athens and Cav at Manchester in the 2008 world championships.

It was a new experience. I’d never won a road stage at a major race. I was always expected to do the business in the time trials. Generally, I can’t stand bunch sprints. I’m one for racing in a straight line – which is funny, because on the track in a Madison I find it easy to manoeuvre. But when you win in that fashion there’s an element of adrenaline, a real rush, because it all happens so quickly. You don’t know you’re going to win until a few metres before the line, whereas in a time trial you’ve got a long time to think, ‘I’m going to win this, I’m still the fastest time, I’m going to win this.’ In that one, the cut-and-thrust meant I had much more of the feeling of racing my bike; the race was on for the last 20 or 30km, and I won it. It felt like being a junior again.

There were other things to take home from Romandie. This was the only race that Mark Cavendish and I would ride before the Tour de France, so it should have been a test outing to see how we worked together. It didn’t quite end up like that, because it was an extremely hilly Tour and there was no stage flat enough to be a sprint finish for Mark. He was struggling a bit at that time – he was training hard for the Giro so he came to the race quite tired – and he had a tough time in the hills.

However, there’s always teamwork to be done. The duties
for
our team riders, the
domestiques
, include carrying bottles for everyone from the team car, carrying clothing to and fro as the weather changes or the race hots up, waiting for the leader when he punctures or stops for a piss, or simply sitting at the head of the peloton, forming a ‘train’ together to keep the pace high. The first day I had the yellow jersey, Mark wanted to work with the rest, in spite of the fact that he was wearing the rainbow stripes as world champion. So he came up with bottles first, then he started riding on the front with the other guys. I went up to Graham Watson, the photographer who is always in among us on his motorbike at the races, and I said, ‘Got to get a picture of this, Graham, I want to show the kids one day, the world champion riding for me.’

Romandie was Sky’s best performance as a unit in any stage race since we had started out as a team. There was one point where I was sitting in the line, watching Richie Porte, Mick Rogers, Cav and G driving along ahead of me. The quality of the riders helping me out made me look twice: a triple world time trial champion, an Olympic track champion, the world road race champion, and one of the best young cyclists Australia could produce; all up there, all on the front, all putting their necks on the line for me. As a team, we dominated all week; G won the prologue, I won two stages, and Richie and Mick finished 3rd and 5th overall behind me.

The five days were a good test for a rider preparing to go for the overall at the Tour de France: an uphill time trial, a prologue and some hilly stages. It wasn’t just a matter of putting the team on the front and controlling it; I had to nail
the
final time trial as well to regain the lead from Luis León Sánchez of Rabobank, who had won the penultimate stage to take the jersey from me. The time trial was 16.5km around the resort of Crans-Montana, but it wasn’t flat. On paper I had a good chance of taking back the 10sec I needed to win overall, but nothing can be taken for granted. The climb up towards the finish was a tough one, and my chain came off at the bottom, as I shifted from the big chain ring to the little one to get into a lower gear. I tried to flick the chain back on by hand, but it wouldn’t go, so I had to stop and let the mechanic do it. In the past I’d have lost my temper and bunged the bike into the ravine by the road, but this was different. In 2009 at the World Time Trial Championship in Switzerland exactly the same thing happened: my chain went and I chucked the bike away in disgust. Here, I remember thinking, ‘This could happen in the Tour, deal with it.’ So I did; I went on to beat Luis León by 1min23sec, which is a big margin in 16.5km, and it earned me my second major stage race of the season.

It was a bit like the first stage I won; I punctured, a few guys in the field were attacking while I was getting the wheel changed; I may have been annoyed but I didn’t start blaming anyone. I came back and got on to the front, and thought, ‘Right: I’m going to win this stage.’ That wasn’t a conscious thing; it just happened and I dealt with it. In those situations it’s not as if you are expecting an incident of this kind, thinking, ‘Right, if this happens I’m going to count to ten.’ You just deal with it on the spur of the moment; it’s not rehearsed. Both those little events were unexpected, and you either react
to
them in the way that I did, or you lose it. And that’s a mindset, a pathway. Keeping an eye on the bigger picture shows your focus and confidence. There’s a bit of everything happening as you gain maturity as a leader. Age comes into it, a sense of security as well, but there’s an element of taking responsibility for everything you do. After the work the team had done, paying them back by throwing my bike on the ground wouldn’t have gone down well. The chain derailing was a small incident at the time but, looking back, it seems like a significant milestone.

During all the races that I won, there was no huge adulation from those around me. There were no great big pats on the back from Tim and Shane. Shane would always say, ‘Good job that, this week you need to look after yourself, you know you need to do this that or the other,’ and Tim would just say, ‘Good job, Brad’, and that would be it. There was no stating that this was a landmark, no sense of what a huge milestone one particular win or another might be. It’s amazing to think now, but at the time it all seemed as if it was meant to be. That time trial was typical. I remember finishing it and expecting Tim and the others to be saying, ‘Bloody hell, that’s good’, but it wasn’t like that.