Bradley Wiggins: My Time (21 page)

As the announcer introduced Cadel Evans, who was lying 2nd overall and was the second-last rider off, three minutes in front of me, my mind went back to waiting on the bus before the race. I was sitting there at the start, listening to the voice saying, ‘This is Cadel Evans, the winner of last year’s Tour de France; he’s second overall only ten seconds behind Bradley Wiggins,’ but in my mind I had gone back two and a half or three hours before. As usual, I was waiting for my warm-up time, doing my stretching. When I was lying in the back of the bus being taped up, they had the television on – that’s where Dave sits and watches the race – and it was showing British Eurosport. I remember Tony Gibb saying some stuff; that the time trials I’d won this year were all uphill on a road bike with triathlon bars – skis as we call them – attached, and because of that it would be interesting to see how I would go in a long flat time trial today. He said that all the work I’d done in training was for the mountains, and so it would be interesting to see if my time trials on the flat suffered.

In actual fact, I was undefeated in longer time trials in 2012 – as opposed to the short prologues where I’d tended to
come
2nd – and in the Dauphiné a few weeks earlier I’d won the long flat time trial by a street. So I was a bit annoyed about that.

Then they interviewed Alexander Vinokourov, who’d just finished the stage: ‘How do you see it going today?’

‘It’s quite tough out there.’

‘What do you think about Wiggins’s and Evans’s battle? Who do you think will be the faster of the two?’

‘I think Wiggins will get the better of Cadel, but I don’t see him taking a lot of time. I only see him taking ten, twenty seconds maximum on Cadel today, but as Wiggins has proved he’s good on all types of course this year.’

I remember sitting there thinking, ‘You’ve got a cheek – twenty seconds!’ It really wound me up. ‘Twenty seconds my arse!’

I fuel off those little things.

Back at the start, the announcer was talking about Cadel, and the crowd was getting hyped up, really hyped up, and eventually he came down the ramp. There was that massive crowd noise you hear when a rider starts, and that noise was following him up the road. I was wearing a thin little jersey over my skinsuit; the second he started I unzipped it, took it off and threw it on the floor to show I was really ready. I slapped my hands together and went to the ramp.

Usually, when you have that long to wait before a time trial, you sit down below in the chair for two minutes then go up on to the start ramp; here, I was desperate to get into the start house on top of the ramp so that I could watch him. In that time trial there was about a 3km straight from the start before
a
left-hand bend; I went up the ramp at once, sideways on with my bike, and then I stood in the entrance to the start house, watching his car going down that straight. I rested my arms on my skis and I was just watching the car going further and further away. I was talking to myself: ‘I’m coming after you. I’m coming after you.’

Then they said, ‘One minute to go’, so I rolled up, clicked into the pedals, got myself ready, watching Cadel’s car all the time. It was still in sight, like a pinprick in the distance and then it was suddenly gone. Then I heard the thirty seconds to go call, and the announcer said, ‘Bradley Wiggins, winner of the Dauphiné Libéré, Paris–Nice, Tour of Romandie, this that and the other’. Ten seconds to go, the crowd were making a huge noise, and I could hear that count: five, four, three … I pushed back, and straight away I was out hard for the first ten or twelve seconds, then down on to the saddle and into my pace.

Sean started the dialogue: ‘OK, Brad, you know what you’ve got to do today, you’ve got three kilometres straight here, then you’ve got a left-hander do what you do best.’ So I settled down into my 460 watts. It felt really good, really strong, around a left-hander, then there was the first drag. I was sitting at 500 watts up that one, and Sean said to me, ‘Looking good, Brad, this is good, you come to a little village here. Descend hard left-hander then you’re away, you’re on open road.’

We got out of that first 5km, then it was out on to a bigger, wider road that dragged up for about 1.5–2km. I remember Sean saying, ‘You’re twenty seconds ahead of Cadel.’ It was
after
about 5km and I thought, ‘What?’ I hadn’t even started pushing on at that point. On the GPS on the television they had me twenty seconds ahead.
Fucking hell
.

We went into a super-fast section, speeding round the sweeping bends, doing about 65km per hour. I put my head down and the visor flew off my helmet. It hadn’t been stuck on properly; the magnet on the right-hand side had come undone, so it just whizzed off. And I had to deal with it. My eyes had got used to having the visor in front of them, so they started watering a lot in the wind; that’s always the way when you take your glasses off on a bike: to begin with your eyes fill with water and then you get used to it. I was blinking continually at first but my eyes adapted. All that time the gap kept going up. All the checks until close to the end had been on Cadel; I remember getting to the last one, at 10km to go, and Sean said: ‘You’ve got one-nineteen on Cadel, and you’re sixteen seconds ahead of Froomie; he’s got the best time.’ I had been just thinking about Cadel the whole time until then, but I suddenly thought, ‘Wow, Froomie, sixteen seconds, that’s quite a good ride from him.’

Towards the end, the course was flat for about 6km, then there was a left-hander, up a climb and Sean said, ‘This is where you’re going to make the difference, this is all for you, Brad, this is like the track days.’ I remember thinking, ‘Forget Cadel, this is where I win the stage and I need to put a bit more time into Froomie.’ I was motoring. I remember taking the effort up another level through the flat section; I didn’t drop below 470 watts the whole way, and then I had to empty it on the last climb.

In the end I took 1min43sec on Cadel but the thing that struck me most when I finished was that I’d won a stage in the Tour de France. A couple of days before I had been thinking, ‘I’ve taken the yellow jersey in the Tour de France’, now I had won a stage. I just kept thinking back to when I was a kid when winning a stage seemed really something: ‘You took the yellow jersey and now you’ve won a stage in the Tour de France.’ That evening I was given the little glass bottle that you get for a stage win.

I remember talking to the press after that; the question they were all asking was: ‘Is the Tour over now?’ It felt strange to be asked that. I’d won a stage in the Tour and no one said, ‘You’re the stage winner, how does it feel?’ They just kept asking if I’d won the Tour. What didn’t really get through to me was that I had 1min53sec overall lead on Cadel and 2min05sec on Froomie. What was in my mind was that I had won a stage in the Tour and I had beaten Fabian Cancellara, Tony Martin and the other top time triallists.

That felt like a major achievement in itself so I hadn’t had time to think of the bigger picture: at the start of the Tour, all I had told myself I needed was to be within thirty seconds of Cadel going into the last time trial at Chartres. After Besançon, nine days in, I had got the best part of two minutes lead on him.

On the Tour you become institutionalised. You do the same thing day in, day out, as a matter of routine for the best part of four weeks – the race is three weeks but you’re there
several
days before it starts – and you only ever see the same people around you. Apart from the fans and the media who follow the race, you almost forget what’s going on in the outside world. I don’t know how it feels to be behind bars but seeing Cath on the rest day of the Tour de France always makes me wonder if this is what it’s like getting a visitor when you’re in prison.

I’m not sure Cath knew what to make of it either, being catapulted into the middle of the Tour for about twenty-four hours. From my point of view, it’s just nice when you’ve been in the thick of it for two weeks to have someone come in from the outside to talk about some things other than cycling. It’s a reality check. On the Tour you almost forget what’s going on in the world, which is why it feels the way I imagine it must when you get a visitor in prison: you catch up on what the kids have been doing, how the Jubilee party in the village went. Here are the clean pants you wanted, and some clean socks, those yellow Adidas trainers you asked for – just little things like that. It’s a rapid glance into the world back home, bits and pieces that were going on before you went to the Tour, that you’ve almost forgotten about: how’s that thing with your mum? Oh, that’s sorted now. Did you pay the bill for the council tax? And then she goes and that’s it, the rest day is done, and you’re left with the realisation that you’ve got another twelve days to go.

Cath’s visit was brief; she was off home the next day. But seeing her was vital; throughout the whole of 2012 she was my most important influence. She’s the constant one, the one who is always there, and she’s been there for me for ten years.
We’ve
known each other since I was about fifteen and we were on the junior national squad together. She’s seen me through the good times, the bad times, the ups, the downs and the great times. Since we got together in 2002 we’ve been a team. The little things that she helps me with are as much a part of the big picture as the training and the planning I do with Shane and Tim. The difference is that Shane goes home every day, and Tim goes home every day, but Cath comes home every day with me. It’s a very hard, very selfish life that I live, and Cath, Ben and Isabella are completely there with me.

Cath knows when I am on it, not on it, skiving, not skiving or when I’m making excuses. Because I’ve been through all those phases in my life with her, she knows me better than anyone. She’ll always stand by me and support me. She gets on very well with Shane as well. If he is like a father to me, he’s like a brother to her. And he’s always calling her and they talk about things on the phone together that I’m not even aware of. He’ll ring her up just to see that she’s all right, so they have their own relationship. They fall out and make up. She is the keeper of everything for me, because she is the last point of protection. She is also my biggest fan, so even in that whole 2010 period she was always standing by me. She would just say, ‘Forget it, they don’t know, they haven’t got a clue about all this.’ In her eyes I can never do any wrong, but she will tell me pretty quick if I have done wrong in other people’s.

I cannot say this often enough or loudly enough: when it comes to winning Olympic gold medals and yellow jerseys, there is as much sacrifice from my family, Cath and Isabella
and
Ben, as there is from me, if not more. I wasn’t home much in 2012. I think it was five weeks between 1 January and 1 August. There were periods of that time when the family were with me, but I was in a training environment somewhere, usually Majorca. When we are doing that, I just go out on my bike for five or six hours a day and they go and do stuff, the best they can, but then I get back and I need to rest, so it’s not as if we all go down the beach together.

In a way, in that environment, it can be harder than being at home. The kids just want to play with me when I get back from training. Two weeks before the Tour we were in Majorca, and I was training, obviously, four, five, six hours of the day. I’d have a split day – a time trial in the morning, time trial in the evening – and I’d come back in between and have food and a sleep. We’d nip down the beach with them at lunchtime and I’d have a coffee, but I’d have to sit in the shade. Cath and the kids would be outside; they’d all be on the beach and they’d run up and say, ‘Come on, come in the sea with us, come on the lilo’ and I would have to say, ‘I can’t, I’ve got to stay here, I’ve got to go out training again later.’

Where Cath and the kids have made a difference is in their willingness to give things up for me, enabling me to live the way you have to if you are riding for the overall in the Tour. It is a special lifestyle and everybody around you has to adapt to it. You have to live as much like a monk when you’re at home as you would when you are actually racing in the Tour, but obviously when you are at home you are still going about your daily business in between training and resting. That’s really hard to do but it’s become almost like routine to me.
It’s
twelve months of the year. There is no question of taking two months off and then we’ll see how we are and we’ll start back on it. It’s a constant thing. It involves everything you do on a daily basis in your life. You’ve got to do it.

For example, in 2012 I was ill only once or twice with minor colds, and I barely lost a day’s training from it. That comes down to the way you live: it is just a matter of looking after myself, being healthy constantly, looking at the little things, never letting my hair down. So I’m always washing my hands.

It can seem extreme, but there’s thinking behind everything I do. I try never to walk any further than I have to. It’s OK if you have to walk a little bit, but when we go to Majorca for training, for example, and we go and eat at a restaurant which is a fifteen-minute walk away, I normally ride my bike to get there. I have a shopping bike that I use. It means that if I’ve got a session the next day my legs don’t stiffen up.

A lot has been made of my diet. We don’t have sugar, bread or biscuits in the house and neither do we have the usual nonos like fizzy drinks. Shane is always on at me about it. ‘Remember,’ he’ll say when I go home after a race, ‘remember your eating this week. It’s like owning a car. You don’t need to put more fuel in it if you’re not driving it.’ He’s always saying that to me. The dieting is like keeping a car on nearly empty all the time, and if you’re going to drive that car to the supermarket – in other words, if you’re using energy for training or something – you only put five-quid’s-worth of fuel in it so that you can only just drive there and back. You don’t ever put forty-quid’s-worth in because you’re not going to use
the
car for most of the week and the fuel would just sit there inside it. However, if you are going to drive to London – in other words, take part in a major race – you fill the car up, then fill the car up again to drive back. Once home, and the car is nearly empty again, you have to keep it like that, only putting in a little fuel when you have to go to the supermarket. I guess that’s the best analogy to use. So the diet is just a constant daily thing. I fill up only as much as is absolutely necessary. That’s the principle I live by.