Bradley Wiggins: My Time (24 page)

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, but 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.’

But the next thing I heard was Sean saying over the radio that a lot of guys seemed to have punctured. What followed was just chaos. I had been having problems with my gears as well on that climb, so I told Sean that I needed to change my bike. He said, ‘We’re miles behind, we’re miles behind, we’ll tell you when we’re there.’ Eventually he caught the bunch up and I changed bikes; just after that, people started coming up to me, saying, ‘Something’s wrong, about fifteen guys have punctured all at once: Cadel, Frank Schleck, all these guys.’ I knew something had happened. So I went to the front and told our boys to stop and shut it down; there was no point racing if everyone had punctured. We’d got over that climb and nothing had happened so slowing everyone down to wait
for
the guys who’d punctured seemed the right thing to do. The stage win had gone in any case as the break was fifteen minutes clear. There was a crash or two, the worst one involving Levi Leipheimer and Robert Kiserlovski of Astana; I still didn’t quite understand what was happening.

As we tried to figure it out, Pierre Rolland of Europcar attacked and I remember trying to go after him. I thought, ‘Hold on, what are you trying to gain here?’ There’s no point in trying to gain time from someone else’s misfortune; that’s why I was annoyed at him. I thought: if he’d gone on the climb, and was away before it all happened then that would be fair enough, but to do it knowing everyone’s punctured just seems ridiculous. Someone came up to me, Richie perhaps, and said, ‘Let him go, let him go’, so we stopped again. Then Liquigas started riding – they said, ‘Right, we’re not waiting any more’ – and Lotto joined in, so we ended up going full gas; because Cadel was still coming back we did about 10km full on. Eventually they stopped, Cadel came back and then BMC were pissed off because Lotto and Liquigas hadn’t shown them respect. The race was all over the place.

People read quite a lot into the way I acted. It was said that stopping the field at a time like that showed that I was behaving like the new
patron
of the peloton. It’s not quite that simple. I could never become a
patron
in the Bernard Hinault sense, a dominant senior figure telling the bunch how to race when it suited him. Sean Yates has told me about how in Hinault’s Tours, he was always super-aggressive; they would be scared to attack when he was on the front. He’d ride on the front of the peloton and if you went past him he’d just
flip
; he ruled by fear. I did end up becoming a bit of a leader for the peloton on that day through my actions, not through being vocal.

At the time I wasn’t aware of what was going on. A lot of the support cars had disappeared, stuck behind us on the climb, stopped to change wheels, or having punctured themselves. There were no motorbikes or anything; you’re going down this hill with all the other bike riders you race with all year round, so you don’t realise you’re being watched by the world. You don’t do things for show, you just do what you do instinctively at the time. And then you get to the finish and find that all of a sudden your actions have kind of taken on a life of their own. It reminded me of the whole thing in 2010 between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck – the attack Contador made when Schleck’s chain came off. So much was made of that.

There was one little event to savour when we reached the final rest day in Pau, with only three more days of racing before that final time trial. I had mentioned in an interview on the day I took the yellow jersey that I remembered watching the Tour as a kid and had never envisaged that one day I’d be taking the jersey; I said in that interview that my childhood hero in the Tour de France was Miguel Indurain, because he won every Tour from when I was eleven to the age of fifteen. It was the most influential period of my teenage years, and Indurain was the mainstay.

It must have got back to him somehow, and so on the rest day in Pau, Spanish television came to us and said, ‘We want
to
do a piece with Brad, we’ve got something quite special for him.’ They said it was from Indurain and that is how they got me to do the interview, otherwise I would have said no. It was a message from him, on the television screen; they translated it to me and it was basically him saying, ‘Hello, Brad, I heard that you were a fan of mine, I think you’re strong in the time trials like me’ and various other things. I was honoured just to think that he knew who I was; they said, ‘He’s also sent you this.’ They gave me an envelope with a red scarf in it, one of the ones that they wear during the bull run in Pamplona. This particular one was a very sacred thing, with his family emblem on it. They explained: you can’t buy it in the shops and it’s a massive honour that he’s given it to you. He’d signed it ‘To my friend Bradley.’ It was recognition from someone who had been my childhood idol, something that I simply hadn’t expected, and it meant all the more for that.

All through this, my philosophy was to take it day by day. There’s enough stress on the Tour without wondering how the other guys are doing, and worrying about who might do what, when and where. Because of that I never think too much about any one rider in a race. Initially you just worry about yourself. You never assume anything. You never really expect anything because then it doesn’t come as a surprise. People would ask me, for example, how worried I was about Cadel, how did I think he felt on the stage, would I be looking at him tomorrow? Whereas in fact he might not be the person I had to worry about. You never anticipate that a rider might do this, or you might do that, or think, ‘Cadel
looks
good today.’ In fact, he might be suffering. You just don’t know.

With me, some of this inward focus comes from the track. There are times when you sit in the track centre and watch another heat going on – during qualifying for example – or you might be there on a training day when you can’t help looking at the other riders. You’ll be sitting waiting until it’s time for your effort, and a rider like Brad McGee – the Australian who was my big rival for the pursuit at the Athens Olympics – might be floating effortlessly around the track. That might begin to get to you, but someone in the team will have a stopwatch on him and they’ll take his times and say, ‘He’s only doing 61 [seconds per kilometre] laps’, although to you he looks as if he’s going faster. You end up realising that people are very quick to make assumptions about how a rider looks on any given day, and those assumptions can be totally wrong.

There was a classic case of this with Vincenzo Nibali in 2012 on the run in to Luchon, a long, brutal stage through the Pyrenees over four big
cols
: Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. He was obviously trying to put us under pressure on that stage; it was hard and we got him back. We came into Luchon, finished the stage, and the next day we assumed, ‘Bloody hell, he’s going to try that again for sure, because that was tough yesterday.’

On the next stage, the last one in the Pyrenees, Nibali put his boys on the front on the first big climb, Port de Balès; they made it hard there and lost some riders. So I sat behind Nibali the whole way up the climb and, towards the top of it, I got a
sense
of his body language, the way he was pedalling. That gave me the notion that actually he might be struggling a little bit. I always watch people’s pedalling action and I’ve learned that Nibali drops his heels when he’s suffering. He doesn’t give a lot away when you ride beside him. He’s very good at bluffing, he’s conscious of that all the time, but he does have some tells. You’re on a descent and he’ll get out of the saddle and stretch his neck, little things like that that you do if you’re conscious that someone’s watching you and you want to make them think.

Nibali started dropping his heels towards the top of the Port de Balès. His pedal stroke made it look as if he might be a bit over-geared. His teammate Ivan Basso, the Giro winner back in 2005, hit the front towards the summit, set quite a strong tempo and we descended off Port de Balès to climb the Peyresourde, the last major ascent of the whole Tour, with the finish at the top at the Peyragudes ski station. Again Basso went to the front, again he set a really strong tempo, but about a kilometre and a half from the summit, the other riders started attacking and Nibali just couldn’t respond. Straight away we realised he was actually on a bad day. He just hadn’t backed up the efforts he’d made the day before. That was a classic case of concentrating on someone, expecting them to do something because of how they looked the day before, when in actual fact they haven’t got the legs for it.

When you are leading the Tour, there are hard decisions to be made. It’s not always a nice business and during that Tour I couldn’t help feeling at times that Mark Cavendish deserved
better
than he got. Right from when he and Bernie had been selected for the Tour in June, I think he had been very conscious of what people thought. From day one in Liège he had said in team meetings that he recognised that we were going for yellow and that he was determined to be part of it in the same way that I had been part of the picture at the World’s the September before.

His line was: ‘I don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be in a British team going for the yellow jersey even if that means I’m not going to get a full lead out in the sprint.’ It was difficult listening to him say that, because the nice part of me wanted to stand up and say, ‘Sod it, Cav, we’ll lead you out at those stage finishes. I’ll try and ride for the yellow as well as support you when it comes down to a sprint.’ But the coward in me had to say, ‘Well, you know how this is, we can’t ride for the sprint every day; we had a goal at the start of the Tour and that has to be the priority.’

Throughout the Tour, Cav was keen to feel that he had played his part in trying to have a British Tour winner for the first time. I got the sense that he was feeling a bit self-conscious, that he felt we might all be thinking we could have had someone else in the team instead of him. That’s why he was coming back for bottles on the stages when it wasn’t going to be a sprint, and that’s why on the first day in the Pyrenees he rode on the front most of the way up the climb of the Mur de Péguère – the day of the tacks and the punctures. There was only so much of a role he could play, because he’s restricted in his climbing, but a lot of the time his presence was enough to make a difference. Cav is a larger-than-life
character
, and sometimes in a team the things someone says and does are enough. All through the three and a half weeks, just having him around was a boost: he was brilliant, good at the dinner table, good with the other riders.

There were various flatter stages that Cav had picked out as ones he wanted to win. Bernie was his main helper on those days and Eddie was going to join in; the plan was that between them they were going to try to work off the other teams a bit so that Sky didn’t have to take control for too long and use up too much energy.

Cav understood why we were in that position but that can’t have made it any easier for him. There were some days where it was quite clear he could win the stage but in the team meeting Sean would say, ‘Look, it’s a bit of a day off for us all today; sit there and look after Brad.’ I could see Cav thinking, ‘We just need two guys to ride on the front and we could win this.’ So there were stages when we had to let groups get ahead to contest the victory where Cav might have won it if it had come down to a bunch sprint.

When I felt the most guilty about Cav was the day after he put that work in up Péguère; stage 15 into Pau. At just under 160km it was a short run and it was basically flat, but the break took 60km to get established. Until we let it go, we had some of the hardest racing of the whole Tour; constantly flat-out in one long line, with everyone’s legs screaming. When the break did eventually get away, there was a feeling in the team that we should ride for Cav, out of respect for him and for the rainbow jersey. So we decided to put two guys on the front and start chasing a little; later other teams would be
likely
to join in, most probably Lotto, who would want a bunch sprint for André Greipel. Our two guys had to push quite hard because the gap was five minutes and there were some strong lads in front: Thomas Voeckler, Nicki Sørensen, Christian Vande Velde – my old team leader at Garmin – and Pierrick Fédrigo, who won the stage.