Bradley Wiggins: My Time (30 page)

I spotted Dave, and said ‘Where’s Cath? Where’s Cath?’

‘We’ll go and find them, we’ll go and find them.’

Down off the throne, and the chaperones started saying, ‘Come behind now, we’ve got to get ready for the podium.’

‘I want my wife and kids.’ I had to find them.

So I got back on my bike, rode out and waved to the crowd for a bit – that’s where all the public were, outside the finish area which was cordoned off inside the palace gates – turned around, came back down and then went up to the finish line looking for Cath and the kids. I turned back round, waved to the crowd again, rode up to Hampton Court Bridge, went back in, and finally found Cath and the kids at the end where the start was. We all went behind the podium, I got changed and then it was time to get the medal.

Some time later, when they were selling off the bits and pieces after the Games, I asked if I could have that throne as a memento. They wanted a hundred grand for it because there was so much interest in it, so I told them that perhaps they should find another customer. At that price! The cheek of it, you know! They did offer to do me a replica one for two grand or something but it’s not quite the same.

CHAPTER 20

WHAT NEXT?

THAT TIME TRIAL
has to rate as my greatest Olympic moment, more than the pursuit final win against Brad McGee in Athens, and maybe even more than the team pursuit world record in the final in Beijing along with G, Ed Clancy and Paul Manning. To win that gold medal in that setting, in London, in front of Hampton Court, with all the history going back to Henry VIII; it was about as British as you can get. The time trial lasted an hour, whereas the track races I’d done in the previous Olympics had been only four minutes long. There was so much time to savour it.

Every athlete has a defining year during their career. Sir Chris Hoy’s was Beijing when he won his three gold medals, and 2012 is probably mine. I remember when I was a kid Chris Boardman talking about his hour record in Manchester in 1996; he reckoned nothing would ever top the feeling of going round that track to the roar of the crowd for one whole hour. That may well have been the height of Chris’s career; it
was
probably the best he ever got physically. For the best part of an hour that Wednesday in Surrey, I was able to savour that feeling, of being at my best, with a massive crowd deafening me with their support. It was phenomenal; I am never going to experience anything like that again in my sporting life. I am not saying it is the end of my career by any means, but nothing is ever going to top that. And that’s a poignant feeling.

Ever since, I’ve been trying to take it all in, wondering whether that time trial was my greatest sporting moment. I don’t know if it was better than the Tour de France. I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that I’ve won the Tour, so at this stage I don’t know. In my eyes, the Tour will always be phenomenal because of what the team did for me. In the last time trial from Bonneval to Chartres I had a fantastic day; I did the job, but the whole race, all twenty-two days of it, was about the team putting me in a position to win the Tour de France. After the Tour, I struggled to work out quite how to thank them. I didn’t speak to any of the riders who helped me win the Tour, other than Cav, for a fair while, because I didn’t know what to say to them. I didn’t want to send them some cheesy email saying, ‘Guys, I can’t thank you enough’, because I don’t think that was quite what was needed. In the initial aftermath of the Tour it didn’t seem to sum up what those guys did for me. It’s got to come from the heart and not just in an email. What I do know is that I will never forget it.

Part of what drives me is the love and respect I feel for the sport and its history. That goes back to my childhood. I grew
up
with posters of Indurain, Museeuw and the rest on my bedroom walls, while other kids were into football: Lineker, Gascoigne and so on. In those days, a child’s dream was to go and lift the FA Cup because that was what those great players had achieved. For me when I was a kid, the dream would be to lead a race like the Dauphiné, or even the Tour for one day. So a lot of my motivation comes from the fact that I realise what the great races mean, and how many people have won those races.

There haven’t been many Tour winners in my lifetime, perhaps a dozen, so it’s a very special list to be on. I never see myself as up there with people like Robert Millar and Tom Simpson because they were the big names when I was a child. You never imagine you will be better than them. Simpson was long gone when I was a kid but even though Millar and the others like Sean Kelly rarely raced in the UK, they were cult heroes. They lived in France, we didn’t have the Internet, you could only see them in cycling magazines, which came out once a week. You never imagine you will be up there with those names: Hinault, Merckx and so on. You never imagine that not only will you be the winner of the Tour, but you’ll also win Paris–Nice, Dauphiné and the Tour of Romandie in the same year, which is incredible.

I’ve always loved cycling because it’s you against the machine. You apply yourself to something in your life, and then it’s all about numbers, pace judgement, putting the ride together, having it all go to plan. You do the training, you get this power; it’s very quantifiable. I love the sense of accomplishment. You come away and see if you can train harder,
work
harder and get a result at the end from it. It’s nice to be recognised and get respect for being good at something, to see what your achievements mean to people. It’s incredible that sport can do that, although it is just sport and you can’t lose sight of that.

I think the difference between the Olympic gold medal and the Tour is that the time trial was all about me. It was all about my individual performance on the day, about what I could put together nine days after the Tour. As an individual feat it was probably the best sporting performance of my career. It will stick in my mind as my greatest ride, the peak of my physical condition. Shane has said a few times that we never saw the best Bradley Wiggins on the track but maybe we saw something of that kind there. Even if I go on to Rio and win the time trial there, or even if I had won the time trial in Beijing, nothing would ever be the same as winning it in London nine days after winning the Tour de France as well.

If I had to look at that day, getting 40secs on Tony, beating Fabian and all those guys, the margin of victory was significant, and to do it on those roads and in that atmosphere was incredible. It had been raining in the morning and it seemed as if the sun came out just for those few hours; it was a great, great occasion, it really was. I spoke to John Dower, the film-maker, and he said there was a bizarre sense of joy lasting long after I’d left with the other riders. The organisers had started taking all the barriers down, but, he said, people just hung around in the pubs and bars down there by the river, it felt almost as if a football team had won the Champions League or something and everyone was celebrating that.
There
was this great atmosphere down there; it was a beautiful evening and it was as if people simply didn’t want to go home, as if they wanted the day to go on for ever.

There’s an interview we did at my house in December 2011, when I’ve got a beard because it’s midwinter. John asked me, ‘Can you imagine rolling down the Champs-Elysées and winning the Tour de France, then winning the Olympics the next week in London? Can you imagine what that is going to feel like? Would you take one over the other?’ My answer was that I couldn’t really choose, because I’m greedy and I wanted to do both. He told me that that interview is priceless now; when I said that to him back then, I didn’t believe for one second that I was going to do both. And here we are now; it’s happened.

Looking back to 2010, it was as if everything I did seemed to go wrong, no matter how I tried; in 2012 it was as if I could do no wrong. When you see pictures of Fabian Cancellara, defining pictures of his career, he’s bouncing across the cobbles in Roubaix or winning a time trial. Contador is always coming across the line on a mountain stage making his firing gun gesture, whereas I’ve kind of got a bit of everything in there. It’s nice to look back, for example, on winning that bunch sprint in the Tour of Romandie and having that picture in my mind. All the wins in 2012 were different; the Col d’Eze time trial, that bunch kick, climbing on the Joux Plane to win the Dauphiné, and then the defining images of the Tour. I’m proud of that as well. It’s been as if everything I did seemed to turn to gold.

Shane has always said to me that we train to be successful for the performance side of things, but we don’t train for success and what it brings. That’s very true. So I don’t know what the future holds. The London Games was always going to be a massive watershed. It’s been the pinnacle ever since we knew it was going to take place. Beijing was amazing, but the minute it was finished, everyone’s sights turned to London. Everyone’s plans seemed to finish there. As for me, I never looked further than 1 August 2012 and that time trial.

I struggle with the idea that I may have turned into a role model overnight. People say to me, ‘Are you ready now, do you realise you are a role model for so many people out there?’ I was constantly saying that I can understand why in an inspirational sense for what I do on the bike, but please don’t hold me up there as something to aspire to, because outside a sports environment I’m as normal as everyone else. I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. People seem to have illusions before they meet you; then they find out that you’re not precisely what they would like you to be. It’s the same with most celebrities in this country: porcelain gods that shatter when they fall. So I say that I’ve got a normal life like everyone else. I have a different job to everyone else, but I’m normal in some of the problems I face like any other person. I have a family, and it’s not easier because of what you do or what you get paid.

Adapting to what 2012 has brought me may not be easy. Trying to be as good as I could be in the Tour, and if possible winning it, was something that Cath, Ben, Isabella and I bought into together. It was a complete lifestyle, twelve
months
of the year. It’s not something you can stop and then go back to. So Cath got on with it, and I got on with it. It wasn’t easy, but it raises a whole new set of issues when it’s all over. Doing what I have done involves sacrifice for me, but most of all for the family; being away for my kids’ birthdays, not being around at times when they need me. The justification was that I could win the Tour; when Daddy wins the Tour it will all be over, that is what you tell the kids, and that’s what we have lived by for four years, and that’s gone now. If I say it again the answer now might be, ‘Well, you said that last year and you’ve done it now.’ It was worth the sacrifice in 2012 to do it all once, but it’s hard to say if it would be worth it to do it all again. And if I do it again, do I go and win a third? I suppose if you do that, it stops when you keep going back and doing it and finally you don’t win. And it’s the end of your reign. That’s what happened to Miguel Indurain. I never want to do that.

In many ways, I don’t want to go back to the Tour ever again. I don’t need to: I’ll always have winning it in 2012. I don’t know if the desire is going to be there. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t. I could retire tomorrow and go and be totally happy with what I’ve achieved. If I were to go back to the Tour and my heart was not in it, or I hadn’t done the work, I’d be in big trouble. What it boils down to is this: I watched Cadel Evans this year, coming back to defend his Tour title, struggling for 8th place, and that’s not for me. If I can’t do it 110 per cent to win, I’d rather not be there.

If I’m honest, I have other goals. I’m not going to be doing this for ever; I have said I’ll do another two years at this level,
so
that means I don’t have much time to win other events I feel are important such as the Giro d’Italia and Paris–Roubaix. After that I would like to go back on the track squad for two years, try and win the Olympic team pursuit, then I’m retiring. Returning to the track would be a different challenge, eight years after Beijing. It would be fresh again, and the Olympics is really where my career all started in Sydney in 2000. It would be difficult, but I think I know what it takes. I wouldn’t underestimate it. I like the idea of a different type of commitment: to be a pure track rider, a pure endurance rider, go to the gym with the other guys every day.

There have been other things: visions, one dream more than anything else, and I couldn’t justify doing it because I’d be silly to move from cycling now with the money I could earn, but I would love to try to be a rower at the next Olympics, in a lightweight four or something. It would be impossible to do: go down, lock, stock and barrel, live in Henley, train and try and be at the next Olympics in a rowing boat. It’s never going to happen, but it would be a different challenge. Imagine that, going and winning the coxless lightweight four: Olympic gold in rowing, four years off. Unfortunately there is no way I could do it.

So I’m thinking of going through to 2014, riding the Commonwealth Games, then, from Glasgow onwards, becoming a track rider again, still racing on the road, but the road would only be to build my fitness for the track, in the way that G’s done this year: Glasgow 2014, world championships 2015, track at the 2016 Olympics.

So that’s that.

I’ve sometimes wondered what George would have thought of all that has happened to me and the family in the two years since we lost him. As my granddad, my father figure and the man who helped me develop a love of all sports, he’d have been made up to see me succeed for sure, but there’s one other thing.

During the Games, there was speculation about whether I might end up with a knighthood in the same way that Sir Chris Hoy did after his great year. People asked me about it, so I did wonder whether I’d accept it if it were to come my way. The point is that I can never see myself being given a title like Sir Bradley Wiggins. I’ve never considered myself above anybody else. I’ve always struggled with hierarchy and status. I don’t know what it is, maybe just my upbringing, the area I’m from, but I’m quite happy to play second fiddle. I understand my physical capabilities sometimes give me status, but when it’s all done and dusted I struggle with that kind of thing. It’s not what happens to kids from Kilburn.