Bradley Wiggins: My Time (7 page)

So I raced the Dauphiné quite tired. I’d done a five-hour ride the day before the prologue time trial, and after the prologue I added on another 80km on the bike. I was riding it at the end of a six-week block of quite intensive training, first at altitude in Tenerife, then racing the Bayern Rundfahrt in Germany, where I beat Fabian Cancellara in the time trial, which was a nice little bonus. That was one of the big differences with having Tim and Shane working on my training: what they did was keep me pushing on during those times when perhaps in the past I would have felt that I needed to back off.

In spite of the fatigue I was able to produce the best win of my entire career up till then, taking the yellow jersey in the time trial at Grenoble, then holding on to the lead in the mountains. With three summit finishes before the end of the race – Les Gets, Collet d’Allevard and La Toussuire – I had to race intelligently to keep the lead I had: 1min11sec from Cadel Evans. This was where the new approach that Tim had devised came into its own: I couldn’t go with all the attacks on all the climbs. I had to race my own race in the yellow jersey, even if that meant coming off the back of the group at some points. It was a great success, thanks to some selfless support riding from Eddie Boasson Hagen and Rigoberto Urán in the mountains. The Dauphiné is a major event in the
second
tier of stage races, one rung down from the three big Tours; that made it the most prestigious road win of my career by some margin. It took a while to sink in, although strangely I didn’t feel it was a great performance.

After the Dauphiné we moved straight on to the final three-week run in to the Tour: our next destination was a training camp at altitude in Sestriere. That meant there wasn’t a great celebration because we didn’t have time. It was a bit like winning the first Olympic gold medal when I was going for three in both Athens and Beijing: it was put in the drawer and forgotten about because I had to focus on the next one. It was hard to do, but it worked.

By June of 2011, with that win behind me, finishing in the top ten of the Tour looked more than achievable; getting on the podium seemed to be within reach, but still with the idea of riding my own race. We had realised that the key thing was to avoid getting involved in the massive explosions at the foot of the climbs when the pure climbers would begin attacking. I had to treat every
col
as if it were a time trial, thinking of getting from A to B as fast as possible without blowing up. It was not the most attractive way to ride a race, it was not riding with panache, but that was the reality of it. We’d all like to be able to attack at the foot of a climb and ride Alberto Contador off our wheel but actually it’s about being sensible, riding intelligently.

That was the biggest lesson I learned from the Dauphiné: there was no shame in dropping off the back even if you were wearing the yellow jersey, bearing in mind you could always come back to the leaders. Even when I was in yellow,
the
centre of attention with the cameras watching me, it didn’t faze me when I decided the pace was getting too much and I had to put our plan into action, and watching it succeed boosted my confidence as well. Miguel Indurain was criticised for riding in this way throughout his career, but looking back you realise how great he was on his best days on the Tour.

This change in approach was largely due to the input we had from Tim Kerrison. I’d first met him at the Tour of Britain in 2009 when I had yet to sign for Team Sky but was being kept in the loop about what they were up to. There was a stage that started in Peebles, and Shane turned up with this lad in a Great Britain Swimming fleece. He and Dave had just poached him from the swimming team. Apparently Tim had been on his way to a job interview with English Cricket. He was going to take the job doing much the same thing with them as he ended up doing at Sky. Sky rang him on the way and he made a detour to the velodrome to see them. That’s how Shane tells it, anyway: before Tim went to this interview, he and Dave convinced him to come and work with them. They told him: we want to win the Tour, that is our goal, this is what we would like you to do, and they got him on board before he could go anywhere else. On paper, Tim’s job description was ‘performance analyst’, but first he had to find his way around bike racing.

In 2010, Tim spent the year on the road, mainly with Matt Parker, just observing. He spent all his time in his and Matt’s camper van; I used to call it the Skip. Their nickname for it
was
Black Betty, but it was always in a bit of a state. You would go in there and you could imagine what Swampy’s little tent looked like in those trees. Tim didn’t open his mouth practically all year. Even now he’s not a big talker but back then you would never hear him say anything. He was there all the time observing, taking it all in, learning how cycling worked. A key part of that was getting on top of how to interpret the data from SRMs, the cranks that measure a cyclist’s power output. They have been an integral part of British Cycling’s training since Peter Keen founded the programme, because they are the best way to measure how hard a cyclist is working, and to control the workload in training. Tim wrote a lot of things down. He could have written a book by the end of that year.

By the end of 2010 Tim had started asking all sorts of questions, simple things that would prove to be more and more important as we went along. It was stuff that an outsider to cycling might ask, such as: why don’t the riders warm down at the end of the stage? Just think about it, why don’t they warm down? He would be told, it’s not the done thing; the riders don’t want to look foolish. There was no scientific reason for not having a warm-down, it was just that no one did it. Another thought Tim had was that he felt that a team should not just be about the leader. In his view, it should be about getting all the guys to the same level as the leader they are supporting. He asked more basic questions: why is it only the team leader who gets to go on the training camps where we reconnoitre the mountain stages? Why does only the leader get set blocks of time for training while the
rest
of the team race themselves to death? Why don’t we get the eight other guys who will race in the Tour – or as many of them as we can – to ride together all year and race in the same races, go to the training camps, go and recon the mountains together and get to know each other as a football team would? That single point made me realise that during that first year at Sky we had all raced all over the place. The first time I raced with Geraint Thomas and Edvald Boasson Hagen and all those guys was when we got to the Tour. I’d hardly seen them all year.

Tim was looking at a host of little things that traditionally no one had ever questioned. He was responsible for us beginning to use altitude training camps, with one in Tenerife in May 2011, and another at Sestriere, in the Italian Alps, that June. And he would ask: why don’t teams have training camps in December? Well, we said, they normally have training camps but they’re more sort of drinking camps where everyone gets to know each other and you collect your bikes, that sort of thing. January’s the serious training camp. Why? Tim would ask. Why don’t we do that one in November, and have a serious one in December, because that’s quite an important month. Traditionally in professional cycling teams, everyone gets their training bike in January; Tim wanted to know why they couldn’t get it in October and then have a training bike that they use at home? And what about specific time-trial bikes, not just for the leader but for the whole team?

Tim went away, looked at the data he had gathered from me and the other riders in the 2010 Tour and began examining the numbers. He worked out what rate you need
to
be climbing at in the Tour de France. That calculation was done in terms of VAM –
velocità ascensionale media
– which translates into English as ‘average climbing speed’, or how quickly you gain height in a climb. It’s basically a measure of how fast you are going upwards as if you were in a lift, measured in metres per hour. He figured out what power output you needed to be averaging for a certain body weight if you were going to win the Tour. He wrote down all the demands of the event and we went from there. We’d not done any testing with reference to the Tour, so the first thing he did was get me in the lab. We started testing and slowly started to build a picture of what I was capable of doing and what I couldn’t do.

It took a while to build a trust between the three of us. As the season went on, as the training and racing and going to altitude took effect, we started to come away with better and better results. The progression was clear: 3rd place at Paris–Nice, a time-trial stage win at Bayern Rundfahrt, the overall title at the Dauphiné. We had set off into 2011 with the idea of aiming for a top-ten place in the Tour, but eventually we realised that I could be up there with the likes of Cadel Evans and Alexander Vinokourov who were going for the podium.

There was another aspect that made us more optimistic as the Tour drew closer in 2011. Various things were coming out on the anti-doping front. It emerged that the UCI had established an ‘index of suspicion’ – I rated five out of ten – which at least meant they were on the case. Most importantly, they had brought in a needle ban, forbidding the use of
injections
across the board, even for substances used for recovery such as sugars and vitamins. British Cycling have always had a no-needle policy, it’s been a mainstay of theirs; so it was something I grew up with as a bike rider.

In British cycling culture, at the word ‘needle’ or the sight of one, you go ‘Oh shit’, it’s a complete taboo. When I was a kid we used to play around in a car park where there were always needles on the floor from heroin addicts who used to go and shoot up – orange needles – so from a young age my mother and others would tell us, ‘Stay away from those needles, don’t go near them, don’t touch them.’ In France you can buy them over the counter; it’s a different culture. Here you buy vitamin C effervescent from Boots, rather than getting it through a syringe. I’ve never had an injection, apart from I’ve had my vaccinations, and on occasion I’ve been put on a drip, when I’ve come down with diarrhoea or something or have been severely dehydrated.

Shane kept saying to me that this was all working in our favour. As long as they kept going in that direction, deterring the drug-users, that would be great. The needle ban was fantastic, although from our point of view at the Dauphiné there was no sign of it being policed. It would have been great if they had started raiding teams to see that people were toeing the line. Medical people in our team were adamant that riders were continuing to use syringes for recovery on the Dauphiné and other races even though the practice was banned. Guys with a history of this sort of stuff weren’t going to say, ‘Oh, it’s against the law now, we’ll stop doing it.’ The hardcore will continue to push the boundaries, and until
someone
gets banned for breaking the syringe rule I don’t think it’s really going to deter them. But all those developments contribute towards a team like ours, which is determined to race clean, coming away with something big at the Tour de France.

As the Tour drew near, I had dropped to my lightest climbing weight ever: 69 kilos. I’d taken it gradually down to 71.5 by the start of the 2009 Tour. That was 6.5 kilos lighter than I’d been when I rode in 2007. It takes a good deal of hard work to get it down there, but it’s the most effective way of improving your performance on the road: one kilogramme less of body weight means you gain about 25sec for a given power output on a thirty-minute climb. It’s not just about the climbs; every time you accelerate out of a corner or up a little hill you are hefting that extra weight. Over a three-week race those efforts add up to a huge amount of extra work. On the track you build up a lot of upper-body muscle simply due to the work on your arms and shoulders from the standing starts you do as a pursuiter. On the road it’s not useful and it took a good while to work it off after I quit the track post-Beijing; one thing I did initially was have regular checks with Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist at British Cycling, to make sure I was staying healthy. It was the biggest single change I’d made.

I’d won the time trial at the Bayern Rundfahrt, taking the scalp of Fabian Cancellara, who was the man to beat at that time. I’d won the Dauphiné, the biggest road victory of my entire career, and then I’d taken first place in the British national road race championships on a super-tough course in the north-east, where Sky had been dominant. I had been
massively
optimistic for the Tour when I had faced the press at Kew Gardens a couple of days before the British Road Race Championships. I told them that I’d relaunched my career and said I was ready to go. It was true: I was in a better position for the Tour than I had ever been. And I raced well to win that national title. But after that trip to the north-east I got ill: diarrhoea for two days. As a result, I couldn’t travel to the Tour until right up to the last minute. I think I got in on the Wednesday night, and then we were straight out, doing team time-trial training on the course for the Sunday’s stage, and I felt dreadful. I was quite close to getting dropped. We did more team time-trial work on the Friday but I’d regained some of my strength by then.

Since the previous Sunday’s win, it had all been a mad rush. By the time the Tour started six days later, I actually felt as if my form was dwindling a little. It’s more in your head than anything physical. I remember getting to the Vendée for the start, and doing the press conference on the Thursday. Everyone around me was saying, ‘Oh, it’s great, things are fantastic, never been this good, it’s a great position we’re in.’ I, on the other hand, couldn’t sit there and say, ‘I’ve had stomach trouble the last couple of days, I don’t feel great on the bike.’ It was all a bit like 2010. I was still talking it up at that stage because I didn’t want to admit to myself, ‘You know what, I’m a little bit worried about this.’ So you put on a front for the press.

There is a lot of speculation about how I would have fared in that Tour, but I never felt great. I felt a bit weak, although I got through the first stage in decent shape. I was strong in
the
team time trial the day after and then I was poised in 6th overall. I was in a good position for the rest of the week but I never seemed to be in control of it. That was what was going through my head, but Shane was saying, ‘No, don’t worry about how you feel, what the numbers are suggesting is something else.’ I always wonder what would have happened once we hit those mountains: whether I would have been in the front or not.