Authors: John Deering
The team were also happy to support Brad’s ambitions on the track, an absolute prerequisite for any potential employer of Wiggins in Olympic year. While he didn’t really want to race
in the red of Cofidis again, a plan thrashed out with Shane Sutton and Simon Jones left him reluctantly agreeing that a late 2007 season of hard racing was the best start to his build-up for
Beijing, now the only target that mattered to Wiggins. He was determined to go to China and come back with three medals, at least as good a haul as Athens, and perhaps he could even better his
gold, silver and bronze from 2004.
In Brad’s view, the big challenge was to compete at his peak in all three events, the individual pursuit, the team pursuit and the madison. He felt that the individual pursuit, being his
performance alone and the first event of each Olympics he had competed in, had taken preference over the others at his previous championships and Olympics, and he wanted to correct that. He felt
that he was the best pursuiter in the world; he believed the GB quartet ought to be the best team pursuit squad of all time; and he was excited about partnering his new teammate and Olympic
newcomer Mark Cavendish in the madison.
To that end, Wiggins trained like a man possessed over the winter. He and Cavendish rode the Ghent Six together, the team pursuit squad put in some crunching training in Mallorca, and Brad
himself put in long solo hours at Manchester Velodrome with the individual pursuit in his sights. The key stop on the road to Beijing was to be a similar one to the Athens build-up, the World
Championships. This time round, however, they would assume a greater significance than a mere staging post and pointer to future success, they would be in his adopted home town of Manchester and
would be a massive target in their own right. It was a great opportunity to test his ability to do the ‘triple’ of individual pursuit, team pursuit and madison.
The sixes hadn’t gone particularly well for the new Wiggins–Cavendish pairing, but they weren’t too worried. Cavendish was coming off the back of his breakthrough season, a
long hard battle since early spring and was exhausted, just as Wiggins was running into the form of his life. They scraped a good ride in a World Cup meeting in the new Beijing velodrome to ensure
qualification for later in the summer, then set their sights on Manchester as their real target.
The atmosphere at those Manchester Worlds was unbelievable. There was a feeling that Team GB were the real force in world track cycling now and they believed they could win titles in virtually
every event, men’s and women’s.
The first part of Wiggins’s own trilogy went extraordinarily well. Despite easing back in his qualifying round a little bit too much and finishing with the second fastest time, he easily
dispatched the man who finished quicker than him, the Dutchman Jenning Huizenga in the final to retain the title he had won in Mallorca a year previously. He was now a triple World Individual
Pursuit Champion. As the celebrations and backslapping began, so did the real test. This time, he pulled away from enjoying his moment and deferred it until the meet was finished and the velodrome
lights would be switched off in a few days’ time. He believed that he and his team pursuit partners Ed Clancy, Paul Manning and Geraint Thomas could not only win the world title but break the
world record in the process. He needed to prepare properly.
By the time he was back at the velodrome in the early morning light, he was totally in the zone, race face firmly affixed. As a result, he was able to commit himself to the team like never
before. The racing began with a shock, as a powerful Denmark foursome blasted a super quick ride of 3’57”. That would take some beating. The GB team knew they didn’t have to beat
that, they just had to be quick enough to make it to the final, where they believed that they could beat the Danes no matter how fast they went. They cruised round in the second fastest time to set
up the big showdown. After a few hours, they were back at the track and ready, the febrile atmosphere reaching fever pitch with the local crowd high on success, excitement and plentiful beer.
It’s unlikely that there has ever been a more precise display of team pursuiting than the one that Team GB delivered that night. The world title and a new world record of
3’56.322” confirmed their perfection and sent the arena into fits of ecstasy. Once again, Brad forced himself to turn his back on the celebrations and tiptoed into his room, where his
roommate and madison partner Mark Cavendish was already softly snoring.
The crest of a wave that the Great Britain team had been riding throughout this meeting had not gone unnoticed by the competition. As well as those two pursuit golds, the team went on to win a
scarcely believable nine world titles out of a possible eighteen on offer, the most dominant performance by a nation in modern history. The seven golds landed the previous year in Mallorca were
improbably put in the shade, and all this in Olympic year.
No pressure for the madison duo, then. They were unsurprisingly marked tightly, and Brad was forced into putting everything into a massive chase to keep them on level terms. But all was well as
he ground back up to the wheels of the leaders who had broken away and he handslung Cav into the action to win the points they needed. As so often at the finish of the madison, there was a little
confusion as the judges checked the scores, but the Team GB management were in no doubt: Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish were champions of the world.
The big night out deferred for the past two victories sprang into action, and three nights of carousing were crammed into one long Manchester night. Good times, and the Olympics to come.
*
There was no year-long bender after these championships. The quiet confidence of this crack Great Britain squad knew that Olympic medals were what mattered. Nobody wanted to
miss this opportunity, possibly one never to be repeated. Surely, they wouldn’t remain this dominant forever. Now was the time to claim their inheritance, stamp their mark on the Olympics and
ensure they would never be forgotten.
Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish both headed to the Giro d’Italia in the colours of Team High Road. Brad was delighted to have a spearhead in the team and relished the work of setting
Cav up for the sprints. The new boy picked up two stages in his first grand tour, delighting his team and repaying his teammates for their hard work in delivering him to the line.
Cav was to go on to his first Tour de France, and Bradley was a little envious not to be supporting him, but his plan took him to the routine of velodrome and road training that he so
appreciated. Routine had been what was missing in his earlier years as a professional, and he now had a much greater appreciation of what worked for him, largely through the efforts of Chris
Boardman, Shane Sutton, Simon Jones and the whole Team GB set-up.
As he set about the business of ‘getting the numbers up’ Cav took an incredible four stages in his first Tour de France. In the space of a couple of weeks, he became one of the
country’s most successful ever Tour riders, all at the age of 23. Heady stuff for British cycling fans. With the blessing of Bob Stapleton and a huge pat on the back from his team, he left
the race before the Alps to fine-tune his training for Beijing.
The Olympics were set to follow the same schedule as they were for Brad: individual pursuit, followed by team pursuit, ending with the madison. The Olympic qualifying was more comfortable than
could be imagined, with rider after rider posting average times, and Brad found himself facing the unheralded Kiwi Hayden Roulston in the final. Unaccountably struck by nerves before the final, he
sought the counsel of Steve Peters, the Team GB psychologist who had been an increasingly reassuring presence in Brad’s preparation, despite his initial resistance to the idea. Peters
reminded him of a theory that would later become a mantra for Dave Brailsford’s Sky team: control the controllables. Don’t worry about Roulston, you can’t affect his ride. You
know that you are a faster pursuiter than him. You know that all you have to do to beat him is execute your own plan, and you will be Olympic Champion. Again.
‘Execute’ is a great word to describe what Bradley Wiggins did in that final. He rode exactly as he had intended and extinguished any hopes that the hardy young New Zealander may
have had of dethroning the king. It was another Olympic medal, his fifth, and a second gold. He was starting to be spoken of in the same terms as Steve Redgrave, one of his heroes. It was all a bit
rarefied, and Brad tried to keep his head down as he had in Manchester and ready himself for the team event to follow.
Team GB cruised through the qualifying round, allowing Brad to recover a little from his three individual rides, then lopped a gobstopping whole second off their new world record in the
semi-final. The others may as well have gone home.
Denmark were the opposition for the final, doing their best to avoid looking like the goat tied to the stake in
Jurassic Park
. Only the Team GB quartet themselves knew what they could
do though, and they were only too keen to execute their plan. They took another two seconds off their own newly set world record to be crowned Olympic gold medallists.
World records aren’t beaten as often as one might expect at Olympic Games, the recorded times of less importance than the glory of gold and winning a title. However, when an athlete, or in
this case a team of athletes, have lifted an event to a whole new level of sublime achievement, world records are virtually inescapable. What a performance.
Now Bradley had to battle fatigue – he had pulled out six performances at these Games – to partner the new star of cycling, Mark Cavendish, in the madison. It didn’t go to
plan. Marked tightly again as in Manchester, a combination formed by the experienced Argentinian and Spanish pairs put the GB duo on the back foot. Once again, Wiggins was forced into a mighty
chase, but this time a blend of fatigue and the determination of the other countries doomed it to failure. The dream team finished in the group a lap down on the medallists in ninth spot. Cavendish
was almost alone in a devastating Team GB performance at the Games in leaving the velodrome without a medal, and was seemingly unhappy with what he perceived to be Wiggins’s lacklustre
performance. The ill feeling was not to linger, but it put something of a tarnish on an incredible performance by Great Britain. Somehow they had managed to bring home seven of the ten gold medals
on offer in the velodrome, plus an incredible win by Nicole Cooke under the Great Wall of China in the women’s road race. For his achievements, Brad would receive a CBE to supersede the OBE
that Athens earned him.
Dave Brailsford had surely achieved all that he could in masterminding this unbelievable return, all under the banner of a drug-free culture and public money. Where could he go from here?
The Tour de France start village is like a massive, moveable country town on market day. All the various farmers, producers, traders and hangers-on gather and business is
talked. Or to be more accurate, business is hinted at and skirted round. A rider will chat to a journalist about how he is feeling, what he thinks the rest of the race holds, and where he hopes to
be plying his trade next year, strictly off the record. An older rider will talk to a younger rider about the new team he’s heading to and whether the younger man would like to join him
there, strictly off the record. A younger rider will talk to a retired rider now in management about whether there might be room on his team next season, strictly off the record. A rider in his
thirties will speak to an agent of his acquaintance about contract values and where he might be expected to get the best deal for the following year, strictly off the record.
But the real business is done on the rest day. These days, the Tour de France has two rest days, one more than in former times. It was one of the changes instituted in the wake of successive
drug scandals in an effort to make the race more manageable without recourse to illegal assistance, along with a promise not to hold any more back-to-back 250km mountain stages with eight climbs a
day and that kind of thing.
Most professional cycling teams follow a three-fold programme, meaning that they can have riders competing in up to three different events simultaneously. This means that there are few occasions
when the entire hierarchy of the sport is gathered together at one time. When they do, it’s more often than not at one of the large one-day classics that litter the spring and autumn
calendars. There’s little time to talk at these races as teams jet in, race and jet out again.
The Tour de France is therefore the most productive in terms of talking shops. The riders spend hours alongside each other every day, and though they’re racing, there is often time for a
few words between friends or for new faces to get to know each other. This will often develop into lifelong friendship, as in the early days of the Anglo revolution, when English speakers would
seek each other out for a bit of company in an alien environment. Or even a long-held antipathy, like the one that defined the ‘relationship’ between peers Lance Armstrong and Robbie
McEwen. Lance would allegedly make childish jokes about the Australian for the benefit of his many sycophantic followers, while McEwen would respond with equal maturity that the Texan should
‘Shut yer mouth before I do it for yer’.
All sorts of banter goes on. But the real business is talked on the rest day. With all the riders, managers, agents and press gathered together in a surreal bubble that stays self-contained yet
transports itself hundreds of kilometres daily, it is simply too good an opportunity to be missed.
The press pack on the Tour de France is well named. It can often resemble a pack of dogs scrabbling over scraps. Many of the writers here are freelance, travelling, eating and sleeping as
cheaply as possible while desperately trying to pick up ‘exclusives’ to sell through their meticulously managed network of media outlets. No rumour is too outlandish, no rivalry too
childish, no scandal too petty to report. In the face of such pressure, it’s hardly surprising that so many riders stick to platitudes and clichés in their interviews.