Bradley Wiggins (28 page)

Chris Froome presses all the way out into the headwind that greets him on the wide roads out of Bonneval before speeding along the narrower more protected final part of the race into Chartres,
the city’s bizarre lopsided cathedral spires guiding him in along the Eure. He reaches the packed finish line in a time 34 seconds less than it took Luis Leon Sanchez to cover those 53.5km.
Nobody else has completed it anything like as quickly as these two and there is only one man left to arrive.

The bad news for Froome is that this last man will arrive very soon indeed.

Bradley Wiggins’s languid style in the time trial is deceptive. He sits so still, his back so flat, he could be completing one of Team Sky’s many wind tunnel tests designed to
unearth the best equipment and position for such an event, rather than riding towards victory in the world’s greatest bike race. After 14km, he is twelve seconds ahead of his teammate Chris
Froome. After 30km, he has found an advantage of 54 seconds. By the finish, it is a crushing one minute and sixteen seconds difference between the two men. He has ridden this course at the cool
speed of 50kph.

It is rare to see a proper victory salute in a time trial, but there are several mitigating factors in play today. Firstly, only the last man off can ever truly know if he has won a time trial.
Secondly, winning a second stage in the Tour de France is a victory worth celebrating, as the demonstrative Thomas Voeckler, Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish have all shown in the last three weeks.
Becoming the first ever British winner of the Tour de France probably counts for something, too.

Bradley Wiggins stands on his pedals and thumps the air like Ayrton Senna at Monaco. The emotion so rarely seen while his face is concealed behind helmet and sunglasses is raw and available for
the whole world to see. And make no mistake, the whole world is watching. Bradley Wiggins has won the Tour de France.

It is clear that the emotion had started before he even reached the finish line. ‘In the last 15 to 20km I knew what my advantage was and I was thinking about my wife and kids, my mum, all
of the people who’ve helped me get to where I am. I know it sounds cheesy, but I was thinking about the fact that I’ve spent my whole life working to get to this point. This is the
defining moment.’

Among a host of people that have played their part in reaching that defining moment, Dave Brailsford is entitled to feel a little proprietary about the success. This whole journey began as
something of a pipe dream for him and Shane Sutton, chewing the fat up on the bleachers of Manchester Velodrome years ago.

‘Bradley’s had an amazing race and what a way to demonstrate he is the best rider in the race by finishing with a time trial like that. I’m incredibly proud of both him and
Chris as well as every single person in the team. It’s never been done before by a British rider, or by a British team – it’s a very special day.’

THE TWIN THREADS OF
these fascinating stories were coming together. From the apartment in Ghent to the flats in Paddington. From the Hayes Bypass to
Herne Hill. From the Leicester track to the velodrome in Havana. From Kuala Lumpur to Sydney. From Athens to Beijing. From an OBE to a CBE. From 78kg to 68kg. From the London
Grand Depart
to Mont Ventoux. And now from Liège to Paris. Bradley Wiggins’s journey has been the stuff that dreams are made of, full of improbabilities, disappointments and unbridled success.

On the eve of his first Tour ride in 2006, Brad had said, ‘I’d be gutted not to finish it. It’s a race you simply have to finish. Places in the Tour are priceless so I might
only ever get one chance to ride, and it’s one of the few races you can look back on at the end of your career and be happy merely to have completed the course.’

Six years on and he is finishing the Tour, but not as an also-ran, as the winner.

Sir Chris Hoy and the Olympic track squad were pausing in their training each day to watch Brad’s progression to Paris. The time trial in Chartres drew the loudest cheers. They knew their
erstwhile teammate was going to pull off the unthinkable and be the first British winner of a race that has been run since 1903.

‘The greatest achievement by any British sportsperson – ever,’ was how Sir Chris described Brad’s performance.

In the
Daily Mail
, Bradley Wiggins was held up as a beacon of British sportsmanship and success. David Jones wrote: ‘Here is a man who inner-city children can truly relate to. He
had a difficult start in life, was disinterested in school, and admits he came dangerously close to going off the rails. Instead, he got on his bike, spent countless lonely, gruelling hours
developing the supreme fitness and iron willpower required to win the world’s toughest race, and pedalled his way into the history books.’

The same paper reached for the book of superlatives and concentrated on one in particular: ‘Ever. It certainly is a big word. Just the two syllables but huge in sport. Hugely misused, too.
The best ever, the first ever. That last word is superfluous. We mean the best, we mean the first. Yet when Bradley Wiggins made his way up the Champs-Élysées, each pumping limb its
own little revolution, ever has never sounded more appropriate. Bradley Wiggins is the first British winner of the Tour de France. Ever. Bradley Wiggins is the greatest British cyclist. Ever.
Bradley Wiggins may well be the finest British sportsman. Ever.’

David Cameron and Nick Clegg were both apparently backing moves to knight him. Well, he already had an OBE and a CBE, and Sir Chris Hoy said he was the greatest of all time . . . Where else
could they go with Brad? Intensely proud of representing his country, ‘Sir Bradley Wiggins’ still has an establishment ring to it that sounds awkward. But, in many ways, one can think
of no more fitting accolade.

The Prime Minister, never one to miss a chance to align himself with a bit of success, said, ‘I am, like everyone in the country, absolutely delighted. Bradley Wiggins has scaled one of
the great heights of British sporting achievement. To be the first British person in 109 years to win the Tour de France is an immense feat of physical and mental ability and aptitude. I think the
whole country wants to say, “Well done, brilliant.”’

PR guru Max Clifford waded in to ensure himself some column inches by trying to assess Brad’s financial worth. ‘It’s an amazing achievement and of course it’s a great
story, with his dad and all that went before. It’s a real triumph out of real tragedy, and we love those kind of stories. The whole of Europe is at his feet. In the next couple of years we
are talking £10 million or £20 million.’

Brad would be interested to read that, especially after his first brush with success earned him no more than a £35,000 contract to ride a bike for a year. He’d be sure to work a
little bit harder to turn this one into a drop of cold hard cash for his family.

The
Independent
declared Bradley ‘King of France’ and noted that ‘what is totally new, also, was to see a triple Olympic track champion win the Tour de
France.’

The
Star
looked for a way to link the win with the Olympics that were starting in less than a week. ‘Olympic chiefs were last night urged to let British Tour de France hero
Bradley Wiggins light the opening ceremony cauldron. His incredible victory has sparked calls for him to be awarded a knighthood and made BBC Sports Personality of the Year. And fans demanded he be
given the honour of firing up the Olympic cauldron at Friday’s opening ceremony.’

Bradley himself is circumspect and relaxed. He’s had a long time to think about this. ‘Going back as a child, watching the Tour on telly from the age of ten, eleven, twelve, all
through the Indurain years, dreaming that one day you would win the Tour,’ he said at a news conference, ‘but you never really think it’s possible. What chance does a kid growing
up in central London ever have to win the Tour?

‘I’m determined to not let it change me,’ he went on. ‘I’m not into celebrity life or all that rubbish. So much of British culture is built around people who are
famous for doing nothing. I’m still Bradley Wiggins. At the end of the day, I have to go home and clean up dog muck. At the end of the day, it’s just sport. There will be more Tour
winners in the future.’

‘There is a set of railings, about six or eight of them, just before the entrance to the Place de la Concorde, about a kilometre from the Tour de France finish on the
Champs-Élysées. I stood on those railings with my brother and my mum on 25 July 1993 watching the Tour de France go past.’

One might think that Great Britain’s history, or lack of history, at this venerable old race might mean a lack of understanding of what it means: the cultural weight, the social power of
the Tour de France. A country raised on dashed footballing hopes, Wimbledon near-misses, some Olympic achievements and the odd cricketing or rugby success would surely have no place in its hearts
for a French national celebration?

As Bradley Wiggins so beautifully evokes in his
Guardian
column, the Tour de France means a great deal to a lot of British people. Football stadiums may be full with multitudes paying
the wages of the super-rich every weekend. Millions of satellite dishes zing with the pictures beamed in from the MCG or Newlands or even Trent Bridge. Twickenham resounds not just to the roar of
those inside when Chris Ashton swallow-dives over for a try, but thousands of pubs across the land. And the boundaries of Henman Hill can be redrawn to encompass the outline of this sceptred isle
when Andy Murray is on Centre Court. But for more of us than most would guess, the Champs-Élysées is where our sporting hearts lie.

And it looks as though every single one of us is in Paris today.

Just like Brad, brother Ryan and mum Linda in 1993, British cycling fans have hopped on the Eurostar, driven down to the Chunnel, used up their
Sun
ferry vouchers or jetted out of
Stansted to watch the arrival of the Tour on to the neat cobbles of downtown Paris. Only there’s a few more now than when they were here.

The circuit around the Champs-Élysées and the Place de la Concorde is about 7km. Let’s say that there is room for three people along every metre of barrier along that course.
Just for fun, let’s pluck a number out of the air and assume that the crowd is an average of six deep. We won’t try to count the people in grandstands or hospitality areas or hanging
out of hotel windows, just like we won’t take into account the crowd-free bit through the tunnel. I make that, at a conservative estimate, about 126,000 people on the barriers. Another rough
guess based purely on the draped Union Jacks, mod target T-shirts and fake sideburns would make about a third of them British. There must be a lot of Sunday drivers in the shires thinking,
‘Where the hell are all the cyclists today?’

The Tour de France may be won for Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky, but there’s still work to be done. One man has won this traditional closing stage for the last three years straight, and
he’d sincerely like to make it four. His name is Mark Cavendish.

He has been able to call upon the full might of HTC or its various incarnations to lead him to those three emphatic victories, something he has acknowledged has not always been possible this
year at Team Sky. Today though, there is no doubt that the entire machine will be placed at his disposal as Brailsford’s boys look to end their dream race in style.

The dead corner under the Arc de Triomphe where the bunch turns back on itself to race back down the other side of the famous old boulevard ought to be renamed Hyde Park Corner for the
afternoon, such is the depth and volume of the British support. Though the roars of approval are huge around the whole lap, the British riders glance up with a grin on the far side of the turn at
the sheer amusement of the situation.

Nobody ever seems to win on the Champs-Élysées from a breakaway, but that doesn’t stop some optimistic types from trying their luck, even if it gives them nothing more than
an opportunity to show the folks back home that they’re still in the race. Jens Voigt, the perennial evergreen chancer, is one of the more successful optimists and has even pulled off the odd
win here and there over his fascinating nineteen-year top-level career, a couple of stages in this old race among them. If anybody can pull it off, it’s him, and he’s still in front of
the charging bunch when they hear the bell that tells them there is only one of the eight laps of the finishing circuit remaining.

When sprinters want to win, it’s hard to deny them. Team Sky are lining it out and they’ve got assistance from Sagan’s Liquigas-Cannondale, Goss’s Orica-GreenEDGE,
Farrar’s Garmin-Sharp and Greipel’s Lotto Belisol. Voigt is captured honourably with 3km remaining and then it’s flat out to the line.

There is the usual battling for pole position, universally presumed to be Cavendish’s wheel. The World Champion is glued to his last lead-out man, Edvald Boasson Hagen, the Norwegian
having blossomed into the role over the course of this race. What they really need is somebody blessed with a world-class pursuiter or time triallist’s talent to tow them into the final few
hundred metres. Where on earth would they find somebody like that?