Cyclopedia (51 page)

Born:
Ghent, Belgium, April 28, 1980

 

Major wins:
Olympic pursuit champion 2004, 2008; Olympic team pursuit champion 2008; world pursuit champion 2003, 2007, 2008; world team pursuit champion 2007, 2008; world Madison champion (with Mark Cavendish) 2008; world junior pursuit champion 1998

 

Nicknames:
the Twig, Wiggo

 

Further reading:
In Pursuit of Glory
, Bradley Wiggins, Orion, 2010

 

A mainstay of the GREAT BRITAIN Olympic TRACK RACING team who won two gold medals in Beijing and then equaled the British record set by ROBERT MILLAR when he finished fourth in the 2009 TOUR DE FRANCE. Wiggins is a gangling Londoner—although born in Ghent—with a penchant for the Mod culture of the 1960s, the music of punk rockers the Jam, and a collection of electric guitars. He is also one of the finest impersonators in professional cycling: his imitation of fellow 2009 Tour star MARK CAVENDISH is particularly hilarious.

Wiggins's estranged Australian father Garry was a top professional on the SIX-DAY RACING scene in the 1980s; by 1998, Bradley had surpassed his father by taking the junior world pursuit title, and in 2000 at the age of 20 he won an Olympic bronze medal in the team pursuit. The world pursuit title followed in 2003, and in 2004 he took three medals in the Athens Olympics: gold in the individual pursuit, silver in the team event, and bronze in the Madison. No Briton had achieved anything to match this since the 1960s, but Wiggins received little recognition at home; his sense of deflation was such that he turned to drink for several months, getting through his entire collection of Belgian beer and spending much time in the pub.

He made his Tour de France debut in 2006 and rode strongly in the 2007 race, coming close to winning a time-trial stage, but had his sights fixed on defending his Olympic title in Beijing. He took three gold medals (individual and team pursuits, Madison) in the 2008 world championships and followed up with two golds in the pursuits in China despite suffering from a severe virus shortly before departure.
The following year, having got the Games out of his system, he astonished most of European cycling by riding an almost perfect Tour, struggling only on the penultimate day's mountaintop finish at Mont Ventoux and finishing just 32 seconds behind third-placed LANCE ARMSTRONG, who tipped him as a possible future winner. It was an improvement that hinged on two things: weight loss and his need to find new goals after his Olympic triumphs.

By the end of the season he was the object of one of cycling's biggest transfer battles between Team Sky and his 2009 backer Garmin, eventually moving to the fledgling British squad.

In 2008 he published his MEMOIRS,
In Pursuit of Glory
. The title was thought up by Brad and his wife, Cath, and the book delves deep into his relations with his father and his problems post-Athens.

WOMEN
At the start of the cycling era, the new pastime played a key role in getting women out of the kitchen, away from chaperones, and out of constraining multiple petticoats and corsets into “rational” dress. Surprizing as it may seem now, the CYCLISTS' TOURING CLUB was involved in at least one case in the 1890s where a female member was refused entry to the women's bar in a hotel because she was wearing “rational” dress—in essence baggy long trousers—rather than a skirt.

“For women, the bicycle became a vehicle of liberation from domesticity and isolation,” wrote the historian Jim McGurn in
On Your Bicycle
(John Murray, 1980). There were disputes over the pros and cons of rational dress and long skirts, and public resistance in remote parts to the former; it remained an issue until the 1920s.

Women began racing soon after the first men's race in 1869 but the cycling authorities have consistently failed to keep up with their progress. There were early records set by the American Jan Lindsey and Germany's Marguerite Gast, while the best early women's track racer was Hélène Dutrieu of France (see opposite), who set an hour record of 39.190 km; the infamous “Choppy” Warburton (see also SOIGNEUR) had female protégés such as “Lisette”—Amélie le Gall—who won an early world championship in 1896.

In GREAT BRITAIN, the Rosslyn Ladies' Cycling Club was founded in 1922. Marguerite Wilson was British cycling's first woman star, a record-breaker who rode as a professional in the 1930s, breaking every women's record on the books including the END TO END and 1,000 miles. It was not until the 1950s that women's racing took off again; the Women's Cycle Racing Association was founded in 1956 and began running a national road race championship. Eileen Sheridan won the first women's BBAR and 100 title in 1950. (The
first women's national TIME TRIAL championship was the 25 held in 1944).

While the UCI began holding a women's road race world title in 1958 (the first held in Reims, France, won by Elsy Jacobs of Luxembourg) under pressure from Eileen Gray, one of the first women to race in British national colors in 1946, they did so against a certain amount of opposition, and women's racing truly began to gather pace only in the 1970s and 1980s. That was thanks partly to an upsurge in interest in the US after the foundation of the Coors Classic, and by the end of the 1980s most of the best women's races were in North America.

The women's TOUR DE FRANCE started in 1984 and was run concurrently with the men's race but that came to an end in 1989 and a similar event known as La Grande Boucle Féminine is run by a different company, but lasts less than a week. The toughest races on the women's calendar are the Tour de l'Aude and GIRO D'ITALIA, while the women's World Cup includes scaled down CLASSICS such as Flèche Wallonne and the Tour of FLANDERS. The money available in women's road racing is minimal compared to what is on offer for men; the disparity is far greater than, say, in tennis.

MOUNTAIN-BIKING has played a key role, because women competed on equal terms from the sport's beginnings in the 1970s and the sport did not have road racing's tradition of discrimination. That meant that when mountain-biking took off in the early 1990s women such as Britain's Caroline Alexander and the Americans Juli Furtado and Missy Giove were able to make a far better living than if they had been racing on the road.

On the other hand, questions about women's cycling were still being raised in the early 1990s, when there was debate about the length and toughness of women's road racing—the UCI felt distances should be restrained, while some races such as the Ore–Ida Classic in the US deliberately went outside the rules.

Women's racing in the OLYMPIC GAMES began only in 1984 and in the Commonwealth Games as late as 1990. At the time of the Beijing Olympics the British sprinter Victoria Pendleton rightly complained that women were discriminated against in track racing, with only three events to the men's seven. This will be put right in 2012, but is many years overdue.

 

(SEE ALSO
BERYL BURTON
,
NICOLE COOKE
,
JEANNIE LONGO
,
ALFONSINA STRADA
)

Cycling as a world sport was not unified in the 19th century but the dominant organization was Britain's National Cycle Union, strictly an amateur body. Their national title races were considered unofficial world championships. The first was a mile race at Wolverhampton in 1874, won by JAMES MOORE, while in 1879 a long-distance race was organized, lasting 26 hours and won by Charles Terront of France. When the NCU helped to found the International Cycling Association, that body ran the first official world championships, held in Chicago in 1893 to coincide with a world exposition. There was limited participation from outside the US, which took two of the three gold medals.

The Italians began campaigning for a world road-race championship after the First World War, and an amateur title was inaugurated in 1921. The French Grand Prix Wolber was considered an unofficial professional world title until the UCI ran its first professional road race title in 1927, with pros and amateurs riding together on the Nurburgring in Germany. The winner was ALFREDO BINDA of Italy. The UCI has been slow to promote women's racing and there was no world title for women until 1958, when
the winner was Elsy Jacobs of Luxembourg.