How I Won the Yellow Jumper (32 page)

On tiptoes, peering over the shoulders of the hundreds of people who stood in the way, I strained for a view of the TV pictures.

Wiggins looked fluent, almost comfortable. What right did
he have to be tapping out the rhythm of the mountains alongside men who'd lived at this rarefied altitude all their cycling lives? Wiggins, a man of the aerohelmet and the time-trial bike. A man for pure sustained speed over flat terrain, a track man. He was the lung-busting long-legged champion of the pursuit. He had come from a world of pure speed in the particle accelerator environment of the velodrome, where the passage of bike through air was uninterrupted by either contour or switchback.

None of that bore even a passing resemblance to the slopes of Verbier: pocked and scored tarmac, crumbling in places from last winter's frost, with its accelerations and slacking-off of pace, the road unsettled and unsettling, as sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes violently, the mountain lifted and lowered its gradient like a treadmill set madly to shuffle. It was the sharp end of a Grand Tour in the high mountains and Wiggins was looking at the finishing line.

Suddenly, and with the thrill of recognition, I got it. The noise of the race flying up the mountain was the breaking of a barrier. I had seen, of course, with bewilderment and delight, the emerging domination of Mark Cavendish. I had watched, in Armstrong, the most systematic winner come and go, but this was different. It was possible to identify with this elongated figure suffering his way up into Switzerland. Wiggins spoke a language we understood.

So I stared at the finish line, and closed my eyes briefly as I listened to the commentary. I had a notion of what it might be like back at home, among those who care for the sport, watching on in the front rooms of Mansfield and Morecambe, Welwyn Garden City and Dundee, as ponderous midsummer, post-Wimbledon weather scudded over rows of houses.

We invested, that summer, a little of our pent-up Britishness in Wiggins. A kindling of frustration, a maggot of self-doubt, a chip on the shoulder with a dab of HP Sauce. This was the
baggage he bore on our behalf. He carried with him decades of our pressing noses against the shop window of the Tour de France, watching a perfectly oiled, deeply tanned procession of the more-or-less trustworthy step hard upon their pedals and accelerate away from the rest. The Basques, the Belgians, the Americans, the Italians, the Spanish and even, now and again, the French. They were all players in a game to which we had been invited, but knew from the outset we had not a chance of winning. But now suddenly, and from nowhere, we had Wiggins.

I peered harder still to get a glimpse of the action on the screens. A trio of riders were now closing in on the finish line: Sastre, Evans, Wiggins.

He'd dropped Armstrong.

Suddenly the pictures on the TV cut to a shot of a French reporter starting to conduct an interview with Nicolas Sarkozy. There were howls of anguish from the truck, as Steve realised that we were about to miss the moment we'd been waiting for. In the confusion that followed, the Wiggins group crossed the finish line together, without anyone even bothering to show them.

It had been an astonishing arrogance, a remarkably ill-judged decision. French television had assumed that an interview with their premier would trump anything offered up by the Tour. The most extraordinary part of all of this was that they flicked the switch not just for their own viewers, but across all the networks around the world taking live pictures. Broadcasters who host an event are obliged to supply what is known as a ‘world feed', in which items of parochial interest are excluded and the action is covered in a neutral and non-editorialised way. By and large this is diligently observed by France Télévisions for the duration of the Tour. But this was an unprecedented breach in their code of conduct. It had probably been a mistake, but the fact that it had happened to a Brit
flung us onto a moral high horse, from which it took us days to dismount.

The run-out zone in Verbier was tiny. Barely a hundred yards of tarmac. Wiggins came over the line, rode to the side, almost fell off his bike, but just managed to step off it before collapsing to the ground.

There he sat, while all hell broke loose around him. Eventually he was offered a drink, a towel and a way out. He got to his feet again, like Bambi on ice, and clambered over a railing into an enclosure reserved entirely for Vittel, the mineral water company. He stumbled towards a patch of tarmac in the shadow of their truck. There was an industrial fridge, full of cold water bottles, and two French students on a summer job handing them out. But, rather than making sure that Wiggins was offered a bottle, they started berating him instead for simply being there. I gazed at the scene, wondering if they even knew who he was.

We got ready to do a live interview as soon as he had composed himself. While he sat wrapped in towels and slumped in a canvas fold-out chair, Woody started rethreading hundreds of metres of cable from the truck through all the chaos to the tiny corner of Switzerland where Bradley Wiggins sat, after the greatest ride of his life.

To recall in detail what he said wouldn't do it justice. I held the microphone and he spoke. It was as simple as that. I prompted, and he spoke again, fully, frankly, and with great pride. He managed, even at that rarefied height and so close to the event, to make clear his understanding of his achievement. Of all the interviews I've ever been fortunate enough to conduct, this gripped me the most. It was a rare privilege.

‘Just wait for the time trial in Annecy. It's Wiggo-Time!'

The tone of his voice, the look in his eye. That all came back to me when I found that crumpled-up piece of paper, still grimy from the finish line in Verbier.

However, third place overall was to be his high-water mark. A week later, he spoke to us again, on the cobbles of the Champs-Elysées. This time it was a matter of seconds after finishing the Tour in fourth place in Paris. He was reunited with his wife Cath and his two young children and, after the briefest of hugs with them, he did his duty once more to ITV. His face was lined with smuts from the exhaust pipes of the Parisian streets.

He looked, more than anything else, knackered.

‘I am aware of what I've achieved. To equal the great Robert Millar. To go better than the even greater Tom Simpson. I know what I've done.'

His words came slowly. I imagined that the eight victorious laps of the cobbled Champs-Elysées had given him time enough to judge the sentiment correctly.

It was life-changing for Wiggins. Even if he did know what he had achieved, I doubt very much if he knew what was about to happen to him.

The following year was another story altogether, whose telling would contrast in every imaginable way from the innocent pleasure of 2009. That's for another day.

Those three weeks are the ones I choose to remember. They made him a millionaire. They gave him considerable fame. They bestowed on him a pressure, that proved to be a bit corrosive. And they gave me my finest memories of the Tour. Remember what the piece of paper said.

Contador. Armstrong. Wiggins.

There are two rest days on the Tour de France. The first comes after nine straight days of racing and travelling. The second, seven days later. They are loved, craved and abused; the Tour's release valves. Never mind the riders: rest days are sacred for all of us.

Sometimes they can catch you unawares. The pace and the intensity of the Tour carries you blindly and unknowingly over a precipice of work and into the thin air of a day off, like a cartoon character chased off the edge of a cliff to find his legs still whirring madly beneath him. It can be odd adjusting to the sudden need to do nothing much.

Generally speaking, rest days are for strolling, chatting, drinking and sweating in a launderette. They are characterised by one consistent feature, no matter whether they happen to take place up a mountain or in an industrial estate: you can take your accreditation off.

It comes as a shock to realise that it is possible to walk the planet, drink coffee, go shopping, and converse with other members of the human race without the need to be accredited. Anyone who has ever needed to be accredited for any length of time longer than a week will never again vote for a politician who believes in the introduction of compulsory ID cards. It is the slow death of the soul, brought about by a small square of laminated card with a blurred photo.

Unencumbered, then, by the need to prove the validity of your existence at every turn, the day stretches before you, unruffled, peaceful, empty. Empty, that is, except for the need to find a launderette. This is as much a part of our Tour de France as a ride up the Champs-Elysées is to the real one. Although we are pretty well versed nowadays in how to operate the machines, dispense soap powder and fold the tumble-dried clothes, it is still vital to get there early. A sizeable town, like Tarbes, for example, at the feet of the Pyrenees, may have 80,000 inhabitants, but it might only boast three or four launderettes. Not enough for the armies of Tour people about to descend on them, each with a black bin bag full of malodorous clothing slung over their back like a sack of coal.

The best part of a morning can sometimes pass while you wait for the staff of the PMU caravan float to wash their green jumpsuits. And while you wait, you have to sit tight in the sauna of the launderette for fear of losing your place in the queue. The hours pass with idle chat among the international hodge-podge of half-familiar faces. People pop in, who you know you should know, but know equally well that you don't. After bantering briefly about the hilariously long nature of the Tour de France, and cracking the usual half-serious joke about the riders having it easy, an uneasy silence often settles on the surroundings. Gradually you become aware that the only thing you really have in common is the fact of your accreditation. Take that away, and a strange disconnection takes over. It's like seeing your workmates naked. It can be a little awkward.

Sometimes, though, it works differently. I remember once sitting on the terrace of a very humble little bar in Grenoble while my laundry gyrated itself into health. I was sharing a mid-morning beer with one of the army of Tour de France media officials who police our activities on the Tour. Yet, he was off duty. It was one of those situations where the beer, the sunshine and the soothing realisation that no finish line had been drawn anywhere on the tarmac that day plunged us
instantly into a conversation far deeper and more intimate than the situation warranted. The act of non-accreditation-wearing released us both from our regular professional inhibitions.

He confided in me his distaste for the Tour, his loathing of cycling, his passion for music and desire to travel to Africa to escape from the general spiritual decay of modern France. A virtual stranger to me before I set down a
pression
in front of him, he was now opening up in unexpected ways. A glance at his watch halfway through our second beer, as he was showing me photos of his girlfriend who was at art school in Rome, told him that his spin cycle was through. And that was that.