Bradley Wiggins: My Time (16 page)

I trained down there for a couple of weeks and in late January we flew back to London for the team launch. We were staying at a hotel in Cobham; that was the first time I saw Sean again and that was where it all came unstuck. He’d just got back from the Tour Down Under in Australia, found out there was no money because the expected sponsorship hadn’t come through, and the team was dead in the water.

Luckily for me, the GB squad took me back, but I didn’t see Sean again until April when we went to the Circuit des Mines in France; he was with a little squad called iteamNova and I remember chatting with him about McCartney.

In 2003 he signed with CSC as
directeur sportif
, and I saw him at Paris–Roubaix; I told him I’d finished 49th the week before in the Tour of Flanders. I remember him saying to me, ‘That’s a good ride. If you’ve got the legs to do that in Flanders you’ve definitely got the legs to do that in Paris–Roubaix.’ I
started
drifting a bit really between about 2004 and 2005 when I had my years at Crédit Agricole, not doing much in terms of results, but I’d chat and have a laugh with him all the time when I’d see him at races. I never asked him, but I remember feeling almost embarrassed about myself and my performances. I’d be there going out the back of the bunch in the Tour of Germany and he would come past in the team car and I’d think, ‘I wonder what he thinks of me now.’ So we’ve gone full circle: from this kid he says is going to be good one day, through those years when I was massively underperforming, having been an Olympic champion, and then to being favourite for the Tour de France and the Olympic time trial, all in the space of ten or twelve years. It’s phenomenal. It’s been an epic cycle.

But Sean hasn’t changed through all those years. He’s still the same as a
directeur sportif
as he was when he was a rider. He never talks about himself. He was legendary as one of the hard men of the sport, but if someone’s pulled out of a race because they’ve got cold or it was too hard, he’ll never say, ‘Oh, when I was riding, I would never have done that.’ He’s always sympathetic. He’ll say, ‘OK, you know how you feel.’ He’s always got a lot of empathy with everyone.

It’s a big job being a
directeur sportif
; in the old days the DS ran everything at a team, from budgets to training and tactics. Now, mainly, a DS has to plan the tactics beforehand, make sure the riders are fully supported while the race is on – that means keeping them fed and watered on the move – and figure out the tactics on the hoof as the race unfolds. I remember talking to Dave Brailsford about Sean; I said, ‘He’s
bloody
good at his job’ and Dave replied, ‘He’s unbelievable. You don’t realise how good he is until you are in the car with him on one of these stages.’ Sean is capable of doing everything at once: driving the car, talking to us on the radio, talking to someone else on the phone, handing out bottles and gels as the guys come back for them. In a time trial he has a list of things you’re coming up to, he’s got this all written down: ‘Descending through a village, there’s a sharp right-hander, eighty, a hundred metres to go before this village there’s a slight pothole on the left.’ He’s like a vocal GPS system for the riders.

Sean is the best DS I’ve ever had. He’s unbelievable. He goes to extremes for us, taking time out to go and look over the stages like he did with me in 2012. He shows as much attention to detail in what he does as we do in what we’re doing on the bike. He absolutely loves it so I can’t imagine what he felt being a British DS in a British team with a British rider going for the Tour de France this year, and following me in the race that he loves the most, those time trial stages. I think he really gets a kick out of it, because time trialling has been his passion for the last forty years or more.

As a DS, he’s just completely on the ball. There are times when crucial decisions need to be made on the road – such as, shall we ride behind a break or not? – and there might be a disagreement. At times like this, Sean will make the call and put his balls on the line. It’s never about him. There was one occasion I saw a while back, in a race where he made the snap decision not to stop for a rider after a puncture; Sean felt he needed to be up the road with the front group as soon as
possible
because we had a rider there who looked good for the overall, but who had no support. He took a lot of flak from the one who had punctured, because the rider felt he could have won the stage, but in the meeting Sean stood up and said, ‘I know you’re pissed off at me but I did what I thought I had to do at the time. You’re going to have to deal with that, and you can continue to be pissed off with me, but I made a decision at the time in the middle of all this madness and I think I did the right thing.’ Where a lot of people would have apologised, he didn’t give a monkey’s whether the rider liked him or not. He just wanted to do his job. The episode was over and it was time to move on.

There are a lot of DSs who will stand behind the finish line jumping up and down when one of their riders wins something, but you won’t even see Sean. He is happy to spend three extra days on the road driving home from a Dauphiné or a Paris–Nice, to check out three of the Tour stages that are in that area. He’ll stay locally, ride the stages on his bike, and then he’s got all that information for us. But he’ll never tell you he’s done all that. There are times when he hardly sees his own family for months, but his life is cycling and he loves it.

There are so many stories about Sean: he has a massive reputation. Someone told me how when Lance Armstrong first rode with Motorola in the early 1990s he was terrified of Sean. Our time trial coach at Sky, Bobby Julich, told me another one like that. He turned up at Motorola, newly turned pro, and they were at the Tour of the Mediterranean. It must have been ’95 or ’96 and he was rooming with Sean. He was
so
scared of Sean – you know, the legendary Sean Yates. Bobby was reading his book in the hotel room and Sean was eating garlic, which was one of the things he was reputed to do. Nothing to do with Dracula; it’s supposed to ward off colds. Bobby was frightened to do anything, so he was lying there in his tracksuit, with his book, at ten o’clock at night, and Sean decided to go to bed all of a sudden: ‘Goodnight’, and he turned the telly and the lights off. Bobby was lying there and he hadn’t even got his pyjamas on or brushed his teeth. Sean had just turned all the lights off and Bobby was still reading and was terrified; he had no idea what to do. So he put his book down and lay there for a few minutes and thought, ‘What shall I do, put a light on, wake this guy up?’ He said he scrabbled around in the dark, got his pyjamas on, went into the toilet, slowly shut the door, brushed his teeth, came back out and got into bed, all as quietly as he could, and lay there trying to go to sleep for an hour because he wasn’t tired. He said he expected Sean to get up as abruptly in the morning as he’d turned the lights out at night. He thought it would be ‘Get up, out of bed, lights all on, I’m getting up,’ but he woke up and all he noticed was the hotel-room door quietly shutting. He realised that Sean had just gone to breakfast and then it dawned on him: Sean had got up really quietly, gone to the bathroom, got dressed in total silence and gone out. He said it was just bizarre. There he was, petrified of Sean and yet out Sean had gone, clearly making a massive effort not to wake him up.

There’s another story about when they were riding team time trials at Motorola. Sean was legendary on those stages;
the
other guys used to be really afraid of how hard he would make it for them. In one of them, Andy Hampsten, who was the Motorola leader at the time, wasn’t able to come through. Every time Sean did his turn and put the gas on a little, Andy would be screaming at him to slow down. Eventually Sean cracked; he turned round and said, ‘Fucking Andy Pandy’, and from then on that’s what he kept calling him.

There was a tale George Hincapie told me about the first time he raced with Sean at Motorola, in the Tour DuPont in the USA. It was probably 1995, Sean was riding on the front, the pace was full on up these rolling hills, and George was struggling a bit, maybe forty, fifty riders back in the field. He said at one point he looked up and he could see Sean peeling back off the front and coming back down the line. Sean saw George and he said, ‘Hey boy, what the hell are you doing there? Get to the front you …’ And the thing was that George didn’t argue with him, he just did it. Sean had that authority and respect from everyone. He led by example. But he’s not an intimidating person at all, in spite of that aura he had.

Sean never tries to push himself forward; he never does what some former riders do, which is to tell you how good they were in their day. He tells his stories and he’s clearly proud of what he did, he really is, but he doesn’t try to put himself in the limelight. I know that everything I’m doing he would love to be doing too, but not in a way where it’s about him. He would love to have been out there with us, riding on the front at Paris–Nice, Romandie and Dauphiné, the way he did at 7-Eleven and Motorola.

When he does his job he just wants to see the riders
succeed
. He’s never critical. All he asks of people as a
directeur sportif
is 100 per cent commitment, to give their all, and as long as they do that he’s happy. As we went into the mayhem of the Tour de France, it was Sean who would be guiding us from the Team Sky support car. And I wouldn’t have asked for anybody else in that front seat.

The particular feeling of confidence I have had in my best years is a hard thing to explain. It’s not confidence that you are unbeatable but confidence that you have done the work to the maximum of your ability, and all you have to do now is empty the tank, be the best athlete you can, and accept what you get from it at the end. I knew coming up to the Tour that what was ahead of me was not going to be pleasant, but it was what needed to be done. It was certainly not going to be nice. In fact, it was going to be horrible. There was going to be no showboating on climbs; it was going to be a matter of suffering in the last kilometre of a mountaintop finish when the guys around me were getting dropped.

I knew I had done the work that would enable me to do that. Going into a race knowing you’ve got the form is completely different to when you don’t know and you’re just hoping you’re going to do well. The interest from the media was quite enjoyable at times in 2012; I kept reminding myself that I was the favourite for the Tour and everyone was saying that. There’s not many people who go into the Tour de France with everyone saying they are odds-on to win. It’s quite a big mantle to wear because you have to deliver, but I was confident we could go on as we had all year. I was trying to
enjoy
that experience as much as possible rather than let it get to me and say, ‘Uh oh, I don’t want to be the favourite.’ You have to accept it and get on with it. It wasn’t going to change how we were going to race. The year before I was trying to shrug it off a little bit; I got a bit defensive when I was asked about getting on the podium – I’d had so much of it in 2010. It was the total opposite this year: everything was based on logic, evidence, rational thinking and questioning. So if you’re asked, ‘How do you feel about being favourite for the Tour?’ you can only say, ‘Well, I have won all these races this year. It’s reasonable to say.’

I felt relaxed and businesslike. There were good reasons to be confident: the team we had built, the way the guys in that team had been riding, the fact that Andy Schleck wouldn’t be at the Tour and neither would Alberto Contador who had been banned since February, which meant that there were two less riders to worry about. All those factors add up and give you greater confidence and belief. They don’t create pressure. I never started thinking, ‘Oh no, everyone’s going to be watching me.’ Pressure is what comes when you realise you haven’t done the work and think, ‘I may fail at this.’

Things had gone just as well back in 2009, but there was a big difference in 2012. Three years before I had nothing to lose because nothing was expected of me; in 2012 the stakes were far higher. In 2009 I could have cracked on the Ventoux the day before Paris, finished 9th overall, and still have run top ten in the Tour, which would have been fantastic. I was in that relaxed state of mind you have where there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. By the last week of that Tour I
was
going to finish top ten in the Tour whatever happened; no British cyclist had managed that since Robert Millar in 1989. Now, however, we were trying to win the Tour. Finishing 2nd would have been a fantastic result, finishing on the podium at the Tour would have been great, but we were trying to win the Tour. There was a hell of a lot more to lose; if I flopped the inevitable questions would have been asked – Could you have done less in March? Did you peak too early? Is that the reason why it didn’t work?

What lay ahead in the next three weeks was completely different to what I’d had to do in Beijing. Racing on the track is largely a numbers game, certainly in the timed events and sprints where Great Britain excels. You know if you have a certain power output in training, that that will give you a certain time for a certain distance on race day and you can win, because no one else out there can do 4min13sec for a 4,000m pursuit, for example. It was the same with the team pursuit, and it’s similar for Sir Chris Hoy, Jason Kenny and Philip Hindes in the team sprint. They know the time that means a medal.

The data we had been working on for road racing in 2012 was not power output or speed, but VAM (
see here
). The average VAM for a big climb on the Tour in 2010 was 1,530–1,600: 1,530 on Plateau de Beille, 1600 on l’Alpe d’Huez.

VAM is a measurement that has to be treated carefully. It depends on the length and steepness of a climb – a shorter, steeper climb, such as the summit finishes in the 2012 Vuelta, will have a higher VAM, well over 2,000m/hour – but
it
depends on wind, heat, altitude and whether you are solo or in a group. What can be said is that in comparable conditions for the same climbs, VAMs are lower than in the recent past, pointing to cleaner cycling. On the penultimate day of the Dauphiné, on the Col du Joux Plane, we had been climbing at about 1,630 VAM. The critical thing for us is that there aren’t many riders these days who can go that fast, and there weren’t many who had been able to stay with us on that stage. So that gave me confidence that physically I was in the right place at that time.