Bradley Wiggins: My Time (19 page)

To join the handful of Britons who have worn yellow – Tom Simpson, Chris Boardman, Sean Yates, David Millar – was a big moment and I knew what it meant. I phoned Cath,
phoned
my mum; there’s not a lot to say other than ‘Did you watch it?’ I’d never had a yellow jersey in my hands; I’d never been in a team that took the jersey. I didn’t take it in my stride. I was trying to soak that up, the whole day: regardless of what happened in the rest of the Tour, I’d taken the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. You’ll be able to say that for the rest of your life when you go down the café on your bike: ‘I took the yellow jersey in the Tour.’

At times I’d reflected on 2009, thinking, ‘I could have led the Tour for a week or more back then, we messed up and I may never have the chance to take the jersey again.’ I had come 3rd in the prologue in Monaco; all we had to do was keep it together until the team time trial, and if we could beat Astana, I’d get the jersey. Alberto Contador had been 1sec ahead of me in the prologue, he missed the split on the second stage and if I’d made the split I’d have taken the jersey and probably held it until the end of the second week. I’d have had the jersey at the Tour for ten days. I always thought I’d missed an opportunity there.

Cycling is a unique sport. It’s the only one where this idea exists, that it’s an achievement in itself to take the race lead in the biggest event even just for a day. Wearing yellow in the Tour is not like leading the Premiership, or being in front at the Masters for a day, or first man in the London Marathon at the five-mile point. I remember watching Sean take it in 1994 at Rennes, when he held it for only one day. I was fourteen, seeing just what it meant, not even winning the yellow jersey at the end of the Tour, but just wearing it for one day. What makes the yellow
jersey
special is that you get to keep it for the rest of your life. You can put it in a picture frame or whatever you choose to do with it to remind you: I held the yellow jersey in the Tour de France.

CHAPTER 12

IN THE FIRING LINE

MY FIRST STAGE
in the yellow jersey was a hard day into Switzerland, up and down constantly, finishing at the little town of Porrentruy. Physically, it included the hardest point of the whole Tour for me. It was a short day, just under 160km, so the race was on from the off, but the support I had from the boys was unbelievable, particularly Christian Knees. We hit the last climb before the drop to the finish and Lotto really pushed us hard. Jurgen Van Den Broeck was still annoyed from the day before because he’d dropped his chain on the run in to Planche des Belles Filles, so he got his teammate Jelle Vanendert – the little climber with the moustache who won the stage to Luz Ardiden in the 2011 Tour – to make the pace on the front and between them they ripped the bunch to pieces.

There were only five or six of us left over the top on that last climb, a short steep one. I felt I was close to getting dropped off the group towards the end. But I was riding a
super
-light bike and a few days later I realised that it had cracked under the bottom bracket so it was flexing like crazy and that’s why I was finding it so hard. But that’s the point about the Tour: the race is never done and dusted. Something can always happen. After that little moment I felt fine, and we had a healthy scrap into the finish, Van Den Broeck and Cadel attacking, me chasing them down quite comfortably. It was like being a junior again, racing for the hell of it.

I didn’t give much away when I had that brief crisis on the climb. I don’t think Cadel can have known how I was feeling; he shouldn’t have been able to tell. I remember as we went over the top, Nibali looked round to see if he was there; I shut my mouth as if I wasn’t hurting, and then he turned to the front again. In that situation, you just try and soak up the pain, not show it. There’s a lot of that in cycling. There’s a lot of bluffing midway through the Tour, because you don’t want to give anything away. You don’t want to give anyone a reason to think, the next day, ‘I’m going to try and attack although I normally wouldn’t.’ You always want to keep them thinking, ‘Damn, he looked strong there.’

With that Swiss stage over, I began thinking about the next key day: the Besançon time trial. I just wanted to get back to the hotel and get on with preparing for the time trial. Coming on top of La Planche des Belles Filles, Porrentruy had been a hard day, and I didn’t want to stick around at the finish doing all the press interviews. But as the yellow jersey of the Tour de France, you have no option.

The doping insinuations on Twitter had begun after the
Tour
of Romandie, and they had continued after Sky had dominated on the Joux Plane at the Dauphiné. So I’d been thinking about what to say for some time. There weren’t any direct accusations: it was more of a nod and a wink, knowing comments. I don’t often lose my temper, but this had made me angry. I think if only people understood what I have to put myself and my family through in order to win the Tour, and if they realised what I have in my life that doping would lose me, they would probably think differently.

I knew that if I went well at the Tour these accusations were going to happen more and more. I was waiting for it. I had decided that when the question was asked I wasn’t going to give it the old, ‘I can sleep at night with a clear conscience’ and all that sort of crap. The response had been in my head a fair while: I thought, ‘I’m just going to give them the kind of answer they’d expect if they asked me in the pub.’

After the stage into Porrentruy a journalist came out with it direct in the press conference: what did I make of the insinuations on the net that Sky’s performances were reminiscent of those put in by Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team? I knew what he meant: were we doping?

I told him this: ‘I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. C***s.’

And with that, I got up and left the caravan where we do the written press after the stage. There was, I’m told, a small ripple of applause back at the main press room, which picks up proceedings from the caravan through a television feed.

I never intended it, but for some people that statement has become a bit of a John Lennon moment. Someone came up to me recently, with some great big yellow posters printed out with that quote on it, then a little dash and my name. I signed them; it seemed a bit like ‘Peace is War’. In years to come, maybe you’ll see that answer in a book of proverbs, signed Bradley Wiggins.

I wanted to nip the accusations in the bud straight away. When someone asked that question, I just went for it; I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that. Even if we are athletes in a public position, we are also human beings. I think people in the past have set a precedent for how to handle these situations. For example, Lance Armstrong seemed to enjoy the confrontations with the media in a way; he liked to fight and when they asked him about doping, it was just another battle for him. I don’t get angry in public very often – there were journalists there who reckoned they’d never seen me get mad before, not once in ten years – but there was a good reason for my anger.

I’ve always tried to be genuine, and I will continue to be. That didn’t have to change just because I was trying to win the Tour. A lot of people may not like it, but there are some who do appreciate it. It goes back to what I’ve always said about being a role model. I’m only human. I don’t claim to be someone I’m not. I’m not a well-trained corporate dream who
says
all the right things to the media. I’m a bit like Cav; we both speak from the heart. We don’t always say the right thing and what we do say doesn’t always go down well. However, that’s what makes some people like us, even if we are hated by others, and we’ll both continue to be like that.

One thing that people have to understand is that I don’t want to be cast in the role of a moral hero. During the doping affairs in 2006 and 2007, the years of Operación Puerto, Floyd Landis being disqualified from the Tour win for testing positive, and the Rasmussen, Vinokourov and Cofidis affairs, there seemed to be an idea out there that I was spearheading a massive campaign for anti-doping. I remember
Cycle Sport
did a piece in 2006 with me on the front cover headlined: ‘The Whistleblower’. I was happy to talk about it but that wasn’t how I wanted to be seen. I didn’t want the attention. That explains a little bit why I went completely the opposite way for the next few years and said, ‘I’m not going to say anything about this any more, because I don’t want to be seen as a whistleblower.’

For that reason, there are journalists who have got the hump with me, thinking I’ve gone completely the opposite way. It’s not that simple. Just because I’ve given my opinion on something doesn’t mean that I want my views to be seen as the opinion of a group or a nation. I don’t see myself as a leader in that sense, or a campaigner. The things I do on the bike make me a leader within my team, but off the bike I just feel like one of the lads at the dinner table. I’m not a leader in the bigger sense.

When I turned professional back in 2002, I was aware of what was going on. I didn’t see anyone doping but suspected people were dabbling in lesser stuff. I would see what some riders would do off the bike when they were partying and would wonder what they got up to on the bike. You’re quite easily influenced when you are young – one way I look at it is it’s like the pressure there is to smoke when you are a teenager – but I was lucky: I got together with Cath in 2002, based myself in Manchester, ended up some distance away from European cycling and realised that there were things in life that meant more to me than my cycling. When I turned pro I was aware that at some point I might have to make a choice one way or the other; if I wanted to win races I might have to do this. But fortunately I never had to make the decision. If I had, I would have retired by now.

That’s why I never condemn anyone. I look at David Millar, who lived in France from the age of nineteen, and I can see how he fell into it. You have to look back at cycling in the late 1990s and early 2000s: it was completely different. It’s not the same for today’s generation – the young British guys like Luke Rowe and Ben Swift – because it’s not a choice they have to think about. Where I was lucky was that I had the track to go back to; British Cycling and their culture was a continuous thread through my life. I would go to the world track championships with people like Sir Chris Hoy, Jason Queally and Craig MacLean; Dave Brailsford was always there, and Shane. Having them there to go back to was like when other kids are caught smoking behind trees in the playground; you go home to your
parents
and they let you know the difference between right and wrong.

I get incredibly angry when I’m accused of doping, or even when it’s merely implied. That accusation is like saying to someone else: you cheat at your job; you cheated to get to where you are now.

I made a particular effort to explain it to Hervé Bombrun, a journalist from
l’Equipe
. I’m good friends with him, so fortunately I was able to make my point without him punching me in the face.

He asked me: ‘What is that anger all about? It’s all right you saying all this kind of stuff but––’

‘Have you got kids?’

‘Yeah, I’m married with kids.’

‘What if I said to you they’re not your kids?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What if I said, your wife had an affair at the time, so she got pregnant by someone else?’

‘No, it was definitely me. I know they’re my children.’

‘Well, no, I don’t think they are.’

So he started getting upset, and I explained, ‘Look, it makes you angry, doesn’t it? It makes you want to come out fighting. It’s like people telling me I’m cheating at what I’m doing; it gets me angry.’

‘
Ah oui
, oh gosh.’

When you haven’t cheated, and the accusation is plain wrong, it gets incredibly frustrating. I don’t believe in beating about the bush, and I can’t sit there and watch people giving evasive answers. As for the tone of my reply in Porrentruy, I
know
the words I used may have shocked some people, but it can be hard to know what to say straight after finishing one of the hardest races you’ve ridden, when you’re knackered and when you’ve already spent thirty minutes answering questions.

I can understand why I was asked about doping, given the recent history of the sport, but it still annoyed me. I’d assumed that people would look back into my personal record; there is plenty I’ve said in the past that should make it clear where I stand, such as at the start of the 2006 Tour when I turned up for a first go at the race and Operación Puerto kicked off, what I said when Floyd Landis went positive that same year, and what I said when I was chucked out of the race with the rest of Cofidis after Christian Moreni tested positive in 2007. On the way home after that one I put my Cofidis kit in a dustbin at Pau airport because I didn’t want to be seen in it, and swore I would never race in it again because I was so sick at what had happened.

Nothing has changed since then. I still feel the same way and I stand by what I said. I also feel that people need to look at how the sport has changed, where I have come from, and how I’ve progressed. They see me put in a great time trial here and there: I can do it because I’ve worked hard to close the gap on the best guys, Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin. What seems to be forgotten is that the margin between me and the best guys hadn’t been that large in the past, even when I wasn’t putting in anything like the effort I have in the last couple of years.

Over the years I had put down a few markers as to what I
could
do. I was 5th in the time trial in Albi in the 2007 Tour, behind Alexander Vinokourov, Andrey Kashechkin, Cancellara and Andreas Klöden. The first two later tested positive for blood doping so I was effectively 3rd, two weeks into the Tour, at a time when I wasn’t concentrating on the race. I had the engine, as you would expect from a world and Olympic pursuit champion; and it showed that year when I won the prologues in the Dauphiné and the Four Days of Dunkirk and a stage in the mountains in the Tour de l’Avenir. As early as 2005 I was 7th in the World Time Trial Championships in Madrid; Vino and Kashechkin were in front of me again.