Bradley Wiggins: My Time (22 page)

It doesn’t mean weighing my food. It’s not quite as bad as that. You get to know what a portion contains. You have to be very careful you don’t become extreme with it. I’ve learned over the years to accept that you have to have some moderation in your life. It’s a bit like when Shane told me to have that weekend off before the Dauphiné. It’s not just to go out on your bike and ride steady: ‘Let’s just go and turn the legs for two hours.’ The weekend off is not a physical thing, it’s more for your mind. You go and spend the time with your family. Some athletes couldn’t envisage having a weekend off the week before a big event. So it’s someone’s birthday, it’s April, you’ve got three months to the Tour, you’ll have a glass of wine. That is not going to lose you the Tour de France. You have to avoid getting into that obsessive stage where you’re weighing your food and you’re saying, ‘Oh, I can’t have a boiled sweet because that might affect me.’ It’s just realising the boundaries and staying sane. You have to keep that sanity and that’s what I’ve managed really well in 2012. There is a bit of balance and a lot of common sense with everything.

Living the way I do involves a whole lot of little things, such
as
not putting your suitcase into the car when you go to the airport before a race, and not taking your suitcase out of the car coming back. Cath does all that. She won’t let me pick stuff up. The thinking is this: it just seems funny how you do all this training, all this preparation, all this work, all the fine-tuning for a race, the Dauphiné or whatever, and then, with two days to go, you’ve got to lift a twenty-five-kilogramme suitcase in and out of the back of your car, lug it around an airport, take it off the conveyer belt and chuck it in the back of the taxi. You could do yourself an injury, and all that work would be for nothing. To me, not lifting the luggage is a part of the race. I almost take it for granted now. When I had finished at the Olympics and we were loading up the car to come back, I was waiting for Cath to put the cases in as usual and she said I could do it for myself now: ‘Come on, you ain’t got that excuse no more.’ All those things make a difference and Cath accepts every bit of it without a second thought; other women might just say, ‘You can pick that up yourself’, or they simply would not put up with never having their husband around the house.

The problem is that when I am at home, the UK isn’t ideal for specific training to win the Tour de France, so I only really go home to rest and ride my bike. Then there comes a point where I have to go away and train again. That’s the biggest sacrifice with Cath, Isabella and Ben: being out of their lives, missing their birthdays. But they all realise why I’m doing it, and the reward for doing something like this is worth the sacrifice. I always look at it this way: I could be doing other things in my life that mean a sacrifice. I could be in the army
in
Afghanistan, be there for years on end and never know when or if I was coming home. At least I get to go home. And I’m doing all this by choice.

Cath and I are both in it together, that’s how I’ve always viewed it. That’s how we deal with it as a family. It’s not a matter of, ‘I’m doing this, you’re going to have to get on with it.’ I’ve always said to her, ‘So long as you’re happy for me to do this, I’ll carry on.’ It’s teamwork and she has been happy for me to do it, for ten years. It’s hard, though, getting some of the phone calls when things are tough at home. I feel massively guilty. I feel like a terrible father to my children, that I’m not there for them. I feel like a terrible husband at times, because I’m not there to support Cath in things that are going on in her life. But I’m not going to do it for ever. It’s now or never.

CHAPTER 14

UNDER ATTACK

IT WAS A
really satisfying rest day in spite of the fatigue after the time trial the day before. I remember being really pleased at having a day off; we had a few moments to chill out and briefly savour the stage wins and the yellow jersey. It was as if the first part of the race was over.

You have to be careful when you have that break in the race that you don’t make the classic mistake of forgetting the next day. You can’t sit there and just think about what you’ve won already. As well as relaxing, there was also a sense of making sure I did all the little things right, paying attention to those details: ‘OK what are we doing tomorrow? Ten o’clock on the bikes; plan the route, we want two hours – we’re doing it because we’ve got to go up the Grand Colombier tomorrow.’ Everyone’s attention is already turning to the following stage – what wheels to use, the gearing – and there’s very little time to stop and think, ‘Oh, wasn’t it great yesterday?’ That’s how the Tour functions; you have to constantly look ahead. That’s
why
you forget very quickly what you’ve done before, and it’s only some time afterwards that you can look back and reflect on how you felt at the time.

The next obstacle was made up of a pair of Alpine stages. The first, to Bellegarde-sur-Valserine, took us over the Col du Grand Colombier, super-steep in places but, as it turned out, a climb where the problem was less the ascent than the descent. This was where Vincenzo Nibali attacked in what seemed to be a pre-planned move, with Peter Sagan further up the road waiting to help him a bit. His margin was never that threatening – only a minute at the foot of the climb – and we reeled him in well before the finish. The only GC contender to gain anything on me was Jurgen Van Den Broeck, who attacked before Nibali; I could afford to drop 32sec to him, as he was well down the order after his problems at La Planche des Belles Filles.

The following day, over the Col de la Madeleine and the Glandon/Croix de Fer en route to La Toussuire, the race took a more worrying turn, with Cadel making his most serious attack of the whole three weeks. It was a long-range move, and clearly had been planned; BMC had sent Tejay van Garderen up the road earlier on, the idea being, I imagine, that he and Cadel could link up and put us under pressure. So Cadel went for it on the Glandon with 75km to go, maybe 10km from the top, on quite a steep section before you turn on to the Col du Croix de Fer. It looked as if he’d attacked from quite a long way back in the group because when he came past us he wasn’t accelerating, he was in full flight, as if he was sprinting for a finish line 400m away.

We had felt in control for most of the stage already, with Eddie doing a fantastic job over the Madeleine, and when Cadel put his foot down we were setting quite a decent tempo: 400 watts on the SRM screen. Our road captain Mick Rogers took it straight up to 450 and sat at that. So the feeling was: this is getting hard, we’re on a really solid tempo here. Cadel pulled out to maybe 300 or 400m ahead straight away, and then he just hovered there. We were determined not to panic, but just kept riding at our own tempo. When you are riding at that kind of rhythm, not far off the limit, if someone is going to attack on a mountain and sustain it to the summit, they have to be extremely good to get away, let alone to open a decent gap. We were conscious that there was still a long way to go: down the Croix de Fer, up another ramp to the Col du Mollard, a second category climb, another descent to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, then the 17km climb to the finish.

So we slowly reeled in Cadel about a couple of kilometres before the summit of the Croix de Fer; you could see he was struggling. At that point, if we’d just turned it up a notch he would have gone, but I knew then that was it, he was finished. Any doubt had been removed. There was no need to worry about Cadel any more; I knew he would not be able to back it up on La Toussuire when we got up there. That was exactly what happened: he dropped almost 90sec and slipped to 4th overall. Later that day, when Tejay and I were behind the podium – Tejay was waiting to receive the white jersey for best young rider while I was being given yellow – he said to me, ‘Hats off to you guys today.’ BMC had done all that in an attempt to get us to panic, but it hadn’t worked. The Glandon
was
the point in the race when I saw Cadel had laid himself open. There was no need for him to do a long-range attack of that kind.

That morning someone had said to me, ‘I think Cadel’s going to attack today’, and I had thought, ‘I can’t see it. If I was him why would I attack?’ We’d had the time trial by then, so he was nearly two minutes behind me in the Alps. I thought it would be a big gamble; he was 2nd overall in the Tour with the best part of ten days to go, which wasn’t a bad defence of his Tour title this far. I thought he’d be a bit crazy to throw it all against the wall in a big Alpine attack to try and get two minutes back. I thought he would just stay with us; if he was going to try anything he would do it in the Pyrenees, when we would all be that much more fatigued. So my first thought was, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ It was bizarre. Straight away, I thought it was a sign of weakness.

Most of the stage to La Toussuire was a simple matter of attack and defence. Cadel threw down the gauntlet; we picked it up and threw it back. The rest wasn’t so straight-forward: by that evening I wanted to go home. I simply felt the Tour involved too much stress for me.

We had a plan: control the race all day, then make the pace and do the peel-offs on the last climb in the same way that we had done at La Planche des Belles Filles. The idea was to put the opposition on the back foot and keep them there. Mick did an incredible job that day; he had already worked a fair bit on the Glandon when Cadel made his move, but when he hit the foot of La Toussuire he rode for the first kilometre and a half; then he was done for the day. Next Richie took
over
; he did 5km or so, he peeled off, and then Nibali attacked. Because Richie was done there was only one rider left to take over and that was Froomie, so he took up the job of setting the pace. He brought back Nibali’s first attack and then once he’d got him back he stopped riding.

I assumed that he was finished, that the effort had taken its toll on him, but he kept pressing on for a little bit more and then Nibali attacked again, over the top of him, with Van Den Broeck taking it up with him. At this point Froomie seemed to dither a bit; I thought, ‘He hasn’t got enough in the tank to bring it back a second time.’ Chris really slowed down, so I took it up. We had less than 10km to go, and I thought, ‘Right, now I’m really going to have to pace this if I’m going to ride all the way to the summit on my own.’ I was ready to calculate my effort: I would have to ride what amounted to a time trial so that when I hit the finish line I’d have got everything out. I knew Cadel was behind me and I didn’t look back; I just assumed Froomie had gone. I thought, ‘I’m on my own now; this is where I take responsibility for the Tour.’

I heard almost nothing through the radio earpiece. All I was getting was bits and bobs, because of the crowd making so much noise around us. I think I heard Sean saying, ‘Pace your effort, Brad, you’re the only one left, it’s all down to you now, Brad,’ or something like that. So I started riding hard, in time-trial mode; I’d been on the front for about 2km, then we went up again as the road steepened coming into the village of Toussuire, just on the outskirts. At that point, Chris came hurtling past me, using the speed from going into the dip; he went straight to the front and said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ I
jumped
on his wheel; he lifted the tempo quite a bit. I’d already been pushing hard for 2km, so his initial acceleration put me in the red slightly. I hung on to him, hung on to him and shouted at him to back off: ‘Whoa, Chris, whoa.’

I could now hear Sean on the radio, saying ‘Cadel’s swinging, Cadel’s swinging, he’s going to go, you’ve got him, you’ve got him, he’s gone.’ Because of that, Froomie began pushing on a bit more, and by that point we’d closed in on Nibali and Van Den Broeck quite considerably, along with Janez Brajkovic, who had jumped away at the foot of the climb. Through another couple of hairpins, we’d got rid of Cadel but I was shouting to Froomie to slow down.

‘You’ve got to let me recover a little bit.’

‘No, I want to go again, I want to go again, I want to get rid of Nibali.’

So then we got on to the back of the Nibali group, and Froomie attacked again and I just thought, ‘I’m not going to put myself even more in the red so I’ll just ride at my own tempo.’ Chris was doing his own thing; I let him go and he attacked through the group. I’d got on to Van Den Broeck and the others, and that’s when Sean said on the radio, ‘What are you doing?’ We were right in among all the crowds so I couldn’t really hear. There was a lot of confusion at that time. I was thinking, ‘What on earth’s he doing? I’m leading this race by two minutes.’ So he stopped, we got back to him and then we rode the tempo that we’d planned to ride all day, up to the finish.

It was a really confusing episode. I remember thinking at the finish, ‘What the hell was all that about?’ My initial
reaction
was that I felt as if I’d been flicked, although I changed my mind when I stopped and thought about it. It was a little bit like having a battle plan going into a war, all being in a trench together, firing your guns at the enemy, and then one of your troops going off and doing his own thing somewhere else in another trench, completely unprompted, unplanned, and contrary to your original plan.

The point was that we had the yellow jersey. In normal circumstances after Richie did his stint at the end, Froomie should have taken the reins as last man, which he did when Nibali made his first attack. What had taken me by surprise was that he’d come back and attacked over the top of me; at that point I was in the yellow jersey and the hierarchy in the team – the GC order in other words – dictates that you have to put your aspirations aside to defend the jersey. That’s how it works.

From that point on it felt as if we were defending both positions, and if it ever came down to it, if we got exposed, if we were attacked left, right and centre, it would be every man for himself. I never liked being in that position. I felt I was as much under attack from my own teammate as from anybody else.

It comes down to a decision for the
directeurs sportifs
; they have to step in and say, ‘This is how it is.’ I remember at the Vuelta the year before when it became apparent that Chris was stronger than me and that I didn’t have it, well before the Angliru, after the time trial where he beat me, I said at the time, ‘It’s clear we should concentrate on Froomie now, he was better than me in the time trial.’ The answer was, ‘No,
no
, no. We don’t have faith in him, we don’t know what he’s going to do. We don’t know if he can last the three weeks, so we stay with you as leader.’ I said, ‘Well, as long as you’re sure of that.’ And that was how it stayed.