Bradley Wiggins: My Time (26 page)

The further we go into the race, the more I’m beginning to realise: ‘This is it, I’ve won the Tour, I’ve done it.’ With each kilometre going by, I’m a little more inspired by that thought and that makes me push even more; there is a sort of aggression, a hunger within me, an urge to keep gaining as much time as possible. I want to win this race. There is no sense of,
‘Oh
, you’ve done it now, you can back off slightly.’ No: I want more, more, more.

So then we come off the big wide main roads on to smaller roads in the last 10km and it’s at that point that it’s starting to get painful at this pace. The physical effort is beginning to take its toll: the first twenty minutes are almost easy, the next twenty minutes you’re having to concentrate more, but the last twenty minutes is where the pain starts kicking in. In that first forty minutes you feel, ‘Yeah, I can sustain this power, at any stage I could take it up twenty, thirty watts.’ In the last 10km that’s gone and you’re thinking, ‘I’m actually struggling to hold this now.’ But in spite of the pain, I’m still able to lift it up. And at about 5km to go we turn left on to this little road and then the gradient starts ramping up, and I’m still pushing and it’s really hurting and with every kilometre that’s going past, once we’re within 5km to go, I’m beginning to think of a lot of other things, and that is inspiring me to push on even harder.

The thoughts come, but not to the detriment of the effort. I’m not wavering and losing concentration or slowing down. I’m going just as hard, and what’s going through my head is inspiring me more and more. Sean says, ‘You’ve got 5k to go, Brad, you’ve got eight minutes left of this Tour de France, eight minutes and you’ve won the Tour, 4k to go, Brad, six minutes to go and you’ve won the Tour de France, six minutes left and it’s all over.’ With those little things that Sean is saying to me I’m thinking, ‘This is it, six more minutes’, and my mind starts going back …

I’d be going out in December, I’d be in the gym at 6 a.m. doing my core work, then getting out on the bike early doors;
four
hours, five hours; I’d be riding all round Pendle, out on Waddington Fell in a hailstorm, thinking, ‘Oh shit, I’m two hours from home now, this is ridiculous, I’m two hours out, how am I going to get home?’ I’d get back and my fingers wouldn’t bend from the cold, so Cath would have to take the gloves off my hands, but I’d think, ‘This is what is going to win the Tour.’ It had said four hours on the programme; it was three degrees outside and it was hailing up there in the hills, but I just had to go and do that four hours because that might make the difference; Cadel Evans might not go out, might not do anything that day.

Sean is saying, ‘Brad, 3k to go, and it’s all over, this is it, Brad, this is where all the training’s come in, just think of all those rides we were doing in Tenerife, you know all those little things …’

I’m back in Tenerife on a day when we’ve done four and a half, five, six hours; we’ve done five or six efforts throughout the day and a couple of the guys are stuck to the floor. Tim is saying, ‘OK, guys, there’s an option of a last effort here, I know a few of you are a bit nailed now so you can just roll up if you want, but if you feel you can do this last one, go for it.’ I’m going over those summits in Tenerife, with Shane telling me, ‘Come on, Brad, this is where the Tour’s won, you know.’ That was where I’d hit it: it’s like not everyone is going to do that last effort. That was the one which would push me over the edge, but that’s what I’ve always done with the training. It was all for the Tour de France …

And here I am with six minutes left of it.
This is what it was for
…

I’m on the phone to Cath when I was in Tenerife training at Easter; the kids were off school, and she was saying ‘God, they’re being a nightmare, running riot, I wish you were here.’ It was Ben’s birthday, ‘Why are you not here?’ he and Bella ask; I tell them and they sort of understand why. I say to Cath on the phone, ‘Come on, it will be all right, love, this will all be worth it, you know, we’re not going to do this for ever …’

This is what it’s been all about; Cath and the kids, all the sacrifices they’ve made to get me here …

We’re getting into those last kilometres and I’m thinking of those things, thinking of my childhood, when I started dreaming about the Tour, how I started cycling when I was twelve. I’m about to win the Tour de France, and I’m taking my mind back to riding my bike as a kid going to my grandparents’, thinking of everything I’ve gone through to be at this point now.

There is a lot of pride at what I’ve achieved and what I’ve been through to achieve it. I can hear what people were saying when I signed for Sky – ‘He’s never going to win the Tour, they’re mad, he’s overpaid, it was a fluke, a one-off when he got that 4th place in 2009.’ There have been all the questions, not only for the last three weeks but from the moment I won that first time trial in Algarve: ‘Do you really think you can win the Tour? Is this all a little bit too soon? Have you peaked too early? Is being the favourite a problem for you?’ All those things, all the questions, all the doping stuff, all the suspicion, sitting at the press conferences every day.

I’ve led the Tour for two weeks: I look back and think, ‘Bloody hell, two weeks. There have been only two leaders of
this
year’s Tour de France.’ Bernard Hinault managed two weeks in the jersey once, in 1981; Lance Armstrong never managed it; Eddy Merckx led for longer, but he was the greatest ever.

The closer I’m getting to the line, Sean starts saying to me, ‘Come on, Brad, just empty it, 1k to go, 600 metres to go and the Tour’s over.’ It’s always in that way: it’s never Sean saying to me, ‘2k to go, that’s it, you’ve won the Tour’, it’s always, ‘Come on, Brad, one minute and it’s over.’

So I am emptying it to the line as if it is a training effort in Tenerife and I have to get out every last little bit. And that’s where the punch in the air happens as I cross the line. It comes from all that emotion I was going through in that last couple of kilometres, for all that hour, for all that morning, for all the days before that time trial. It all comes out in that punch in the air as I go across the line. That’s the defining image of the Tour for me: crossing the line and the punch. It is an incredible, incredible feeling.

Afterwards, my first stop was the team bus to say thanks to my teammates. The job was truly done now: the moment had to be shared with them. At the hotel later on, after giving the winner’s press conference – at the Tour they always do this on the Saturday night because there is so much going on at the Champs-Elysées on the Sunday – I bumped into Sean just round the back of our accommodation, the Campanile, which is a curious kind of hotel where you have to go outside to get to all the bedrooms.

Sean had that massive, creased smile on his face; he
laughed
a Dick Dastardly laugh, put one arm round me and hugged me. I said, ‘Fuck me!’ and he replied in a funny accent, ‘Tell me about it … I’m just so happy for you.’ The most amazing thing was seeing what it meant to people like him, who had known me for years. It’s a nice feeling, that you can have that kind of impact on other people. He wasn’t the only one: Scott, the photographer who has been working with me for a couple of years, broke down, and one of the mechanics was in tears as well. It’s at that point you realise, hell, it’s not just me who’s gone through this: everyone else around me has lived it too.

Part Three

My Time

CHAPTER 17

AN ENGLISHMAN IN PARIS

THERE IS AN
iconic image of the final stage of the Tour de France that every cycling fan knows. It shows the peloton lined out along the banks of the Seine when the race is going into the centre of Paris, with the yellow jersey sitting behind his teammates at the front of the bunch, and the Eiffel Tower to the right. I remembered watching this on television as a kid: a team riding down the quays, most often with Miguel Indurain riding behind all his guys in the Banesto blue, red and white. It’s a phenomenal moment for a cycling fan, truly legendary. And on the final Sunday of the 2012 Tour, as we rode along past the Eiffel Tower, there was a brief instant when I allowed myself to forget I had a job to do that day; suddenly I saw myself riding at the front of the bunch in the same way I had watched Indurain and company while sitting in our little flat in Kilburn all those years ago.

That wasn’t the only moment from that Sunday afternoon that will always stay with me. We are on the front, all eight of
us
from Sky, with Cav sitting behind me at the back of the string as he is going for the sprint. We join the circuit, along the Rue de Rivoli, take a left down through the tunnel and out into the bright sunshine at the exit into the Place de la Concorde. I’m hearing the crowd for the first time, seeing the wall of British flags. It’s phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal; as the noise hits us we start riding a decent tempo across the Place de la Concorde towards the Champs-Elysées.

I’m taken back to my first sight of the Tour. I’m standing on the railings just before the kilometre-to-go kite on the entrance to the square, with my mother and my brother, watching them all go past. It’s 25 July 1993; I remember spotting Miguel Indurain in the yellow jersey, Gianni Bugno in the rainbow jersey of world champion. We’d come over from London for the weekend, gone up the Eiffel Tower on the Saturday, gone to see the Tour on the Sunday.

Nineteen years later, we pedal up the Champs-Elysées, bouncing on the cobbles, past the finish line, past the stands, up to the turn at the top in front of the Arc de Triomphe. I know my family is there in the stands on the right; Cath has told me, and that morning at the hotel in Chartres we made sure a pair of little yellow Pinarellos were ready for Bella and Ben to ride with me on the victory parade down the Champs. As we make the U-turn, the wall of sound from the Brits when I come into sight round the bend is unbelievable. It’s quiet as the first seven riders from Sky take the bend and then when the Brits see me in the yellow jersey the noise comes up at me and wallops me in the face. Amazing. I’m getting goose pimples. And then of course the attacks start, I’m thrust
back
to reality, and that’s it. Time to start concentrating: we have got a job to do for Cav.

I’d finished the Tour on the Champs-Elysées three times, and I’d always ridden that stage watching the person who’s won the Tour, imagining the delight he must be feeling: Floyd Landis in 2006, Alberto Contador in 2009 and 2010. I remember sitting at home in 2011 looking at the television and seeing Cadel doing it, thinking, ‘God, that must be incredible, knowing the whole race is finished and you’ve won it.’ It is quite ceremonial, the whole parade from the start to the suburbs of Paris, with other riders coming up and congratulating you as you ride along. We got all the Sky guys riding abreast across the road for photographs; I posed on the front of the bunch with Peter Sagan, who had won the points jersey and Thomas Voeckler, who was King of the Mountains. As we were riding in, there were some guys – particularly the French lads – coming up to me and saying, ‘Is it all right if I have my photo taken with you?’ And they’d arranged it with one of the photographers on the motorbikes, so they would come up and take the photo. That felt like the ultimate accolade from your work colleagues: they respect you and what you’ve done so much that they actually want a photo taken to mark the occasion, perhaps so they can show their kids and tell them, ‘One day I raced the 2012 Tour and made it to Paris with Bradley Wiggins; he’s that bloke in the yellow jersey with the long sideburns.’

Every minute of that final stage was as sweet as I had expected, as good as it had always looked when I was
watching
it on television as a kid. There was a little moment on the outskirts of Paris when we went through Saint-Rémylès-Chevreuse, where the Paris–Nice prologue had finished; I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I was back here in March when it all started, we went over all those roads, in the freezing cold, and now here we are in July, it’s thirty degrees and it’s completely different.’ As we began riding through the suburbs of Paris, there was a lot of talk through the radio earpieces, with Mick calling the shots about when we were going to get to the front. It’s a matter of protocol: if you are the Tour winner, your team leads the race into Paris, with you sitting behind them. We started riding and that was it, there I was sitting 8th wheel, doing what I’d seen all those other guys do.

The noise hit me as we turned by the Arc de Triomphe and from that moment on I expected it every lap. You go so fast around the eight laps up and down the Champs-Elysées that you wish it could last for ever, but at the same time you wish it wouldn’t because it’s quite hard. Relatively speaking, I had a straightforward ride being in yellow, with the other guys giving us a fair bit of road space and letting us get on with it. But even then you know the judges don’t stop the clocks until you get to 3km to go – and 6km out there was a serious crash with Danilo Hondo in it. It could, in theory, still be all over at that point.

I’d always wanted to lead Cav out on the Champs-Elysées in the rainbow stripes; at times in the last three weeks it had crossed my mind I might end up doing it in the yellow jersey. I was just concentrating so hard the closer we got to the finish. I knew the job I had to do: after we came out of the
first
tunnel I had to take up the running and pull Eddie to about 800 or 700m to go so that he could unleash Cav. It was a phenomenal feeling; turning on the power, seeing Cav come past tucked in safely on Eddie’s wheel, then pedalling up the Avenue next to Mick and Richie. I knew Cav would win; I knew I’d done the job.

I had been so focused on what I was doing for Cav that by the last lap I had forgotten that I had the yellow jersey on. There was no thinking, ‘This is the last lap, I’ve done it, I’ve won the Tour.’ It was, ‘It’s 3k to go, 2k to go – I’m going to hit the front; 1k – after this tunnel that’s it, we’re going.’ That was the whole thought process for the last couple of laps; then peeling off after I’d done my job for Cav, I was thinking, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve done what I needed to do for him’, rolling across the Place de la Concorde, turning right up the Champs-Elysées and then I thought, ‘Oh fuck, I’ve won the Tour de France.’ It came on me very suddenly because I’d been thinking only about doing that job for Mark.