Bradley Wiggins: My Time (29 page)

As the gold medal was presented to Alexander Vinokourov of Kazakhstan – he of the blood-doping positive from 2007 – we sat in the tent in the pits for an hour after the finish with our skinsuits unzipped. We were too exhausted to get changed, and just too depressed. No one said a word. It was as if we’d all lost the race, all five of us, or as if we’d lost a man during war. I was empty and exhausted but television wanted us the minute we went across the line; I was gutted we hadn’t won. I was also a bit angry because one of the other riders had really pissed me off; he said as we were riding in towards the finish, ‘So what happened to your legs, couldn’t bring the group back?’ It felt as if some of our rivals were really pleased to see us fail rather than doing some work themselves, so that left us all a bit upset.

On the other hand, I think the press really did build Cav up a bit too much, and I don’t think he’d fully appreciated how hard it is to win an Olympic road race with a small team. All the headlines that night were along the lines of, ‘Cav fails to win Britain’s first gold medal of the Olympic Games; the team let the gap get too big’. I actually saw one story that read, ‘Even Bradley Wiggins was struggling to hold the pace at the end’ with a picture of me being dropped at 5km to go, asking if our ‘failure’ might be due to fatigue from the Tour de France. You read that and you think, ‘Are you serious, did you not see me riding on the front for over two hundred kilometres?’

The misunderstanding happened, I think, because from the outside the last two weeks of the Tour had looked pretty straightforward. There had been no massive dramas or nail-biting suspense once I got the yellow jersey – although obviously it’s never like that when you are on the inside – and having watched that for fourteen days, most of the press just assumed that when it came to the Olympic road race Great Britain would carry on where Sky left off. The problem was that a one-day race on a hilly course with a five-man team is a completely different matter to a three-week Tour with nine men. There were some writers who tried to point out that we were taking on a huge challenge that might be beyond us, but they were a minority.

After the race, I was going back to the team hotel and Cav was heading straight off to do some criteriums in Belgium and France; he hugged me, and I said, ‘I’ll see you later.’ He wouldn’t let go, and it felt as if he was crying on my shoulder
because
of what I’d done for him. So we went our separate ways and he sent me a lovely text the next day, a long, long message saying that what I did meant more to him than winning, gentleman isn’t enough and so on. He said he didn’t want to say it at the time because it would have been over the top; he sent me another one before the time trial saying, ‘Go and bash them all tomorrow’, and I didn’t see him again until the Tour of Britain.

That night I was completely out of it, totally on my knees, and the day after I was still absolutely knackered. But we had a good routine at Foxhills: recovering, sleeping, out on the bikes. The next day went easily, and the third day I started feeling really good again. The chances were, I needed that ride in the road race to open me up, having stopped after the Tour for a few days. I remember going through all the numbers with Tim, and the figures said the Olympic road race had been one of my hardest days of the year.

We looked closely at the TSS scores that are such an integral part of my training. Some days in the Tour register only 120 TSS, meaning that although you’ve been out there for six hours, it hasn’t taken as much toll on your body as you might have thought. At Paris–Roubaix in 2011 I clocked up 450, so that was a huge day, and I remember the Olympic road race came in about 320, so that was quite a big outing too. But it was perfectly reasonable going into that time trial in the Games. If you look at the last three days before the
contre-la-montre
from Bonneval to Chartres in the Tour, there were the two Pyrenean stages at a TSS of 332 and 342, and
the
day into Brive where I led Cav out was about 290. So that had worked out at three really tough days. Tim said, ‘You’ve just had that Olympic road race at 320, so now you’ve got three days’ rest; don’t worry, you’re going to recover and you’re going to be fine.’

During the Tour it had struck Tim, Shane and me that on each of the occasions when I had won a time trial all year Sean Yates had been there every step of the way. So I asked Sean if he wanted to be driving the car behind me in London, and he said, ‘Bloody right, I’d love to do it, will I get a tracksuit?’ So we sorted him out with a day’s accreditation and he came along, drove the course the day before, and rode it; that meant he had all that information and we had the usual dialogue in the same way that I had had in every time trial I’d ridden all season.

The overriding thing with the time trial was that from the day before, going through that whole routine in the morning beforehand, it was the same process that I had been through at the Tour and every other time trial in recent years. So that put me in Hampton Court on the Wednesday morning knowing what I’d achieved in Chartres nine days before, feeling super-confident that I could win. I had no idea about the public out on the road at that point, because you go into a tented area at the start, and you concentrate on your warm-up. There was British support all around though, so I wasn’t sitting there in a state, saying to myself, ‘Oh God what are they all going to think?’ I was thriving off it. All I had to do was go out and put my ride together.

That silver medal in Copenhagen had given Tim, Shane and me confidence in the approach we had taken to time trialling, where we had been looking to move closer to Fabian Cancellara in every way. It was similar to the approach Great Britain had adopted on the track. You analyse where you are and see where the rest of the world is, and you look at what they’re doing. What we used to do with the team pursuit when we were trying to catch up with the Aussies was to look at their gearing, whether they were doing lap turns or more, where each rider was placed in the line, the kind of schedules they were riding. You look at everything.

It was the same with time trialling. The big thing we had flagged up with Fabian over the years was how much time he took out of the other riders just because he was better at cornering. That was always one area we were looking to improve in. In terms of flat speed we were very similar, but he’d always been renowned for taking a lot of risks on descents and corners. With Tony Martin after the 2011 World’s, it was more about looking at his cadence. We looked in detail at how he had managed to take 1min20secs out of me at the World’s. We worked out his average power and realised that for me to go 1min20secs faster, the power I would have had to produce would have been impossible. It would not have been human. So there must have been something else, aerodynamics maybe; there was certainly something in his cadence. I tended to spin a lower gear, partly because of my background as a track cyclist, where fast pedalling is a key element. He was turning the pedals a good 15 or 20rpm slower than me and it was something that he and
another
German, Bert Grabsch, tended to do. It’s a bit like driving a car in a high gear, sixth maybe, for a long time down a motorway as opposed to trying to whizz along in third.

This was typical of how we built to 2012: not accepting how I was, but trying to change it a little bit. So we worked on torque all through the winter of 2011–12, simply putting more power into my pedalling but at lower revs. That meant riding at the same sort of power output I would have in any time trial, but doing it at 50rpm rather than the usual 90. We started with five-minute blocks and progressed through the winter – seven-and-a-half-minute blocks, fifteen-minute blocks – until before the Tour I was doing forty-minute climbs at threshold at 50rpm. So by the time we got to August, and the time trial in the London Olympic Games, I was 40secs ahead of Tony for a little bit more power, but I’d brought my cadence down by about 7rpm (Tim’s figures are that in the 2011 World’s I averaged 103rpm; at the Games, 96rpm); I was rolling along in a bigger gear rather than spinning a smaller one. I didn’t have bigger ratios on but I was using higher gears than in the past – the 11-or 12-tooth sprocket, where in the past I would have been on the 13-tooth. The thing to remember is that we knew it was going to take me a long time to build up to that kind of time and torque. That was why we had had to start in November.

Back in Hampton Court in August 2012 I was very relaxed. I remember talking to my mechanic Diego beforehand, and him saying, ‘Brad I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘What is it, Diego?’

‘On the way to the start we went round this roundabout and your bike wasn’t attached properly to the roof and it fell off and it smashed your handlebars.’

‘What – my race bike? Oh fuck …’

‘No, your spare bike.’

He had to put some other handlebars on the second bike, which weren’t the same as the ones on the race bike, but there were no toys being thrown out of the pram instead I was sitting there laughing, ‘Don’t worry about that, Diego, I’m not going to need a spare bike today.’

That sums up the state of mind I was in at the time. In the Tour, and in the first few days after the Tour, I remember thinking that if I could just get a medal of any colour in London that would be fantastic. That depended on how I shaped up after the Tour, but the closer it got to the time trial, the more I knew that in terms of the power I could get out, I was going to be as good as I had been in Chartres; I’d been flying the day before in training. So on the day I was raring to go. I was thinking about the process: the walk up the ramp, launching myself out of the start house, not getting carried away too early on, and all the incremental steps through the ride, all the things going well, fuelling after seventeen minutes and so on. I knew I had it in the bag if I could avoid getting anything wrong.

The minute I turned up in the start area, I couldn’t believe the roar I got. I remember sitting in the stage area next to the ramp and getting a buzz from the crowd. It wasn’t the loudest thing I’d ever heard, not quite, but then I rolled down the ramp and the sound of the crowd really hit me.

I turned left out of the ticketed area, on to Hampton Court Bridge, and the noise was unbelievable. It was the same all the way around that course, but the bit I will always remember to the day I die was going through the last time check. It wasn’t official, it was one that the team had set up – we just made sure someone was at a certain point with a stopwatch – and it was at 9km to go, just before Kingston. Sean had been telling me I was 29secs ahead of Tony Martin: knowing that there were about five miles to go and I wasn’t dying off at that point, all I had to do was keep it together and I was going to win.

That was inspiring me to press on even harder, and I remember going through Kingston, not taking any super risks on the couple of little corners, through a shopping precinct; then the route went left out of the shopping precinct, over Kingston Bridge and down to a roundabout, where the Sigma Sport bike shop is, which you had to take on the opposite side rather than using the race line. So I had to slow down quite a bit, coming out of the roundabout, and because I’d pulled up, I was then accelerating away almost from a standing start. The road had narrowed down so the yells and screams from the crowd were actually deafening, to the point where I got ringing in my ears. I was thinking, ‘Fuck me, the noise,’ and then it was a matter of giving it everything I had all the way to the finish.

I turned into Bushy Park towards the end, and I could see Tony Martin’s cars up the road, so I knew I’d beaten him. At that point you’re emptying it, you’re nailed, you’re just trying to keep it together; I kept giving more than I had to, thinking, ‘Empty it to the line’; I’d lift the pace quite a bit and then I’d
bring
it back down, because I knew I couldn’t sustain it. I was already fifty minutes into the ride and thinking, ‘No, no, you don’t need to do that, Brad, just hold it, hold it, you don’t need to push like that.’ I was continually doing that in those last few kilometres, and coming out across the cobbled section towards Hampton Court Palace, Sean was saying, ‘You’re not taking it too hard, don’t take any mad crazy risks.’ Even at that point, when it was clear I’d got it in the bag, he never said, ‘You’ve got this, you’ve got this, you’ve won it.’ He was just concentrating on getting me to the end.

Coming round that last sweeping bend and up to the line, the crowd seemed to go dead silent. I was thinking, ‘Uh oh.’ Normally when you cross the line everyone cheers so I thought, ‘Shit, I’ve lost it, I must have done something to have lost it.’ Further up, towards Hampton Court Bridge, the crowd erupted. That had to be for me, with the best time, but I still wasn’t certain. I was confused, so I turned around and went back to my
soigneur
; I stood there and he didn’t say anything.

I kept saying to him, ‘Have I got the fastest time?’

And he kept saying, ‘Yeah, you got the fastest time.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘No, they are fucking lying to me.’

I was getting really irate and saying I can’t exactly remember what. I was really confused; the fatigue was kicking in a bit. Fabian Cancellara was last off as the defending champion; he hadn’t come in yet.

I remember saying something like, ‘Are you sure? Fabian’s not ahead of me on the road, is he?’

‘No, no he isn’t.’ The exhaustion began hitting me; I had to sit down for a bit.

‘Is Fabian in yet? Is Fabian in yet?’

‘No, no.’ But eventually Fabian came in and they said, ‘That’s it you’ve done it.’

So I stood up again, went up there into the finish area; people were cheering and I was trying to soak it all in. I was still a bit confused as to what was going on. I was just looking for Cath and the kids: Where are they? Where are they? I kept trying to look in the stands for them; they directed me to the throne which they had been putting each of the leaders on as they waited for their time to be beaten; I sat there for a second, which was bizarre. It’s that picture that everyone printed; I always sit in a chair in that way, so as soon as I sat down I did a Winston Churchill victory sign.