How I Won the Yellow Jumper (30 page)

After years of pussyfooting around the issue, I had finally
seen life from both sides. My night on the Hautacam had taught me a little of what the mountain means to the Tour.

And what the Tour means to the mountain.

I have in my hand a piece of paper. It is yellow and grubby and it used to be folded up so that it would fit snugly into the back pocket of my jeans. Indeed, that's where I found it, nestling shamefully at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket. That's where I had flung the jeans along with other filthy souvenirs from a month on the roads of France. There it had stayed: in the bedrock, deep below the surface, as the shifting sands of soiled socks, shorts and shirts came and went above it. Down at these depths, the jeans kept their secret locked up in their denim tomb, cocooned from the ravages of passing time.

Until now. Gripped by an appalling trouser shortage, I was recently forced to prospect further and further afield. My search unearthed the jeans, and the jeans offered up the yellow piece of paper among other Tour junk: a cracked biro from a hotel room, a two-euro coin, a plastic-wrapped badge from the tourism office of some obscure French town.

These are the provisional results from Stage 15 of the 2009 Tour, produced before the various splintered gruppettos have even crossed the line. They are rushed off the press and distributed to the media by hand. There are, beneath the Tour de France logo and the various sponsors' headers, eleven
riders listed, in order of their position in the General Classification.

Carlos Sastre, the defending champion is in eleventh place, three minutes and fifty-two seconds off the pace. Andy Schleck's in fifth. Andreas Klöeden is one place better than him. But the top three names belong to Contador, Armstrong and Wiggins.

In third place: Bradley Wiggins. Three-quarters of the way around only his second full Tour, poised on the shoulders of the seven-time winner and the astonishing Spaniard who, back in 2009, looked destined to eclipse even Armstrong's status. Wiggins, the unlikely lad with the long limbs and the crooked smile.

I look at the typeface and still find it hard to take in.

It's 2009. I am back in the thin air of Verbier, on the Swiss mountaintop. As I fold the paper and tuck it away in its time-vault pocket, I consider with growing excitement the scale of his achievement. I am heading down the slope away from the finish line. The TV trucks have grunted their way up the mountain and into their precarious summit-side parking grid. Massive vehicles are jacked up sideways along the vertiginous
mountainside. Dropping down through the tangle of power cables and leaving the metallic blare of the PA system behind me, I head back towards our truck, my earpiece still wirelessly relaying Gary Imlach's closing words as we head towards our off-air time. Soon the programme will be closed off and another defining chapter in British Tour history will, like the sheet of paper in my pocket, be folded away and placed into the past.

He'd warned us, of course. He'd told me a couple of weeks before.

The Columbus Hotel in Monte Carlo had a modern marble-and-leather interior with soft lighting. In a lobby overlooking the entry staircase, Wiggins had sloped over to ‘share his thoughts with us' ahead of the 2009 Tour. It was the eve of the race. I leant across the vast expanse of a smoked-glass tabletop towards the sardonic figure of Wiggins, slumped in the Barcelona chair opposite me, his nylon Garmin team tracksuit offered no resistance against the shiny upholstery. He seemed to slip lower and lower, melting downwards to the floor. His Princess Diana eyes were doing their downcast thing and a curious smile played across his mouth. He spoke thoughtfully, softly.

‘I'm in the form of my life. I've never felt this good.' This wasn't boastfulness, I thought to myself, but quiet honesty. ‘I'm aiming for a top twenty finish. Who knows, maybe even higher.'

It's worth putting this in context. Here was a man who had finished the Tour on only one previous occasion. In 2006, he'd managed 124th place, three hours, twenty-four minutes and thirty-five seconds slower than winner Oscar Pereiro. On the first mountain stage that year Wiggins straight away lost forty minutes on the leaders.

Three years later, even though we had glimpsed him riding alongside the climbing elite in places during that spring's Giro d'Italia, his ambition still seemed preposterous. The target he
had set himself from that hotel chair in Monaco was at odds with the formbook.

It is unusual for an athlete to post such a specific, let alone ambitious, target. The fear of falling short normally modifies outward shows of bravado, distilling any act of prediction to the equivalent of the footballer's ‘take each game as it comes'.

The next day the 2009 Tour started. We had rigged up our set and, unusually for us, had such a fine view of Monaco harbour behind us that we were able to dispose of the central panel, which is normally used to mask the sight of a row of generators or the likes of a German catering truck. This time Gary Imlach, in his finest Monte Carlo polo shirt, and Chris Boardman, standing alongside him wearing his best pair of Rohan slacks, were framed by a ghastly forest of masts in the Port Hercule. The ensigns of a hundred tax havens fluttered bad-temperedly in the sultry air.

Woody and Liam and I lugged our heavy kit around in sapping humidity, meandering up and down the clogged-up embankment of Quai Antoine, ducking and diving through crowds of Americans and Brits and the occasional Frenchman. We stood for a while, waiting for Fabian Cancellara to appear outside the Saxobank Team bus, all three of us absorbed by the sight of a vast gin palace shamelessly emptying litre after litre of human excrement from its septic tank straight into the port.

It stank. In fact, Monaco stank. In the cool of his team's bus, Wiggins was probably listening to The Jam. Not long now before the 2009 Tour would get under way.

The Prologue route ran from the port up into the hills, then turned sharply and steeply and headed back down the Avenue Princess Grace to the waterfront again. Fifteen and a half kilometres, but featuring some sharp climbs, and some technical descending to rejoin the Formula One circuit.

It was not, in other words, a circuit designed with Bradley Wiggins's long frame in mind. But, as was widely predicted, it suited Cancellara. He tore into it, and into the yellow jersey. He put eighteen seconds into Alberto Contador, who in turn edged out Wiggins by just a single second; the Londoner managing a third place finish to improve on the fourth place he'd ridden in London two years previously.

A short time after he'd finished, Matt was dispatched to fetch Wiggins to join us on the set. He found him warming down on some rollers outside the Garmin team bus. Would it be possible for him to join the ITV team on the set for a few minutes?

‘ITV can fuck off,' Matt was told from underneath Wiggins's towel. This was a Wiggins joke, it seemed. He has a love of heavy-handed dead-weight wit, which can leave you wondering what it is you might have done to upset him.

Yet his demeanour a little later, when he stood on the set dwarfing Gary and Chris, was different. Clutching a microphone as he spoke, with the sweat of his efforts slowly crystallising into salt, the view of the port behind him was crowded out by a few dozen British cycling fans who had made their way through the chaos of the media compound to where the ITV truck stood. While many might still have been smarting from a deflating sense that his chance of winning a stage had passed him by, Wiggins was clearly thinking and believing in a much longer game, a grander objective. His disappointment wasn't so much well disguised. It just wasn't there at all.

When the show went off the air, Wiggins shook hands and turned to leave, and the crowd broke into spontaneous applause, cheering and shouting his name. This was something I had previously only ever witnessed happening to French riders in front of French crowds. Yet the Brits had arrived that year in large numbers in Monaco. Middle-aged couples from Swindon, wiry old boys from Cumbria, kids from the Isle of Wight in replica kits. Our presence was swelling. Something was in the air.

Wiggins rode off alone through the crowded streets of Monte Carlo towards the aptly named Columbus hotel. A new world was calling him.

The next time I had occasion to deal with Wiggins came three days later in Montpellier at the finish line of the team time trial. Wiggins's Garmin team finished in second place. This in itself should have been enough to catapult him into the yellow jersey, had he not lost forty-one seconds the previous day when the peloton was split by Columbia's sudden acceleration on the approach to La Grande Motte. If Wiggins been the right side of that divide, he would now have led the Tour de France by three seconds.

This time, the ‘ITV can fuck off' moment was laced with
sincerity. It was not verbalised, but it didn't need to be. I am not sure, at the time, that I realised the depth of his disappointment.

Parked up in the shade by the side of a road near the rugby stadium, Garmin had set out a row of nine chairs for their riders to collapse into after forty kilometres of agony. Around this strangely haphazard chill-out zone, their staff had roped off a private area, to keep press and public at bay. I stood there, the sweaty T-shirt clinging to my back, waiting to catch Wiggins's eye, microphone handy. I called his name imploringly a few times. He saw me, winced, stood up, and moved to the far side of the pen. We upped sticks and moved with him, shadowing his every move. Minutes later he saw me again, and waved me away again. And so it went on. I was humiliated. He was irritated. But we were locked into our behaviours: I needed the sound bite, he needed me to vanish. There would inevitably only be one winner. It wasn't me.

After what seemed like an age, but must only have been twenty minutes or so, Wiggins ducked under a rope, grabbed his bike and started to ride off, heading back down towards the finish line and away to his hotel. Like a team of parents in a three-legged race, Woody, Liam and I galloped after him, cabled together and looking every inch the idiots that we were. Ahead the crowds were still dense. His slight figure snaked through the pack of faces, but in the end Wiggins had to slow down. We caught up with him, and I fired in a last desperate attempt.

‘Brad, give us a word. Just one question.' He rode on, stony-faced, without so much as a flicker. This was Bradley Wiggins lost in private frustration.

My role is not to be the riders' friend. It's to bring home the sights and sounds, character and soul of a race that places immense demands on its protagonists. Often, in their silence, their unwillingness to talk, or even in a flash of anger or
contempt directed towards us, they articulate the brutal pressures more accurately than any manicured words might achieve.

In such circumstances, I understand my job to be the lightning conductor.

For the next two days, Wiggins's race went quiet, while we ploughed onwards and, generally speaking, south-westwards. Hidden safely in the bunch, he will have buried his thoughts while Thomas Voeckler stole a march on Mark Cavendish into Perpignan, and then listened to team radio with his heart in his mouth the following day as teammate Dave Millar, with 10km to run, nearly outwitted the chasers through the rain-soaked avenues of Barcelona.