How I Won the Yellow Jumper (31 page)

Then came Andorra. I remember it well because it was the day before my fortieth birthday. With the deluge of Barcelona behind us, we had climbed up and away from the clouds in Spain and into tax haven number two of the 2009 Tour. The skies had cleared overnight. In the morning, the usual grinding ascent towards the finish line seemed to sparkle. Knowing that I had some time before the race arrived, I had laced my running shoes and slipped on a vest. We laboured up the steep climb towards Arcalis, a tidy ski-station surrounded by the jagged teeth of a Pyrenean horseshoe. I asked to be let out of the car with 6km to go, and I ran up towards the finish line.

I passed campers firing up stoves. An army of middle-aged Frenchmen soaked up the morning sun in Speedos and unbuttoned checked shirts, their idling daughters looking vacant and traumatised in equal measure. I passed cheerful Luxembourgers on Schleck-watch, their medieval blue flags catching what little breeze picked at the mountainside. Along the road cheap radios and chatter, the white noise of a morning on the Tour.

It was a short climb, no more than twelve kilometres in total to the summit. But it was steep in places, the gradient
never seeming to settle. Finally I reached the top, red-faced, and with my accreditation flapping at my chest, I came to a breathless halt, apologising as I hop-scotched past the guys whose job it was every day to stencil the giant letters SKODA on the tarmac just next to the finish line.

The first summit finish on the Tour, I thought. This was where the race would really start.

I was not, however, thinking about Bradley Wiggins. Nor, I should imagine, were at least half the peloton. Especially not when, within the closing kilometres of the climb, and still riding strongly, Wiggins starting shouting, ‘That's what I'm talking about!'

Amazed at what I had seen on the monitors, I went on Brad-watch. Brice Feillu won the stage. Rinaldo Nocentini rode himself into a surprise yellow jersey. But I disregarded completely the need to go chasing the main men. Armstrong could wait for another day. Contador? Well, Matt would grab a word with him, if we bothered at all.

All alone in my particular mission, I had waited for Wiggins to come over the line. He was in a group of eleven riders containing all the main contenders. As the hordes descended on Armstrong, we spotted Wiggins, sneaking through the pack and continuing up the hill at speed, heading for his Garmin team vehicles parked a few hundred yards away in a grassy compound on the steep mountainside.

Breathlessly we caught him up, just as he reached a van in the Garmin livery. It was locked. There wasn't a sign of anyone. The morning sunshine had been replaced by a chilling grey cloud cover. Where were his soigneurs?

We started filming, as Wiggins's long shaky legs stalked around the outside of the van, a stream of expletives leaving him all the while as he tried with increasing exasperation every locked door handle. He just wanted a drink, a towel and privacy. He banged his fist against the side of the van and cursed. It
gave a deep metallic thud whose reverberations were soon lost in the continuing din of motor horns and excitable commotion drifting up on the cool mountain air from the finish line.

There we all stood: Wiggins teetering around on cycling shoes. At two paces distant was Liam, his eye welded to the viewfinder and the heavy camera loaded onto his shoulder. Woody, one eye on Wiggins, the other looking down at the mixer, his microphone boom reaching across the gap like a hand outstretched for an unwanted handshake. And me, head bowed and hand mic dipped down, held by hands folded in front of me in the manner of a schoolboy in the headmaster's office. I felt guilty witnessing his discomfort, yet knew it would make revealing viewing. Also, as I still did not know exactly where I stood with Wiggins, I felt quite unable to offer him my congratulations. It was a curious stand-off.

Minutes later, help arrived in the form of a Garmin soigneur. He guided Wiggins over to an estate car, opened up the boot, and finally thrust a cold drink in his hands. He collapsed down, perching on the opened rear end of the vehicle. He ripped the can open, and drank heavily. He emptied it, in fact. I watched his Adam's apple bouncing up and down in his long neck as he gulped.

This is the type of detail you have little choice but to end up observing minutely as you wait for the athlete to be obliging. He knows what you want, but will rightly only answer when he's good and ready. You feel a little like a faithful family pet waiting for its owner to go walkies. The same imploring eyes and unfathomable patience. The same dumb behaviour.

By now we had been joined by the Britpack. Writers from the
Guardian
, the
Telegraph
, Reuters and
Cycling Weekly
as well as a microphone from the BBC had appeared. We formed a respectful semi-circle. This was a car-boot sale with a difference. Time stood still. Wiggins cracked open his second
can. He threw his neck back and drank again. We watched, fascinated and irritable. Deadlines were closing in on us. This story was a little too thirsty for our liking.

Eventually, Wiggins signalled his readiness with the trace of a smile and a beckoning flick of the head. He started to talk into our bunched microphones.

‘I knew I could do this. I've been confident, ever since this spring when I changed things a little. I've lost weight but kept my power. It's just nice to be able to show to myself what I know I've been working towards.'

And then the sober assessment: ‘You know, this was just the first day in the mountains and I got through it fine. But there's a hell of long way to Paris and a whole load more mountains to get over. This is a great start, but it doesn't mean much just yet.'

As he rolled the words out, we drank them in. Nodding dogs. Egging him on to speak in prouder, louder terms of his achievements. But Wiggins was utterly in control of the messages he was sending the public, and at the same time of the messages he was sending back into the peloton and back through his own ears and into his heart.

Andorra had been special. But as the race rumbled out of the Pyrenees, and attention returned to the sprinters, we all became a little obsessed with weight. Wiggins and his missing kilos kept us fascinated from day to day.

We ambushed him at the start village. We ambushed him at the finish line. We spoke to him whenever and wherever we could to talk pounds and ounces. He offered simple explanations where we demanded complex ones. He'd simply been on a sort of diet. With loads of exercise. There was really nothing more to it than that.

He'd always been thin, but in a peloton made up of men whose BMI is so low it'd double if they ate a cheese sandwich, Wiggins stood out in particular.

And yet, it seemed that for many people outside of the bright British bubble of enthusiasm, there were plenty of unanswered questions. To most of the rest of the world, he had appeared from nowhere on the leaderboard. So during that middle week, people from all over the international media compound made the trek across to our modest truck. German TV wanted to know if we had any footage of him playing the guitar. The Danes wanted pictures of him from his childhood.

But there were those who felt differently. A few of the Dutch and some of the French wanted to know what he was on.

This came as a shock to me when I first perceived the depth of their cynicism. It felt as if some outsider had just gatecrashed a private party and set about insulting your family. But, more than that, I was nagged by worry. Had I missed something? Had I neglected my duty somehow?

I had prided myself on going about my business on the Tour with my eyes and ears wide open, live to any insinuation, receptive to rumour. I had become better with each passing year at filtering the wheat from the chaff. I really should have stopped and thought more deeply about the Wiggins case. It was true that in the ultra-suspicious world of cycling journalism his transformation would automatically have raised eyebrows.

And yet, as I finally set about unpicking his past dealings and thinking about those who'd had influence on him and his upbringing as a rider, I found nothing to provoke alarm. The bad vibes simply never chimed. My conviction in his innocence became clearer. Nonetheless, I reproached myself a little for not having thought to ask the question earlier.

One day on the 2009 Tour, somewhere near Tarbes, Wiggins must have read my mind. Or he must have been reading too many message boards on continental cycling websites. We stopped him just before he got away at the end of a nothing sort of a stage.

He was wearing a pair of extraordinarily large white plastic sunglasses. This fascinated me, particularly since, when I looked him in the eye, all I got back was a stereoscopic vision of two identical earnest-looking ITV Sport reporters. It quite put me off my stride.

But that day, without me even raising the subject, he acknowledged his detractors. He offered up the oxygen of recognition to the murmurs and mumbles of discontent. I was astonished. Standing by the side of a field, hemmed into the side of the road by a slow-moving line of Tour vehicles, with one leg mostly falling off down a drainage ditch, Wiggins told it like it was.

‘I know they'll talk of doping and that people won't believe that I can do all this clean. But that's it, that's cycling, that's where we're at. What else can I say? I know it's sad.'

That phrase cut through. It dragged back into the hot French air all the ghastly baggage of 2007, when Wiggins had been escorted back to his hotel room by the gendarmerie. One of his Cofidis teammates had been busted. The entire team withdrew from the race. After two weeks of appalling effort, Wiggins had found his Tour prematurely and ingloriously ended.

A day or two later back in Manchester, Wiggins called a press conference to discuss his enforced withdrawal. It was a stinging assessment of the Tour. His languid delivery betrayed some emotion. Not for him any more the nest of vipers of the continental pro-racing scene. He painted a picture of a peloton rotten to the core. It was an articulate rebuke to the corruption in which his sport was steeped. Instead, he declared, he would now dedicate himself to the pure, clean aesthetics and ethics of the track, in pursuit of the perfect pursuit. I was struck by the coherence of his attack on road racing.

His words made my surroundings seem temporarily a little tawdry: the as-far-as-the-eye-can-see array of Tour vehicles, awnings and branded marquees mushrooming up in each gap between the trucks. The self-important accredited chosen ones scurried from one duty to another, in and out of edit-suites, satellite feed points, ad hoc radio studios, all filing stories for consumption back home that told only half the story. We had all bought into the cheating. We were all part of the problem. The truth didn't matter so much that it should stand in the way of good fiction.

So in 2009, it was uncomfortable to hear Wiggins evoke the ghosts of 2007, as this time the finger of suspicion rounded on him. I applauded him for facing down the issue, and not scurrying away. In effect, he answered the questions, before we'd even asked them.

The next summit finish on Verbier could not come soon enough for those of us who wanted to know just how good he might prove to be. We feared its arrival and craved the certainty it would impart. It was judgement day for Wiggins's Tour.

What happened, then, on that Swiss mountain top? Of all the days on my eight Tours, no other single stage has been replayed in my memory as often as this.

That day, Alberto Contador won. His attack had been widely predicted. It was the day he rode himself into the yellow jersey,
and effectively dispensed with any notion that Lance Armstrong might be capable of winning an eighth Tour de France. Behind him the race spread out. Nibali, the Schlecks, none could live with him.

Yet as that small clutch of elite riders spilled over the top, the French media pack remained largely unmoved. Their sights were set on Nicolas Sarkozy, who had dropped in for the day. He was the showbiz draw, the darling of the crowds, the small man with the pulling power, and quite possibly the politics, of Peter Stringfellow. Because of his presence on the race, we were being chaperoned by half a dozen of the hardest-looking shaven-headed secret service guys it's possible to imagine. In the glaring sun, Liam, briefly taking the weight of the camera off his shoulder, had the temerity to park his tired backside on the bonnet of an unfamiliar-looking, unmarked, black limousine. A tap on the shoulder from one of the highly trained assassin types was enough to send him jumping up.

Then Sarkozy's official car finally arrived and screamed to a frantic halt. All hell broke loose. It provoked a whirlwind of cameras, guards and fanatical crowds, all trying to snatch a glimpse of the little great man. You could have been forgiven for forgetting there was a bike race on.

For the rest of us, the race was the only thing that mattered.

One minute and twenty-six seconds further down the mountain, and flanked by former Tour winner Carlos Sastre and world champion-to-be Cadel Evans, Bradley Wiggins was doing battle with the boundary of the British believability. A further nine seconds back, Lance Armstrong had cracked, and was digging in, unable quite to hold the wheel of the grimacing East German, Andreas Klöden.