Bradley Wiggins (16 page)

Garry occasionally made it over to Europe for a look at his old stamping ground and on occasion caught up with Brad at the Ghent Six-Day race. He would invariably be holding court at a bar,
fuelled with beer supplied by his son and surrounded by listeners only too happy to hear tales of his unsurpassable genius as a track rider and drink the beer he so generously gave out via his
son’s wallet. He would delight in telling them about Bradley’s shortcomings as a cyclist and expound upon the reasons why he could never match his old dad’s abilities.

It wasn’t what you’d call your typical father-son relationship.

Brad was woken by a phone call in the early hours of a January morning in 2008. He had been training in Manchester as part of his Beijing preparations and so was sleeping in his own bed for
once. He got out of bed leaving Cath sleeping, wondering who it could be. There had been drunken late-night calls from Garry in the past, but not for years. A chain of events and long-distance
calls that night revealed a sad truth: Garry Wiggins was dead. The truth was hazy, but it appeared that he had been drinking at a house party and got into a fight with the host. He had left the
party on his feet, but been found a little way off at the roadside a few hours later, dead from a blow to the head. Whether the injury had been sustained in the fight or when he fell was unclear,
but those were the facts. He was just 55.

Bradley talked to Shannon and Garry’s sister, Glenda, in Australia. He made plans to go out for the funeral but then changed his mind. It was time to put his father and their tentative
steps towards reconciliation behind him. He should be concentrating on his own family – his lovely wife Cath, first child Ben and the recently arrived Isabella – none of whom Garry had
ever met.

Two months later, Bradley dedicated his gold medal at the World Championship when partnering Mark Cavendish in the madison to his late father. For all his faults and all the pain he had been
through and caused, Brad remembered that Garry had been a bloody good bike rider. There had been few better madison riders in his day. It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had meant so little,
yet strangely so much, to the new World Champion.

Back in the mists of time, way back as far as the 1990s and even the 1980s, the cycling season went like this: spring classics, Vuelta, Giro, Tour, autumn classics, World
Championships, Tour of Lombardy. That was it. No Tour Down Under. No Tour of California. None of that stuff. What’s more, races used to be run in a logical start-slow-get-faster sort of way.
When the Tour went through a French rider’s home town, he had time to hop off and share a glass of bubbly at
un picnic en famille
before lolloping back up to join the leisurely
peloton.

Then things began to change. People started putting up a bit more money for folks to win their bike race, or even just for them to come and ride it, especially if it was in some far flung place.
The decidedly two-bit Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia, for instance, became the fourth richest race in the world for teams prepared to spend two weeks in February riding through a jungle. Now, the
Tour of Qatar and the Tour of Turkey attract squads chasing early season euros and UCI points.

Ah, yes, UCI points. Points dished out for results at races, weighted according to the seriousness of the event. It’s all a bit chicken-and-egg, but people started chasing UCI points
around the same time as races got richer and quicker. A rider with points against his name can secure a team entry to the races they want to ride. It’s made racing more competitive but
flawed: Saxo Bank team manager Bjarne Riis recently pointed out that it’s not easy to get a
domestique
to sacrifice his own ambitions for a team leader and then be told at the end of
the year that he hasn’t earned a contract for the following year because he hasn’t accrued enough UCI points.

All these things meant that the traditional way of racing was impossible to sustain over the course of a season. It was just too hard to ride all of the races, especially to ride hard in all of
the races. Something had to give.

The first thing to give was the Vuelta a España. Rooted to its spot in the annual calendar at the beginning of May, immediately after the cessation of the spring classics, the Tour of
Spain suffered horribly through the new regime of hard riding for ten months of the year. Nobody was turning up. It was fast becoming a domestic race, and even the brightest Spanish stars were
finding it hard to find room in their year to ride the Vuelta. Even the legends Pedro Delgado and Miguel Indurain began to duck it in order to better prepare for the Tour de France.

The solution was to fan the three grand tours out. The Giro d’Italia would be the first one of the year now, moving from its customary appointment in June to May. The Vuelta would be
pushed back to September with the World Championships even later than that to bookend the season.

To start with, the move benefited the Giro and the Tour, not that the Tour needed any help, as it had long been becoming a gargantuan monolith that dominated the calendar more and more with
every passing year. The Giro now became the place to be seen for the Tour riders in need of a hard race before July.

The Vuelta was quickly cast as the whipping boy of the whole arrangement, and the new arrangement didn’t do the World Championships any favours either, pushing it to such a late point that
many likely contenders had simply had enough racing by then and stayed at home.

Faced with this alarming erosion of the world’s third biggest bike race, the organisers of the Vuelta hatched a cunning plan. They reasoned that what the cycling public wanted to see were
mountain top finishes and plenty of them. They wanted to see the favourites scrapping with each other day in, day out. And they wanted the drama to go the distance of a three-week race.

So, they made some key changes. Out went super-long stages – the TV viewers only switch on for the last hour, anyway. In came short, sharp exciting
parcours
that invariably
finished on top of a big hill, giving the attacking riders more chance of hurting the competition. They also introduced time bonuses for those finishes, giving an extra incentive for attacking your
rivals at the end of each day. And out went long time trials, a move that had two benefits. Firstly, it tended to prolong the race’s action right up to the final weekend as there were less
long settled time gaps between the top riders on GC. Secondly, lots of time trialling kilometres in a race tended to promote and favour a more defensive style: build up your lead in the time trial
then protect it in the mountains. (This final point was a theme that 2012 Tour de France viewers were beginning to suspect awaited them.)

As a result, their race was revitalised. Nobody was ever certain of victory until they’d breathed a huge sigh of relief in Madrid. Time bonuses and big climbs kept everybody guessing from
the first stage until the last, and the lack of monster stages made it infinitely more attractive for riders to come and give it a nudge.

Lance Armstrong was one of the first to enjoy the new format. His 1998 appearance was the springboard for his comeback after testicular cancer and his fourth place was a major plank in
convincing him that Tour de France glory was a possibility.

The Tour de France has belatedly begun to look at the Vuelta’s advances. The Tour remains steeped in tradition, however, the numerous doping scandals that have battered the race’s
reputation for many years could not continue to be ignored. In the same year that Armstrong was reinventing himself in Spain, the race was brought to its knees by the revelation that a Festina team
car carrying illicit supplies for its riders had been rumbled by French police. Expulsion, police raids and even jail for the many miscreants threatened the very fabric of the great event. Drug
taking appeared to have reached its dark zenith, with many privately claiming that the race could not be completed without chemical assistance. Yet two years later, the Tour was still staging
back-to-back Alpine stages containing 425km and seven enormous passes in an eye-watering display of endurance for the riders. The stages were won by Santiago Botero and Marco Pantani respectively,
both riders with histories of drug abuse. The image of a shell-shocked and demoralised David Millar after these tortures was the first that sprang to this writer’s mind when the British star
confessed to taking illegal stimulants four years later.

Things are a little different in 2012. Not revolutionarily different, but a lesson has been learned from the Vuelta. This 148km stage to the ski-station at La Toussuire is the
étape
reine
of this year’s procession through the Alps. In the last century, this may have meant anything up to eight hours in the saddle, scaling any number of high passes. Claudio
Chiappucci’s legendary win over Miguel Indurain at Sestriere in 1992 took nearly eight hours – a lot longer for those in
l’autobus
– and went over five huge passes
to cover a total of 254km. The day before was even longer, and the day after finished on Alpe d’Huez.

Today, the riders will head over the massive Col de Madeleine virtually from the start, then the graveyard of ambition that is the Col de la Croix de Fer, before tackling the brutish slopes to
the finish at La Toussuire.

Last year, the Tour de France’s most exciting stage was an eyebrow-raising dash of just 109km, over the Tour’s favourite giant, the Col du Galibier, then finishing on top of Alpe
d’Huez. Alberto Contador and Pierre Rolland traded blows all the way up the Alpe, while behind them Andy Schleck launched the sort of gut-wrenching attack that gets fans out of their seats
and Cadel Evans’s fatigue-busting pursuit ultimately won him the race.

Shorter stages suit the fans and riders alike. But will they suit Bradley Wiggins and his defence of the
maillot jaune
? On the one hand, he should be fresher and less susceptible to the
attritional problems such long mountain stages bring, but attacks are all the more likely. Evans, Nibali, Van Den Broeck, Frank Schleck and Menchov are waiting like vultures for the first sign of
weakness. Will Team Sky be able to fend them all off?

*

Albertville, host of the 1992 Winter Olympics. Not to be confused with Alphaville, shoulder-padded purveyors of the 1980s ‘classic’ ‘Big In Japan’. I
remember it well as the singer had acne scars of Steve Cram proportions, a horrendous quiff, make-up befitting a deluded transvestite and, unfortunately, looked like me, according to my
schoolfriends.

How to put this? It’s not a place I’d want to be stuck in, falling as it does into that category of Alpine towns most often described as ‘unloved’. Apparently, the more
colloquial ‘shithole’ is frowned upon.

Brad and his band of merry men don’t get to see much of it. Within a few minutes they’re already setting a frantic tempo on the Col de la Madeleine in an attempt to contain a furious
breakaway group intent on landing a stage win. The relatively short distance of 148km leaves no room for pleasantries and the explosive attacks cause instant panic at the back of the bunch as the
sprinters and
rouleurs
try to organise themselves to ensure they will finish within the time limit and not be eliminated. This is a job they wouldn’t have expected to contemplate
until much later in the day.

Twenty-eight riders is a big breakaway group, even if it doesn’t include any obvious contenders for Wiggins’s throne, and Team Sky send the Norwegian battering ram Edvald Boasson
Hagen up to the nose of the peloton to control things. Incredibly, the one-man team rides on the front of the race pretty much without assistance for the thick end of 80km. It’s not until the
upper slopes of the Col du Glandon are reached that his teammates Mick Rogers and Richie Porte take up the reins.

The Col du Glandon is not an easy climb, but it is largely a white-lines-down-the-middle kind of road. Today, we’re not going to take the Tour organisers’ favourite route of going
over the Glandon and down to Le Bourg-d’Oisans before a sharp left up Alpe d’Huez. Instead, on top of the Col, we’re going to swing left up the steeper and narrower Col de Croix
de Fer. Perhaps it is the knowledge that this harder part is coming, perhaps he is nervous, or perhaps he just feels good. Whatever the reason, Cadel Evans’s attack on the Glandon comes as a
surprise. We’re only halfway through the stage and Team Sky’s Aussie duo are going pretty hard, but the defending champion shoots upwards from the group in search of the seconds he has
ceded to Bradley Wiggins. He joins his young BMC comrade Tejay van Garderen and they push on hard, causing consternation behind.

Rogers puts his head down in inimitable style and cranks out a fearsome rhythm, taking Porte, Wiggins and Froome back up to the BMC pairing. The acceleration has served to kick the pain further
down the mountain. Now it is the riders trying to hold on to the Team Sky quartet who are troubled.

The stage is set for a proper gunfight on La Toussuire. The remainder of the breakaway is now unlikely to be reeled in by the Tour grandees, but this is where the real race is, a minute or two
behind the lone figure of Pierre Rolland as he battles towards yet another French stage win this week.

Richie Porte is the man charged by Sean Yates to set the tempo on the last climb of the day. The finish line is situated right at the top of the mountain, so Porte knows there will be no
opportunity to pull back an attack on the descent: he must bury himself to ensure attacking is impossible.

Janez Brajkovi
č
of Astana is the first to test Team Sky. He’s joined in short order by Thibaut Pinot and the dangerous Belgian, Jurgen Van Den Broeck. Porte stays calm
and pulls away on the front of the rapidly diminishing yellow jersey group, but when Vincenzo Nibali moves to join the attackers, it is clear that something must be done.

For the first time since the weekend, Team Sky’s full armoury is called upon. Chris Froome, hunched over his handlebars like he’s trying to pull his bike apart, shreds the group to
nullify Nibali and Van Den Broeck. There are around 5km left to the top and the Tour de France could be won and lost in those precious minutes. Unfortunately for Australian fans, it looks like the
man who will lose it today will be their hero, Cadel Evans. Froome’s pace is just too much for the champion and he agonisingly loses contact with Wiggins and the race lead. For once not left
totally exposed by his inadequate BMC team – supposedly the richest squad in cycling – he is forced to rely on his foot soldier van Garderen. Proudly clad in the white jersey that
denotes the race’s best-placed young rider, the American paces the distraught Evans to the finish. He will concede a minute and a half to those ahead, surely an insurmountable loss when added
to his existing deficit.