Bradley Wiggins (7 page)

Things could only get better for the Linda McCartney team. They brought in Jacob’s Creek and Jaguar as co-sponsors for 2001 and set upon an ambitious expansion plan, bringing in Spanish
hitters like Juan Carlos Domínguez and Íñigo Cuesta, and exciting young signings such as the former World Junior Road Champion, Mark Scanlon from Ireland. They also brought in
a co-director to accompany Yates in the form of Neil Stephens, the popular recently retired Australian.

There was one signing that made more headlines than any others, though. The new star of British cycling, the twenty-year-old Sydney bronze medallist Bradley Wiggins, was joining.

It seemed like the ideal move for Wiggins. An English-speaking team would integrate him into European cycling more gently than the established Euro powerhouses. This was an exciting new squad
who were sweeping away preconceptions about ‘old school’ cycling and made a big deal about being clean and drug free, one where friendly faces like Matt Stephens and Russell Downing
would be. The Tour de France was just a few more eye-catching rides away for the new squad, perhaps even in 2001.

The money was right, and Bradley was assisted by his old friend and sometime manager Richard Allchin in settling the deal. Hands were shaken. Cars were loaded. Brad drove himself down to the
team’s new base in Toulouse and began to pin up posters of
The Italian Job
, The Who and Muhammad Ali around his rather pokey little billet in Colomiers. However, it proved to be a
miserable month. The bulk of the team were in Australia riding the team’s first race of the year, the Tour Down Under, and there was nothing much for the twenty-year-old to do other than ride
his bike. Christmas Day 2000 in Haute-Garonne was warm and sunny with the peaks of the distant Pyrenees pricking the blue horizon. But by mid-January, a familiar soggy fog had settled over the
sweetcorn fields that took the more enthusiastic rider out beyond the Forêt de Bouconne and the sleepy villages of Gers. It was a bedraggled and solitary Wiggins who arrived in Bagshot for
the new-look squad’s unofficial unveiling.

There was considerable excitement after McKenzie won the final stage of the Tour Down Under in a sweltering Melbourne; however, it quickly evaporated. The launch and the whole concept of the
team was a complete fiasco. The riders and staff numbered about 30, and they sat bewildered in a back room at the Cricketers Hotel on the A30 at Bagshot to be told by a frowning Sean Yates and Max
Sciandri that they had discovered there was no deal with Jaguar, no deal with Jacob’s Creek and the Linda McCartney money for 2001 had already been spent. Of Julian Clark, there was no
sign.

Yates and Sciandri battled to save the team, trying to raise more funds and trying to organise the team on a reduced budget, but it was clear by the end of that awful day that there wasn’t
a budget shortfall, there was no budget. No money at all.

The riders drifted away in a sense of shock. Some had the good sense to hang on to the beautiful new Principia bikes they’d been given. Sciandri, picking up a ride on the Lampre squad,
even rode his in the first Belgian classic, Het Volk, a couple of weeks later. The rest were left to seek their own fortune.

Bradley wasn’t as devastated as some. For a start, he was within riding distance of home, unlike the Australian, Colombian, Czech and Spanish recruits. He was young, he was an Olympic
medallist, and something would turn up. What turned up were the willing open arms of Team GB. In a brilliant move, they immediately put him back on the elite performance plan and reinstated his
salary. He had given his country a medal and they’d not forgotten him.

Welcome home, Brad.

It’s not exactly the infamous clear-the-air meeting during which sporting teams have to sort out their differences, but Team Sky do have a discussion about tactics before
Stage 5 of the Tour de France. Another flat, fast stage designed for the sprinters spells more danger in the shape of crashes and another flat, fast stage designed for sprinters spells another
opportunity for Mark Cavendish to win. How to combat these twin issues?

Sean Yates explains: ‘The best way to stay out of trouble is to have your team around you and ride near the front. Also, the best way to win a sprint is to have your team take you to the
front of the race. We feel that by riding more aggressively than we have this week up to now, we can achieve both our goals: keep Brad out of trouble and set Cav up for the win.’

Mark Cavendish is patched up and wearing fresh kit after yesterday’s unscheduled bike rider/asphalt interface. ‘Cav may have a little prob with his hand, otherwise ok,’ texts
Yates before the teams roll out of Rouen for another nervous 200km.

While RadioShack-Nissan are doing what they have done effectively all week in controlling the race for the yellow jersey and making sure the break doesn’t disappear into the distance and
ruin things, this time Team Sky are in closer attendance, especially in the last 50km as the pace rises and pulses follow the pace. All eight remaining members of the original nine-man team mass
near the front, Wiggins enjoying the protection that a
grand patron
receives and Cavendish benefiting from a smooth ride to the business end of the race. The World Champion does indeed
have a sore hand from yesterday’s spill but he feels good enough to tell his teammates that he is ready to contest the shakedown in Saint Quentin.

Peta Todd is not called upon to express her frustrations when the inevitable big smackdown comes, this time with only 3km remaining. That’s because the new team tactic has come up trumps
and the squad’s position at the head of the fast-travelling peloton has kept them out of the carnage for once. If only they’d listened to her earlier. The green jersey of Peter Sagan is
not so fortunate; his scrapes mirror Cavendish’s rapidly healing contusions. His girlfriend’s thoughts remain her own.

The usual suspects jockey and harry each other for their sprinting positions. Cavendish, having been close to the front, drops back, expecting the winning sprint to be a late one due to the
draggy uphill finish and the possibility of some crosswinds. The World Champion doesn’t make a lot of mistakes, but this is definitely one of them, as he leaves himself too much ground to
make up in the final 300m. Matt Goss is the first to break cover and he opens up a gap on the others, but he has made the opposite mistake to Cavendish and has gone too early. The cannier Greipel
– who else? – has timed his run to perfection. Today he is able to swat away criticism that a crash has gifted him the stage as he has proved himself a worthy winner over the best
sprinters in the race. Only Sagan and Tyler Farrar are missing from the vanquished; the American being restrained by his team from entering the Argos-Shimano bus after the event to launch a right
hook at Tom Veelers, the perceived architect of his misfortune. Dave Brailsford’s earlier observation that ‘sprinters crash’ probably wouldn’t have gone down too well with
Farrar at that precise moment. Emotions were riding high.

Cavendish decently declined to blame his injuries for missing out on win number 22. Greipel’s second stage win and Sagan’s absence from the top places has tightened up the battle for
the green jersey, with Cav in fourth spot behind a closely grouped Sagan, Goss and Greipel.

Perhaps Team Sky’s new-found aggression and cohesion will deliver the twin prizes of yellow and green after all?

Objective 1 has certainly been achieved today, with no members of the squad suffering mishaps and Wiggins’s second place overall comfortably conserved again. The first mountains of the
Tour are looming on the horizon, and Cancellara has publicly admitted that his tenure in yellow is unlikely to survive the first big obstacle, La Planche des Belle Filles in two days’ time.
The Vosges mountains are outgunned by the Alps and Pyrenees, but have some very difficult slopes to trouble the best riders, and most teams have taken the trouble to recce Saturday’s stage
finish. If all the favourites for overall victory in this race stay together and Cancellara drops away on the struggle up to the finish at ‘Pretty Girls Plain’ then we will see Bradley
Wiggins of Great Britain pull on a Tour de France yellow jersey for the very first time.

Objective 2 has been a qualified success, with a display of team unity and brotherhood delivering Mark Cavendish to the finishing kick in fine position, but the Manx rider was unable to convert
the approach with a victory. Tomorrow will be the last chance for sprinters to shine for a little while. We can expect him to be keen to show Greipel who is the boss.

MATT ILLINGWORTH WAS A
bloody good bike rider. A talented time triallist from Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex (‘Don’t put Southend’), the
tall cyclist was in great demand for teams on the British road circuit as the powerful horse who could drag races back together for faster-finishing teammates.

He rode for such teams as GS Strada, Kodak, Brite and Linda McCartney in a ten-year career upon the roads of Great Britain and the tracks of the world. He won two medals on the velodrome at the
Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur and that’s where he first got to know Bradley Wiggins properly.

‘I’d seen the skinny kid at a few races and I knew he was pretty good. His legs looked too long for his body. The longer socks were starting to get fashionable then – George
Hincapie was wearing them – and there was a big debate about whether they were cool or not. They were made for Brad. He wore them so long you could have easily got shin pads in them, as was
pointed out more than once in the bunch.’

Wiggins was drafted into Illingworth’s England team pursuit squad for the Commonwealth Games. He made an immediate impression on the older rider, one that developed into a friendship that
endures today, despite Illingworth emigrating to Australia in the early part of this century.

‘The thing I remember most about Kuala Lumpur was Brad wiping his arse on a bit of paper and shoving it down the back of the fridge at the place we were staying at. After a week the smell
was atrocious. Colin Sturgess eventually found it, pulled it out and went mental. “Who the fuck would be such a dirty bastard?” he was screaming. This weedy eighteen-year old, who had
hardly said a word the whole trip, just looked at Sturge completely deadpan and went: ‘It was Illingworth.’ Thanks to his almost monkish silence up to that point, they believed him,
too. I liked him a lot.’

Being cool was always as important as being good for Brad, even in those days.

‘We were going for training rides in Malaysia, and it was, like, I don’t know, 40 degrees or something and 98% humidity. Mental. We were ripping the arms off our training kit and
rolling up our shorts like Yates, blaming it on being too hot but really just trying to get a nice tan to take home to England. Brad would be there in legwarmers. ‘Pros never train in
shorts,’ he said. He’d been watching old Tour de France videos and seeing Delgado and Indurain riding mountain time trial preps in thermal jackets and tights in July. You could see him
thinking, “I want to be them.” And now he is, really.’

Matt would be the first to admit that the general approach to racing was a bit less serious than nowadays, and he was one of the last of the old guard who could party hard and still race the
next day. For a while Brad was happy to join their ranks.

‘We were up in Edinburgh for a track meet as part of our World Championships preparation one year. The old outdoor track at Meadowbank was pretty grim at the best of times, and the weather
forecast for the following day was appalling. Convincing ourselves in the nice warm and dry hotel that the card for tomorrow was bound to be rained off, we went on a massive bender. The next day,
we woke up mid-morning with horrific hangovers and pulled back the curtains to piercing blue skies and searing sunshine. That was the worst day’s racing I’ve ever got through, but we
got through it.

‘A bunch of us went out to watch the Ghent Six when Brad and Rob Hayles were riding, supposedly to support them. We must have embarrassed them horribly, hurling abuse at them for six whole
days, especially during quiet periods in the racing. It’s much more fun then. My season had ended and I was kicking back a bit . . . I won’t go into detail, I look bad enough as it
is.’

Wiggins’s success has not come as a surprise to his old teammate.

‘No, not at all. From day one he was different gravy. And he just loved it so much. He was a pleasure to be around. I know I’ll be telling young kids in my shop in years to come
about how I used to ride with Bradley Wiggins. Well, if I’m honest, I’m already doing it. And telling them how Sturge used to pull Brad’s pants down when he wasn’t
looking.’

Illingworth had a great career that he can look back upon with pride: an Olympian, a Commonwealth Games medallist, a host of World Championship appearances and stage wins and podium places on
the track and on the road all over the globe. Even now, though he may try to give the impression of being an old soak in an armchair, the antipodean Brit has a formidable record as an Ironman
triathlete. But the buzz he gets out of seeing Bradley Wiggins bossing it at the Tour de France is as good as anything he got from his racing career.