ski town of Verbier, his performance was befitting his lofty placing. After his teammates David Millar and Christian Vande Velde set a searing pace to the foot of the mountain, Wiggins rode like someone trying not merely to finish in the top 20, but like someone trying to win the Tour. Here, for the first time, was the sense that Wiggins wasn’t merely surviving: he was a major player, instructing his team to set him up, then assuming responsibility for finishing the job off, taking over like only a natural-born leader – or someone at the very peak of their form and confidence – can.
In Verbier, although Contador jumped away to win the stage, Wiggins’ fifth place, in the company of climbing specialists Frank Schleck and defending Tour champion Carlos Sastre, and 30 seconds ahead of seven-time winner Armstrong, had left him in third place overall. Only four days remained to Paris. The podium beckoned.
Whatever happened in those final four days it had become clear: Wiggins had managed a metamorphosis of Kafka-esque proportions, in his case from Olympic track star to Tour de France contender. How had he done it? The loss of 7kg clearly helped – his new, pared-to-the-bone physique saw him re-(nick)named: from ‘The Wig’ or ‘Wiggo’, he was now ‘The Twig’ or ‘Twiggo’.
Whatever the cause, the implications of his transformation are enormous, especially for the two men locked in conversation in the start village in Martigny. In Newport Wiggins had signed a two-year contract with Garmin, and so Vaughters has Wiggins for the 2010 season. Brailsford, meanwhile, is in the process of scouting and recruiting for Team Sky for 2010. But he is faced with the prospect of running a British team without a British star. Mark Cavendish, on his way to following his four stage wins of the previous year’s Tour with six at this year’s race, is locked into Bob Stapleton’s Columbia-HTC team until the end of 2011. It is difficult to overstate how desperate this situation is. Wiggins and Cavendish are proving two of the stars of the 2009 Tour, both are British, but neither is available to Brailsford’s new British team.
Eventually Brailsford breaks off from Vaughters and stops to talk. He describes rider recruitment as ‘like a game of poker at the moment’.
‘It’s a fluid, dynamic situation,’ says Brailsford. ‘I’ve been sitting there with my budget most nights, rejigging it on an hourly basis almost, thinking, shit, we can do this, we can’t do that. I think we’ve filled 17 slots. We’re getting down to the sharp end now. The element of poker is the question: should we wait to the end of the season and see if any teams collapse, and get some top riders cheap?’
Brailsford describes the ‘intelligence gathering’ he’s been doing, which seems to refer mainly to sussing out whether riders can be trusted; whether they are ‘clean’. Indeed, there is a rumour that one prominent rider has been turned down on the basis of suspect data on his biological passport. Brailsford won’t confirm this. ‘It’s not a black and white science,’ he says of the analysis of the passports, which monitor a rider’s blood and hormone levels over a long period. There is a margin of error, so I can’t say for certain that so-and-so is using drugs. But we’re taking a no-risk approach.
‘When I talk to every agent,’ explains Brailsford, ‘the first thing I want is consent to see their biological passport. I get all the data sent over to Manchester to get our experts to pick over it. We also look at the history of the guy, his progression over a number of years. All the best bike riders, the clean ones, you see steady progression; you can graph it. The ones whose performances go up in a spike usually test positive. There are no secrets. It’s basic stuff; intelligence gathering.
‘But yeah, some of the data that comes through – you think, Jeez! I wouldn’t say I’m surprised. It just makes me laugh, the audacity of some of them. But like I say, we’re taking a no-risk approach.’ (I later learn more about one suspect case from Shane Sutton. The rider in question, a top one-day rider, had been offered a contract at the Milan-San Remo Classic in March. ‘Then we looked at his [biological] passport,’ said Sutton. ‘It was all over the place. We just said, “Sorry, mate, see you.”’ The rider in question subsequently found a place on another big team: possibly a disturbing outcome; or perhaps Brailsford and his team misread his passport. As he says, it’s not an exact science.)
Brailsford admits he’s been stung by the reaction in some quarters to his stated ambition of winning the Tour with a clean British rider. On both counts, ‘British’ and ‘clean’, he has been accused of naivety. ‘Everyone says it’s impossible to win the Tour clean,’ says Brailsford. ‘It’s been said for a while now. I don’t know whether these people think we just stick our heads in the sand in Manchester. We’ve got some of the best sports scientists in the world. And we use that knowledge and do our homework: we don’t just come out with irrelevant comments.
‘I think Brad’s a case in point,’ he continues. ‘Bradley Wiggins is clean, and he’s here performing with the best in the world. Correct me if I’m wrong, but he could win this bike race. He hasn’t changed into a new athlete. He’s the same person, taking the same full-on approach to another discipline within the sport. It vindicates our idea that if you take a proper approach – analysing everything, looking at the sports science – then it’s possible.
‘To be honest,’ Brailsford adds, ‘for the last couple of years I’ve been quite confident we’d get a British winner of the Tour de France, and people have said, “Yeah right, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”’
And is Wiggins one of the riders he had in mind as a potential winner?
Brailsford, now standing with his arms folded like a football manager, rocks back on his heels and, with his mouth clamped shut, shakes his head. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘No, no, no.’
What had he and Vaughters been discussing? ‘Actually,’ he says, unfolding his arms, ‘we were talking about Swiss chocolate.’
Bourgoin-Jallieu, 24 July 2009
In a hot and dusty field in Bourgoin-Jallieu, where stage 19 of the 2009 Tour will start in an hour, reporters and TV crews form a crowd around the entrance to the Garmin-Slipstream team bus, close enough to catch refreshing wafts of the air-conditioning whenever the door opens. Then comes not so much a waft as a blast of something else: the raw punk energy of ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. As soon as it starts it is cranked up, prompting a sing-along inside:
‘No point in asking us, you’ll get no reply …’
The bus reverberates to the rhythm, rocking to the movement inside. Matt White, the team’s director, steps out, as if to escape the noise. ‘Wiggo will be out after this song,’ says the Australian, smiling broadly.
When Bradley Wiggins emerges, 24 hours before the biggest day of his career, with his battle for a place on the podium still alive, and set to be decided at the summit of Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day of the Tour, he steps into a swarm of reporters. It is a swarm that has grown day by day, and which is now as chaotic as the crush outside any of the other team buses, with the possible exception of Astana, the team with two of Wiggins’ podium rivals, the yellow-jerseyed Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong. In his comeback year Armstrong would surely not have predicted he’d have to beat a track cyclist for a place on the podium of the Tour de France. Nobody would have predicted that. But Wiggins has looked strong, Armstrong vulnerable and more erratic than in his pomp. ‘Armstrong, fragile troisième,’ reads the headline in L’Equipe this morning.
The Sex Pistols are Wiggins’ choice, and that lyric – ‘No point in asking us, you’ll get no reply’ – has come to seem especially apt. The more Wiggins has grown into his new role as a Tour contender, and the more interest there has been around him, the less comfortable he has seemed. It is one reason, allied to his new star status, for the scrum outside his bus this morning: the less he said,
