Tour’s first mountain range, the Pyrenees, everyone was talking about his weight loss, as though that held the key to his transformation. ‘I’ve worked my arse off for this,’ he said in Andorra, after finishing with the leaders at the Tour’s first summit finish. It was true: his arse did seem to have vanished.
In Limoges a few days later Wiggins explained how he’d done it, and why: ‘I went about it in a really planned way. I worked with Nigel Mitchell [the British Cycling nutritionist] and Matt Parker [the BC endurance coach]. It’s been a nine-month process and I did it because I wanted to give the road, and the Tour, a right good crack. Shane Sutton’s been telling me I could do it; he instilled that belief and confidence in me.
‘After the Olympics, and the party season and making a prat of myself for part of the year, I weighed 83kg. Now I’m 71kg. But that’s it; there’s no more to come off. It’s getting ridiculous now – Nigel’s quite worried, I think. But it’s worked very well for me. I haven’t lost any power. I’ve been lucky.
‘It’s been a lengthy process and there were spells when I could put weight on, and others when I could lose it,’ Wiggins said. ‘A lot of it was changing what I ate, and when I ate, not necessarily eating less. I’d go wheat and gluten free at times. And I’d try not to eat bread. I don’t have any sugar any more. That cuts out a lot of calories. I’d have two or three sugars in coffee. And booze – I don’t have any beer any more. I forget the last time I had a beer. You get to the point where you don’t miss it.’
At this point, Wiggins might not have been comfortable talking about himself as a Tour contender – almost two-thirds of the race remained, including the Alps and Mont Ventoux – but he appeared far from uncomfortable talking candidly and self-deprecatingly about himself, and his almost comical lack of preparation for this Tour. He hadn’t reconnoitred the stages to come in the Alps, he admitted. ‘Nah, of course I didn’t,’ he laughed. ‘I was doing 10-mile time trials and Premier Calendars [domestic road races] back in England. I didn’t really expect to be in this position.’
Yet he had believed that a high overall placing might be possible. Apart from Sutton’s encouragement, a catalyst had been the previous year’s performance of his Garmin teammate Christian Vande Velde. Vande Velde had been fourth in 2008. ‘That was inspiring,’ said Wiggins, ‘’cos I know he’s clean. It showed me you can do it on bread and water. I mean, I left the Tour in 2007 saying I’d never come back. But watching it on telly last year, seeing people like Christian and Cav, it was a breath of fresh air from the previous years.’
The biggest change, however, was in Wiggins himself. ‘I didn’t have the work ethic when I first rode the Tour in 2006,’ he admitted. ‘I was coming off the back of being Olympic champion at the age of 24, and I thought I was it, to be honest. I thought I’d made it. It’s only now I realise what cycling’s about. With the Olympics, you get swept along, they’re great, fantastic, but, in the world of cycling, they don’t mean much. You get over-feted for the Olympics.’ There were other reasons, though, for sticking to the track, to what he knew. ‘Before 2006 I was in a team that I disliked, surrounded by people that disliked me,’ Wiggins said. ‘And in 2006 I just wanted to do the Tour to say I’d done the Tour. I didn’t think I’d come back; I thought I’d lose my contract at the end of 2006, so I just wanted to say I’d done the Tour.
‘I grew up in teams where the French had a real funny attitude towards everyone else,’ he continued, now hitting his stride – getting things off his chest. ‘There was this sense of: “There’s no way we can compete with those guys because they’re doing other stuff, but we’re French and we do it right, and we have croissants and baguettes, and we can sleep at night with a clear conscience and can’t control what other people are doing.” Even if you were near the top guys on a stage, the attitude was: “That was fantastic, look how well you did.” And you were feted for doing quite little things, really.’
Joining Garmin at the start of the season had opened his eyes to a team that ‘gives you the freedom to be who you want to be. We’re much more of a family, without shouting about it. People want life contracts here. It’s just like a close knit friendship, a relaxed atmosphere, and there’s no pressure to get results, which suits me.’
As he spoke, in the dining room of a budget hotel on the outskirts of Limoges, Wiggins appeared relaxed and at ease. He slouched in his seat, his long, lanky legs splayed beneath the table, from time to time using his painfully thin arms to help make a point. He tended to avoid eye contact, however. He also remarked testily that he ‘had the arse with some journalists,’ who kept asking him about doping. ‘Lance gave me some advice about the press,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to tell you what he told me.’
Whatever it was, Wiggins grew gradually more distant as the Tour wore on and his star ascended. Most mornings he remained in his bus for as long as possible, emerging as the last call was going out for riders to sign on for the day’s stage. Sometimes he had a few words for the waiting press; other mornings he ignored them, hiding behind his Oakley sunglasses and pushing through the crowd as he rode off silently. It was very different to 2006, when he spent mornings drinking coffee, reading newspapers, shooting the breeze. It was true that his circumstances had changed beyond recognition. But was there another explanation? One morning, I mentioned Wiggins’ reticence and occasional curtness to Jonathan Vaughters, his team manager. ‘He’s shy,’ said Vaughters. ‘It’s no more than that; he’s really uncomfortable speaking to the press because he’s actually very shy.’
‘But he’s a natural,’ I said. ‘He’s eloquent, and he can be funny. He doesn’t seem shy.’
‘I was watching him in Limoges,’ said Vaughters. ‘He was doing a good job of seeming comfortable. But it was an act. I could see his legs under the table – they were shaking.’
Hotel Cadro Panoramica, Lugano, 25 September 2009
Early evening on the roof terrace of the Panoramica Hotel, as the sun sets over Lake Lugano, which nestles deep in the valley below, and Dave Brailsford surveys a pile of white paper sitting on a table, its edges gently lifting with the breeze.
‘I can sign those while I talk,’ he says to the colleague charged with managing the logistics of setting up Team Sky.
‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ she says.
They’re the riders’ contracts for 2010. But they don’t include one for Bradley Wiggins. His fourth place in the Tour – missing out on the podium by just 38 seconds to Lance Armstrong – was sealed with a gutsy, even heroic, effort on Mont Ventoux on the penultimate day.
‘And so to the Ventoux,’ Wiggins had written on Twitter that morning. ‘Spare a thought for the great Tom.’ Then he rode, with a photograph of Tom Simpson taped to the top tube of his bike, as though inspired by his late countryman, fighting almost the entire length – or rather height – of the mountain, from the shelter of the trees as the climb got underway, to the bald, lunar-like upper slopes, where Simpson died during the 1967 Tour.
As they ascended into the sky Wiggins was trailed off, but he fought back, only to be trailed off again, only to fight back again – a yo-yo effort that is torture at the best of times, purgatory on a climb like Mont Ventoux. Approaching the summit, and riding past the Simpson memorial statue, and past Simpson’s daughter, Joanne, who emptied her lungs to yell ‘GO BRAD!’, Wiggins dangled just off the back of the Contador-Schleck-Armstrong group, his mouth wide open, his face a picture of agony. After such an effort, and although at the start of the day the podium had seemed a possibility, his fourth place in Paris – equalling Robert Millar’s best-ever British performance in the Tour, 25 years previously – could only be seen as a glorious triumph.
Wiggins’
