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William Fotheringham has followed the development of Bradley Wiggins more closely than most.
The Londoner completed his transformation from track star to Tour de France superstar in the summer of 2012.
So, how did he do it?
PROJECT WIGGINS
BY WILLIAM FOTHERINGHAM
HINDSIGHT IS A wonderful thing but one little speech from Rod Ellingworth during the 2010 Tour de France is worth revisiting.
The Sky race coach spoke in the middle of a Tour which was viewed as a disaster for a team with the aspirations of the big-budget British squad.
Ellingworth was thinking long-term, beyond the team’s debut Tour where Bradley Wiggins was failing to perform a leader’s role on or off the bike, when he told me: ‘In a business, the building period is 18 months from when you start, so that means two Tours. By the third we should be bang-on.’
How right he was. By the end of the summer of 2012, Sky had turned into the winningest outfit in the game, with a dominant Tour de France behind them.
Wiggins had been converted from a Tour hopeful with one great ride to his name – not even Wiggins himself could work out whether that was a fluke – into a model of consistency, with a perfect curve of performance improvement over two years, taking him from third place at Paris-Nice in 2010 to the gold medal in the time trial at the Olympics.
It was a sporting triumph, but it raised some unexpected issues that would take time to resolve. Wiggins’s athletic ability had been tested, but so too his capacity to answer the questions about doping that come with any Tour victory in the era post-Armstrong, Landis and company.
The ethics of Tour winners are no longer taken for granted; Wiggins came to understand that, and duly responded. As he said after the Tour, he doesn’t like having to proclaim his probity in public, but he knows he has no option.
After the publication of the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s report into Armstrong, belief in the probity of professional cyclists is in short supply. I firmly believe Wiggins won the Tour clean. I base that on knowing the man for 10 years, having seen more of him one to one than I have most other cyclists, having discussed doping with him on many occasions, having a good chance to mull over his body language and his answers, and being in a position to contrast how he talks and acts compared to the dopers I have seen, interviewed and listened to over many years: Armstrong, Vinokourov, Landis, Hamilton, Riis, Pantani, Millar.
Post-Tour, the questions continued concerning members of the Team Sky entourage linked to the Armstrong scandal unveiled by USADA. Even if the individuals concerned – Sean Yates and Michael Rogers – were not directly accused of doping within the report, it was clear from sources within Sky that a response of some kind was in the pipeline after Dave Brailsford’s policy of zero tolerance towards those caught up in doping scandals had been proven to have its limits.
The chances were that would involve, at the least, a beefing-up of the policy, and changes in personnel. But that is in the longer-term. The eventual fall-out for Sky remains an open book.
As Armstrong went down in flames, the question that had been forgotten was this: how did Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France?
Not as in, how did the side-burned superstar of British sport get from Liège to Paris between June 29 and July 22 in the quickest possible time? That’s fairly clear.
He did that by not missing a beat in those 23 days; straightforward, if not simple: he stayed upright in the first week, he won the time trials, he climbed the mountains ahead of the others.
The back story merited a good long look, however: no Tour winner had done it in quite the way he did. And at a time when the way cyclists win the Tour had been called into the sharpest possible question, the background mattered as much as the victory itself.
Unlikely as it may sound to those who accompanied him in the gruppetto in his first two Tours, Wiggins was a stage racer waiting to be unleashed: this was a rider who had won a mountain stage at the Tour de l’Avenir, who had won the Flèche du Sud in Luxembourg at the ripe old age of 19.
Three episodes from his time in the gruppetto Tours spring to mind: 2006, when he wrote that in his first Tour he was waking up fresh and alert in the final week; 2007, when he told me of riding up the Col de l’Iséran in the front group, without really meaning to (before dropping back to his usual place in the autobus), and again in 2007, at the stage start in Pau, when he was discussing his high placing in the Albi time trial, deep into the race.
‘I didn’t know I was that good,’ he said. He may have dreamed as a child of emulating his hero Miguel Indurain, but it never crossed his radar.
‘He had so much potential in road races when he turned senior,’ says Rob Hayles, his former Madison partner who raced with him for Great Britain on the road. ‘He could read a race, follow it, get in the moves, but he had years when he switched off.’
There is another critical point: incredible as it sounds, Wiggins says he didn’t learn to train until 2011. He is backed up in that by his long-standing mentor Shane Sutton, who laments that ‘one of the things he said to me is that he never really trained and he regretted it. We’ve never seen the real Brad in all those six Olympic medals. Think of the records that could have fallen… but he didn’t apply himself as well as he could’.
Why, you might ask, was he ‘undertrained’, and why did he have no awareness of his potential on the road, when he came out of the immensely analytical, scientific culture at British Cycling?
The answer is that that culture was simultaneously the making of him as he is today, while being a brake on any aspirations Wiggins might have had in road racing. Those could not have been furthered by the timed-discipline, track-only culture that was founded by Peter Keen. Wiggins’s coach of eight years (1998-2006) Simon Jones concedes that the Tour was never on their radar. I suspect Wiggins feels that’s just as well, given the culture of the needle and the blood bag that was rampant in European road racing in the early noughties. As he has said, the fact he had his speciality on the track to fall back on meant that he never had to make the choice that presented itself to a talented, aspiring road star such as David Millar.
Road racing only became a part of British Cycling’s armoury after 2004 when Rod Ellingworth founded the under-23 academy. Prior to that, how a British Cycling track rider performed on the road simply didn’t matter. What counted was getting Olympic medals on the track, in the timed events, at the races that mattered in order to secure funding: the World Championships and the Olympic Games. The road was seen purely as a means of building a foundation of fitness to support the intense blocks of track training that were necessary for the individual or team pursuit.
That had several implications. None of the trainers at British Cycling thought of making their best pursuiter lose weight and ride through the Alps and Pyrenees with the best climbers to see where they stood in the road hierarchy – but why would they? It wasn’t in their remit. The track endurance riders clearly had the talent to perform on the road, with the possible exception of Ed Clancy, who is more akin to Sir Chris Hoy than he is to your average pursuiter. Even when training for the pursuit, with the bulkier shoulders and backside of a track rider, Wiggins was capable of performing on the road, winning hilly stage races in Luxembourg and Majorca, time trialling over the mountains to win a stage of the Tour de l’Avenir. But no one looked at that.
Hence the lack of training for the road. Up to 2008, the blocks of preparation that Wiggins and his peers were putting in for the track were intense, but they were purely oriented towards performing for a few days, for four to eight minutes a day. There is a world of difference between looking at that and building for the Tour de France, and it’s not knowledge that is gained overnight.
What can be traced is an obvious process in which Wiggins spends seven years racing as a pro (2002-2008) on the road, picking up the odd result here and there. All that time, however, when the going gets tough, when he wonders what the opposition are up to after yet another drugs scandal, or when the choice is between training in the rain or doing something more pleasant, he has the fall-back: none of this road stuff matters, because I have to be at my very best in August for the Games or, alternatively, I don’t need to do this, because I’ve just achieved my goal for the year, I’ve won my medal.
Hence the sporadic results, hence the pattern of aspiration for the road which subsides gently on an almost annual basis. He’s supported in this by French pro road racing culture, where he is pigeon-holed as a prologue time trial specialist à la Chris Boardman, as Robert Millar rightly identified: ‘For a track rider like Brad in a French team, as he was for so long, all they want is for you to win a prologue time trial. They don’t care if you get dropped later in the race. There is no probing, no questioning.’
The view of the other Millar, David, is instructive here. In Racing Through the Dark he describes Wiggins as ‘a chameleon-like personality: [with] a strong desire to blend in and tell people what they wanted to hear’. Critically here, the people who told Wiggins what to do early on were the track specialists: Jones and Keen. He was capable of finishing in the front group in the road race at the Madrid World Championships in 2005 but, by implication, he was not capable of seeing his own potential outside the track domain, until he had no choice but to broaden his horizons.
At the end of 2008, the comfort blankets are taken away; there is nothing more for Wiggins to achieve on the track after taking two gold medals in Beijing to go with his three medals, one of each colour, in Athens.
Simultaneously, he sees two things going on in the road cycling world: Mark Cavendish – that little fat kid from a few years back to whom he once gave a box of gels at a criterium and who later became his Madison partner – is winning bunch sprints left, right and centre and gaining colossal kudos and a fair bit of cash. And his old mate from the track squad, Steve Cummings – another occasional road racer with Great Britain in the early 2000s – has left the British Cycling nest, dropped a few kilos, and appears to have the makings of a career on the road. If they can do it, why not him?
‘It felt like it was a conscious decision,’ says his coach at the time, Matt Parker. ‘He had done everything he could do to be successful on the track and he made the switch [to road] in his head. He had just come off a two- or three-year Olympic campaign, but he didn’t miss a beat that next year. Before, he had continually switched from road to track and back again, but now he didn’t have to keep making the transition. He had never been far off it on the road. He had incredible power, and in 2009 he stripped down in terms of weight.’
Wiggins has no idea quite what he is trying to do. He has absolutely no notion what area of road racing he might be good at – apart from the prologues in which he has always excelled – but he gets the kilos off with the help of the British Cycling diet guru Nigel Mitchell and Parker. Between them, they get him light, but at the same time he retains a power output that would give him a 4,000-metre pursuit time not much slower than he would manage at his heaviest on the track. That is the key to his success.
So in 2009, Wiggins tries a bit of everything: a prologue time trial here, pushing for a long time trial there, smashing it in Paris-Roubaix, testing his climbing in the Giro d’Italia. His objectives are undefined, until he gets within a couple of weeks of the 2009 Tour de France. As David Millar wrote, ‘Contrary to what Jonathan Vaughters would have people think, we had absolutely no idea he would become a grand tour contender or challenger in anything but the flattest and most simple of stage races.’
Before the start of the 2009 Tour, Wiggins tells me (on condition I don’t write it as he thinks people may laugh) that he thinks he might get a top 10 place. I’m sceptical. But Wiggins is lucky, in many, many ways. While he is getting on with his last year on the track, 2008, on the road there has been the latest in a series of clear-outs of dopers in the sport. Riccardo Ricco, Leonardo Piepoli, Bernhard Kohl, and Stefan Schumacher have all been busted for CERA, the latest derivative of the blood-boosting drug EPO. That follows Operation Puerto in 2006 (which claimed Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Joseba Beloki and Francisco Mancebo) and the ‘Tour de Farce’ of 2007 (which culled Alexandre Vinokourov, Michael Rasmussen and Iban Mayo).
The three years of scandals at the top of the sport means that in 2009, in spite of Lance Armstrong’s comeback and Alberto Contador’s return to the Tour after being refused entry in 2008, there is space at the summit of the hierarchy given the number of riders who are banned; the ones who have been banned, come back and are now running scared; the ones who are just scared and have stopped. As a further deterrent, the effects of the UCI’s biological passport is kicking in. Wiggins’s new team, Garmin, have already placed Christian Vande Velde in the higher reaches of the standings in the Tour, and that’s precisely what they manage again. The rest is history. Fourth place in the Tour.
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Wiggins brings a lot more to the party than an engine that can put out 450 watts for an hour at threshold. During and after the Tour it became fashionable to dismiss the Londoner as a ‘numbers monkey’, obsessed with the vital statistics relating to his training and racing: the 100,000 vertical metres of climbing he was expected to manage between April and June – roughly 10,000 per week; the velocita ascensionale media [VAM] by which he and Kerrison measure his progress up each climb; the power outputs he can detail from the time trials he has ridden.
Wiggins has several vital assets, but perhaps the most important is his ability to learn from his mistakes. The 2010 season is a wake-up call of epic proportions: the humiliation of failure – in relative terms – in the Tour amid epic levels of hype; the prospect of losing his status and wage when Sky threaten to demote him at the end of the season; the brutal reminder of his own mortality after the sudden death of his grandfather, George – the closest person he has had to a father.
So he recognises a string of errors: approaching the Tour without specific training, working on the assumption that what had brought him success in 2009 would work again; a lack of guidance that can – from the outside – be put down to the sheer speed with which Team Sky was built from scratch to ProTour level. Once he acquires that guidance, in the form of Tim Kerrison and Shane Sutton, the awareness grows.
The Eureka moment came when Wiggins finished third in the Vuelta a España in September 2011. Here, two key things happened. Up until then there had always been a grain of doubt in his mind, a question mark over the 2009 Tour. Was it a fluke? The doubt was dispelled after he finished on the podium, very close to winning a race which didn’t suit him in the slightest – only one time trial, in which he didn’t perform at his best, and a plethora of mountain-top finishes – and he did so after six weeks training with a broken collarbone. It could hardly be matched as a confidence booster.
At this point he and his trainer, Kerrison, made the breakthrough. Wiggins had not raced before the Vuelta. He had not turned a pedal in anger since he broke his collarbone in a crash en route to Châteauroux in the Tour de France, some six weeks before the Vuelta started. For at least half a century, the received wisdom in cycling has been that riders need to race as part of their training. Suddenly it became apparent that this was not the case.
The discovery goes back to the matter of Wiggins ‘never learning to train’. In his years at British Cycling, no one had looked hard at what a rider needed to do in order to win the Tour de France. There was no reason to do that as I’ve explained. Once Kerrison began looking at Wiggins’s ‘numbers’ – the TrainingPeaks stress scores that express how hard a particular day’s work has been – the answers became clear. Conventional wisdom says you train, you back off, you race, you recover. The combination of the taper, travel days and the recovery days means a multiplication of the lost time, with the irony being that in many cases the rider is recovering more from the travel than the actual racing.
In terms of moving forward within a structured training plan, racing can be completely counterproductive. For example, there is no point in riding the Ardennes Classics if your mind is set on the Tour. As Wiggins says, why travel to Liège or Maastricht, spend a week in a hotel to ride Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, to put your body through the mill for two days, when the workload is uncertain and either event is completely open to the vagaries of chance: one crash and that’s a week’s training down the pan.
Most radical of all was the discovery that as a rider becomes fitter, racing becomes a game of diminishing returns. Once you think about it, it makes perfect sense. You have to train harder, because the racing gets easier, overloads your system less, and thus it is having less of an improving effect. The killer quote from Wiggins’s account of his road to Tour victory is this: ‘The Dauphiné didn’t touch the sides.’ It is a remarkable notion: one of the toughest pre-Tour ‘preparation’ races which actually wasn’t that hard.
It’s only possible to believe that when this fact is borne in mind: at the Tenerife training camp 10 days out from the Dauphiné, Wiggins and company put in the training equivalent to two weeks of a grand tour, but under conditions controlled by their coach to maximise their benefit and with none of the transfers and general crapping about that make stage racing so stressful.
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If you were setting out to win the Tour de France the Wiggins way, here is what you might do. These aspects of his preparation worked to perfection.
Lifestyle. Wiggins went to extremes to maintain a low body weight, avoid injury and avoid illness. That entailed having no sugar, bread or biscuits in the house, walking as little as possible, never so much as putting his suitcase in the car when he left for the airport. Beyond the extremes came a realisation that winning the Tour is a 12-months-a-year exercise. There perhaps lies the ultimate contrast with the track: to hit the ground running in early February, he had to be ready to begin training hard from the first day of November. The upshot was that apart from one cold, Wiggins missed barely a single day’s training between November 1 and mid-August. There was no time spent playing catch-up. The programme could be adhered to in its entirety.
Start training early and build a massive base. Wiggins set out on his road to the 2012 Tour and Olympic Games on November 1. He had raced to a high level to the end of the 2011 season, finishing the World Championships in fine fettle, and this in turn meant that when he got back on the road – having actually taken time completely away from riding his bike – he was able to ramp up the workload rapidly with no adverse effects. That’s why he was able to put in a 40-hour week shortly before Christmas at Sky’s training camp in Mallorca; that put him on a par with Edvald Boasson Hagen, one of the team’s Classics specialists who was expected to peak far earlier in the season.
Training early at intensity so that there is no process of adaptation when racing starts. This came from Tim Kerrison’s work in Australian swimming, in which the athletes train at a high level for far longer than in cycling, where the end-of-season break and a gradual build is the norm, with races used to hone fitness. Kerrison turned that on its head: Wiggins began high-intensity work early – although reserving the toughest, longest and most specific sessions for late in the process – and was already close to his best at his first race in early February, the Volta ao Algarve, where he won the time trial. By then he was already close to 95 per cent of his best form, and he built on that until mid-June.
Identifying the best venues in which to train. This was a task which Rod Ellingworth had highlighted as important even before Sky’s formation, but which Tim Kerrison worked on in 2011. Tenerife was identified as a key location because of the variety of roads on offer, the almost guaranteed good weather, and the relative isolation of the Hotel Parador on the top of Mount Teide. All there is to do there is train and rest. Tenerife was not unknown within cycling, having been used by Lance Armstrong and Alexandre Vinokourov inter alia, but tends not to be popular with many teams because the harsh climate means riders need back-up from at least a soigneur and mechanic. Sky travelled with a large group of riders and staff – around a dozen – representing a considerable investment.
Using races intelligently. The irony is that Wiggins’s plethora of stage race wins – four in one year – owes nothing to the haphazard ‘cannibalistic’ approach of a Merckx, an Hinault or a Kelly, where the rider consumes every event in sight until his body and mind are sated. Far from it. Under Kerrison and Sutton, the rider is not setting out to win races left, right and centre. The races have a purpose: to rehearse rider and team for the main goal, to ensure that they are used to the entire process of leading a bike race, from defending the lead to having the recovery drinks ready and waiting for the leader to consume in the post-stage press conference.
Winning the races is important, but not to the extent that training towards the main goal is compromised: the taper is small, the training load maintained as late as possible, training resumed afterwards.
‘Traditionally, there is a culture in cycling of racing every week,’ said Kerrison. ‘We have tried to get back to racing and training, racing less to free up big blocks of time when Brad can train in control of what he does. He has done fewer races, has gone there with the goal of winning, but without going out of his way to prepare for them. If you go to win, mentally you back off, we’ve preferred not to compromise his training, go there with what we’ve got.’
Preparing everyone around the leaders. Part of Kerrison’s plan for Tour success involved the core of the Tour de France team putting in the same preparation as the riders who would lead at the Tour, racing together and training together so they all arrived at the Tour as a tight-knit unit in the form of their lives. The team was built around seven riders known as the climbing group: Wiggins, Chris Froome, Michael Rogers, Kanstantsin Siutsou, Richie Porte, Christian Knees, and Danny Pate, who was ruled out of the race at the last minute. These seven followed a similar programme, participating in the altitude training camps in Tenerife and racing every event alongside Wiggins, with only slight variations. The specific aim was to build a close-knit group with similar capabilities, all able to ride strongly both in the mountains and on the flat. With Edvald Boasson Hagen added for the Critérium du Dauphiné and an obvious selection, that left only the question of who would accompany Mark Cavendish. Sky opted for Bernhard Eisel, who ended up a vital asset in the battle for the yellow jersey, according to Wiggins.
Identifying physical weaknesses that need to be worked on. The approach adopted by Kerrison and Sutton involved brutally honest analysis of Wiggins’s capabilities. Early in 2011, Kerrison identified that he faltered when he climbed at altitudes over 1,500 metres. The answer was altitude acclimatisation – not the traditional living at altitude to increase red blood cells, but training at race intensity at over 1,500 metres to force his body to adapt.
The Sky leader’s relatively poor performance on the Alto del Angliru in the Vuelta a España led to an analysis of his upper body and core strength, which needed improvement. The upshot was a strength and conditioning programme. A similar approach was taken to time trialling: Kerrison examined his time trial style compared to that of Tony Martin and concluded that there was no option but to push a bigger gear at a lower cadence, hence a programme of torque training – big-gear work at threshold.
Taking off the pressure. The presences of Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome were disruptive in one way, beneficial in another. Sources within Sky indicate that Cavendish felt he could go for the green jersey; Cavendish himself said he felt he could have won three stages more than the three he did win. The tensions with Froome were obvious and clearly had an impact. But whereas in 2010 and 2011 Wiggins was the sole leader of the team, Cavendish’s leadership qualities and his high-profile personality took the pressure off him, in the first week at least. Froome’s presence meant that if there was a repeat of the 2011 crash, Sky had a Plan B.
Racing to your strengths. It sounds blindingly obvious, but is surprisingly nuanced. One key to the Wiggins Tour of 2012 was the decision by Sutton and Kerrison in the winter of 2010-11 to move away from a focus on what the Sky leader ought to do in the mountains to what he could do. It was a rapid move to something which most stage racers take time to learn; you ride to your limit, then stay at your limit, rather than going over the edge. Because this is British Cycling, it was evidence-based: a calculation of how Wiggins would have fared in the 2010 Tour which showed he could have finished 11th rather than 23rd if he had raced within his limits. It’s something that the greats – Hinault, LeMond, Indurain – could do instinctively, or with the help of a great directeur sportif. With Wiggins a relative novice and with no Cyrille Guimard figure to hand, Sky had to break it down and learn it.
Competition. Wiggins is legendary as a character who performs when his back is against the wall. He won’t admit to it, but it is possible to speculate that his great 2012 stemmed in part from the arrival of Mark Cavendish at Sky late in 2011. Cavendish is known as a leader who rallies the group around him – the opposite of the relatively shy Wiggins, who agonises about how and when to thank his troops and has a tendency to go AWOL – and his impact was noted from the first training camp. It’s also a fact that Cavendish represented competition, for all their close relationship, and Wiggins had to respond.
There were two chinks in Wiggins’s armour: the first was his mental fragility. When he comes under assault unexpectedly, his first response is flight rather than fight, and it then falls to those around him to dust him down and keep him in the saddle. He’s always been this way. Studying interviews we had done in 2004 and 2006, I was surprised to find that faced with the Millar and Floyd Landis scandals, his initial response was that he wanted to escape. Similarly, that was his first thought when Froome went, briefly, on the attack at La Toussuire. Not so much because he thought Froome was out to undermine him but because Wiggins craves certainty.
One of the core British Cycling principles is controlling the things that can be controlled. Wiggins is the programme’s ultimate pupil in his need for certainty. Hence his dislike of racing the first week of the Tour, that mayhem of crashes and injury which falls into a category of its own: a factor which can’t be controlled but which can be influenced by judicious decision-making. Here, clearly, Sky were fluctuating between ‘dithering’, as Wiggins calls it – letting events happen in front of them – and taking control. They rode their luck, but made it at the same time, with Wiggins missing both the definitive pile-ups – at Boulogne and Metz – by a slender margin.
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There is another factor beside sheer hard work and some breakthroughs on the coaching front that must have contributed to Wiggins winning the Tour. The creation of a more level playing field with improved drug testing and the UCI’s recent ban on needles has favoured the Briton, who is adamant that he will never use drugs and has had no injections besides his vaccinations. Compare and contrast with the tales from the professional peloton of riders sitting on team buses post 2011, trying to get their heads around the fact that they have just been told that they are no longer allowed to use drips for recovery.
Wiggins comes out of a no-needle, no-drip culture at British Cycling. I would suggest that if the peloton is coming to terms with life without needles and drips for recovery using legal means – before we even start to think about illicit methods – a cyclist who has the background that Wiggins does will have a head start, as he highlighted back in 2011. His run of success began not long after the UCI brought in its needle ban; perhaps it’s no coincidence.
‘His strike rate this year is incredible and that’s a good sign,’ says Rob Hayles. Wiggins’s former coaches Simon Jones and Matt Parker both recall how they would puzzle with him at time trials where their charge’s power output would suggest he should have won. Wiggins himself wondered at times what the likes of Vinokourov were playing at – as he told The Observer at the 2007 Tour after ‘Vino’ smashed him in the Albi time trial. Then the Kazakh tested positive, and Wiggins wondered no longer.
There is another thesis that perhaps should do the rounds. I was told the tale of a former grand tour winner who felt he had no option but to seek time trialling advice in Britain. It seems his sheer lack of expertise in the area – aerodynamics, power transmission, testing, position on the tri-bars – was shocking. It was also intriguing that our rider and his team were subsequently unable to make good use of the expertise they sought out in Britain. They couldn’t get the bikes built on time; they simply couldn’t put into effect what they were advised to do.
Cycling’s EPO and blood-doping culture goes back 20 years. The priority for leading teams in the EPO years was blood enhancement; the supply of drugs and blood bags, and the concealment of their use from the dope testers and police. As Tyler Hamilton said in his book: you got your haematocrit up, and your weight down. That was most of what you needed. Given the ever-more elaborate and expensive methods of blood doping, technical expertise was replaced by reliance on doctors and soigneurs.
The experience of the grand tour winner and his time trial coach is not an isolated instance. In this year’s Tour, one contender’s supposed area of expertise was the descents, but that rider didn’t go and reconnoitre those very downhills where he would have been expected to attack. Other contenders don’t go and look at the time trials. All that leads me to believe that within professional cycling there is a ‘technology gap’, which the British, having explored every legal area of performance in the last 15 years, are perfectly placed to fill.
For years, British cyclists such as David Millar and Wiggins with experience of both British Cycling and European teams have been saying that in technical terms – training methods, the ability to break down the sport into its constituent parts, aerodynamics – much of professional cycling has lagged behind the British. In the mid-1990s Chris Boardman’s ability to build to a specific target, his capacity to train and his attention to detail briefly took the peloton by storm.
Historically champions and cultures have tended to emerge from left field to pull the professional road side of the sport forwards. Think Fausto Coppi in the late 1940s; Greg LeMond in the 1980s; Francesco Moser (blood doping or no blood doping) earlier in the decade; infinitely more controversially, Lance Armstrong in the noughties – not in the sense of his doping, although he brought the leaders of the pack with him in that area, but in terms of global media profile. Less controversially, the Australians and the mountain bikers such as Cadel Evans and Ryder Hesjedal have emerged in recent years.
I would argue that the British cycling pyramid tipped by Team Sky but extending downwards through the track side of the sport in the UK is just the latest addition to that list. The sport’s insiders have usually been surprised at the ease with which radical change occurs when it happens, but that should not be a shock: professional road cycling is a short-termist milieu, in which few sponsors invest for more than a few years.
National federations are strapped for cash. There are only rare instances of long-term, sustained investment such as that made by Sky since 2008, by Rabobank in Holland, until their shock departure in October 2012, and earlier by Mapei in the 1990s. There was such surprise at British Cycling’s success in 2012 on road and track, but given 15 years of financial input from the Lottery and later from Sky, there should be no shock at all. If nothing had come of all that cash and expertise, now that would have been shocking.
My favourite story from Wiggins’s book, My Time, is when he flies into Liège airport for the start of the 2012 Tour. It’s the ultimate example of the marginal gains approach: he invests in a private jet – at his own expense – to minimise travelling time and exposure to possible infection from others. He lands in Liège to find Cadel Evans has flown in from the other direction, but with a big difference: no one has turned up to meet the 2011 Tour winner, although their hotel is close to the airport. If BMC can’t even get that detail right, it’s hardly surprising they didn’t win the Tour.
David Millar sums up Wiggins perfectly: ‘A very dedicated, driven, self-obsessed and ultimately sensible man… his ability to nail objectives is remarkable and comes from years of controlling variables and targeting one-off events on the track.’ Given what Wiggins, Kerrison and Sutton put into 2012, the number of areas where they managed to move forwards and make marginal gains, it would have almost been surprising if he had not won the Tour.
