Jeremy Whittle followed Sky at the Tour of Romandy and found the pressure was getting to Bradley Wiggins weeks before he stepped into the pressure cooker of the Tour de France.
Like everyone else who wins in these days, Wiggins found every performance under scrutiny.
And it seemed the cynicism infecting the sport can be traced to one man.
Will the inability to trust be Lance Armstrong’s lasting legacy?
I CAN’T REMEMBER exactly where it was. Brixton, maybe – a flat somewhere down towards Herne Hill.
The end of the 1990s, or perhaps post millennium. Maybe winter 2000. There’s wine on the table, rain falling outside the window, Travis’s Driftwood playing in the background.
We’re sitting around after dinner, a big group, and the girl next to me, pretty, smiley, happy, chatty, says, ‘So, what did you say you do?’
I say, ‘I’m a journalist, covering, erm, sport mainly.’ Pause. ‘Things like the Tour de France – you know it?’
She almost levitates with excitement.
‘Oh God – the Tour? I love it, I love Lance Arm-strong! He’s amazing! Have you read his book?’
This is rare – somebody who likes cycling, and a woman, too. Even so, my heart sinks.
‘Yes, well, I’ve only skimmed it really.’
‘God, he’s incredible. To win the Tour after all he’s been through! My mum’s just had treatment and she’s reading his book… She loves it…’ She smiles at me.
‘You haven’t… You haven’t met him, have you?’
Oh Christ, here we go.
‘A bit – well, a few times. Interviews and things.’
‘Oh wow – no way, really? What’s he like?’
Charismatic, arrogant, aggressive, rude – and sometimes a little scary.
‘Oh, well, er, he’s great,’ I say. ‘Funny, you know – pretty funny, pretty sharp, lots of dry wit. Yeah, he’s amazing.’
For a while, every time I got asked, about the Tour, about The Legend of Lance, I lied.
I still told them I was a journalist, that I went to France a fair bit. For travel, though – to write about travel, not sport, not the Tour de France, not Lance Armstrong – travel, that’s my game.
* * *
July 1995. Lance Armstrong’s third Tour appearance, my second year on the race.
Ahead of us, ‘The Cowboy’ is stuck to the road. Halfway up the Cormet de Roselend, he is fighting the bike, fighting the gradient, his big rear end, all power but no souplesse, churns and churns, but it’s no good. He can’t hold the wheel. The break moves clear of him and he slumps back into the saddle, shoulders sagging.
The rest of the race convoy overtakes, leaves him, following the leaders, far up ahead, skipping around the hairpins that wind towards the Roselend’s wild and beautiful summit.
Pretty soon, it’s just us and Lance, plodding along.
It must have looked pretty odd to the fans lining the climb, this brawny American rocking in the saddle, followed by a right-hand drive Rover with British plates. And after a while even we lose interest, accelerating past, glancing across at him, his eyes glazed, the sweat dripping down his nose.
He can’t climb, I think – not like he needs to. The Tour’s always going to be too much for him.
Stage wins, that’s the way to go for Lance Arm-strong. Stage wins.
* * *
January 2012.
On a bar stool in the lounge of a deserted beach hotel in Mallorca, Dave Brailsford stares pensively out at the windswept Mediterranean. He turns the dregs of his espresso in a cup, and finally knocks it back.
The stars are aligned for Brailsford. Sky are poised to take control of the European scene. They have a leader, once reluctant and lacking in commitment, finally ready to realise his full potential. But if he does, the same old suspicions, the same issues of context, will cloud his achievements.
Out in the hills lining the north coast of the island, a convoy of Sky team cars is following a pencil-thin Bradley Wiggins and his team-mates through a long and punishing climb, spinning their way up past Lluc monastery and beyond, before swooping down, through the switchbacks and hairpin bends, to Sa Calobra and the sea.
As Tour de France hopeful Wiggins and Sky’s new signing, world champion Mark Cavendish, perfect their form, Brailsford, the architect of both Team Sky and Team GB, sits quietly in the empty lounge pondering the coming season, the 2012 Tour de France and the London Olympics.
‘That’s the question isn’t it?’ he says after a long pause.
‘That’s what we said we’d do. We said we’d win the Tour with a British rider, that we’d win it clean.’
But has it really changed, Dave, I ask? Has it really changed enough for that to happen?
‘Yeah, it has,’ he insists. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Later, back from his five-hour ride in the Mallorcan mountains, showered and recovered, Wiggins is loafing around the team hotel with Sky’s coach, Shane Sutton. The Australian, once winner of the Milk Race, has been out on the bike himself and comes Lycra-clad, straight from the saddle, to join Wiggins at the pool table.
Afterwards Wiggins sits down, mug of builder’s tea in his hand, for a chat.
‘These days, I think less and less about it,’ he says of the doping culture that shadowed his earlier career. ‘In 2006, 2007, it was a constant frustration. I always felt I was a little bit away from achieving something – I had a right chip on my shoulder back then.
‘I was in a French team – all they used to talk about was who was on drugs. It was self-consuming, constant: “Imagine what you could have done today if they hadn’t been there.”’
The next morning, under chilly winter skies, Wiggins and Cavendish are out on the road again, on another sortie into the hills, accompanied by a wide-eyed and starstruck band of VIP guests.
In the Team Sky people carrier following the knot of riders, the effervescent Sutton is, as ever, holding forth.
‘You know what Cadel Evans gives his team-mates every time he wins a race?’ he says of Australia’s first-ever Tour de France winner. There’s a long pause.
‘A fucking Toblerone…’ Everybody cracks up.
As Wiggins and Cavendish lead the breathless VIPs through the rolling landscape, Sutton debates the wisdom of the federal investigation into Lance Armstrong.
‘What’s the point?’ he says tetchily. ‘It’s ancient history. Leave the guy alone. It’s just doing more damage to the sport. It’s not going to fix anything.’
* * *
A few weeks later, after taking a red-eye to Basle, photographer Pete Goding and I get into another hire car and head off to follow Team Sky. This is race reporting, not investigative journalism, although increasingly the lines are blurred.
Recently, after spending some time studying form, I’ve been on a hot streak of near-misses. After staking £100 on Louis Oosthuizen to win the Augusta Masters – at 90/1, I might add – only to see Bubba Watson reach over and take the money out of my hand, I make a decision. I am never going to bet again.
Now, as I get out of the car outside another gymnasium, perched on a European mountainside, with Bradley Wiggins yet again in a yellow jersey, I’ve changed my mind.
I start to wish I’d put that 100 quid on him, Mr Grumpy, to win the Tour, back in January, when I’d first thought of it. At the moment, as the Tour of Romandy nears the finish of stage two, with Alberto Contador banned and the Schleck brothers AWOL, he’s looking, well, a shoo-in.
We arrive so early at the finish that the race hasn’t even left Montbéliard, where the stage starts. The deserted press room at the top of the Chemin de Piscine is ringed by forested hills, and huge tumbling verdant pasture. Below us is Moutier, an anonymous Swiss town in the Vaud.
The previous evening, after pulling off a surprise sprint win in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Wiggins had attended a shambolic press conference. You’d think, given that he was sitting in yet another yellow jersey at the head of the classification of yet another prestigious stage race, that he’d have been in relaxed mood.
Team Sky’s website covered his success, and was full of cheery bonhomie from the Londoner. The reality, it emerged, as I worked my way around the room in a flurry of handshakes and ‘ça vas’ was perceived as very different.
Wiggins, they said, had lost it with the avuncular Jean-Jacques Rosselet, the veteran chef de presse of the Swiss race.
‘Cameron should use you as a spin doctor,’ he’d said to Rosselet. ‘You don’t understand a word I’m saying, do you?’
He’d even, I was told, forgotten his own team-mates’ names.
‘Kanstantsin quelque chose,’ he’d said dryly, as he described Sky’s work ethic towards the end of the stage. ‘Kanstantsin something – yeah, he brought me back.’
But it was his dismissive attitude that irritated them most. ‘Are we done yet? Maybe think about some real questions for tomorrow, eh?’
If there’s one thing the meticulously-mannered Swiss don’t like, it’s rudeness.
Faced with hours to kill before the race arrives, we go for a walk. ‘Cav won’t like this,’ I think to myself, as the final kilometre swings up a sharp bend, 200 metres from the finish line.
As we wander around, Pete walks into the ice rink alongside the finish line and studies a gloomy collection of trestle tables set out in the middle of the arena. ‘I wish I’d played ice hockey, you know,’ he says wistfully.
By mid-afternoon in Moutier, the pavements, deserted at midday, are now crammed as spectators line the road. A heavily pregnant teenager with Sharon Osbourne hair and a too-short skirt, chain-smokes as the peloton sweeps through, Wiggins’s hapless team-mate, Kanstantsin quelque chose, leading the bunch.
Once the race convoy has headed out into the hills for the circuit before the final sharp haul to the finish, the crowd disperses. I stumble upon the Sky bus, but, as I head back to the press room, a team helper emerges carrying a crammed black bin liner. He ignores a nearby hopper and begins walking down the road.
I follow him at a distance, folkloric tales of French TV crews rummaging through rubbish, uncovering syringes and blood bags, flooding back to me. He carries the bag to a street corner, opposite a supermarket, with a busy pavement café in the entrance, and pushes it into a bin. Just an ordinary street bin – the kind you might toss chewing gum, a fag packet, or an empty coffee cup, into.
Before the ethical makeover, searching team rubbish was de rigueur, particularly among the French media, when it came to Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team. In fact, it became almost a sport in itself. That’s how Actovegin, or ‘Acto-wassisname’ as Lance once called it, came to light.
I hang back, then walk over. I look at the families sitting opposite, the buggies lined up, the babies on laps. Should I haul the bag out of the bin and begin ripping through it, in the hope of finding something that justifies my lingering damned cynicism? No, I decide, because that way lies madness.
I turn and walk back to the finish. A couple of hundred metres from the line, I run into Nick Howes, Sky’s press officer, charged with recce’ing the finish by Sean Yates, who, like most of us, is no doubt wondering if the final hill is too much for Cav.
‘What do you think the percentage is?’ he says.
‘Not one for Cav, is it?’ I say. ‘Nine per cent on that bend, maybe.’
Instead, I’m thinking that maybe Cadel Evans, if he can find his legs again, can do something on this nasty little hill. Not that I’d put any money on it, of course.
Nick says that the previous day’s press conference was a mess.
‘Some French radio guy was heckling a bit and then they just ran out of questions. I think Bradley might be pleased to see a British journo, to be honest…’
Out on the second-category climb of La Caquerelle, with its nasty 12 per cent stretches, the breakaway is collapsing under pressure from Sky, and two big names – Evans and Cavendish – are struggling.
The bunch strings out, descending at 80 kilometres per hour through the forest in dappled spring sunlight, a glimpse of pro racing at its most beautiful. Wiggins is constantly shepherded by his Sky guard. A group, led by Peter Stetina of Garmin, eases ahead with a few kilometres to race. It won’t last long.
They swing up towards the ice rink and Jonathan Hivert of France elbows his way through the chaos, punches the pedals as he squirrels up the hill and screams in delight as he crosses the line first. Wiggins, hidden in the bunch, is 40-odd places behind him. Cavendish comes in over eight-and-a-half minutes later.
Soigneurs, journalists and fans – one asking each breathless rider for their water bottle as a souvenir – cluster around the riders as Wiggins eases through the throng to be met by Nick Howes and guided to a home trainer behind the hastily thrown-up marquee that passes for a changing room.
This is something I have never seen at a stage race. Even Armstrong didn’t do this – get back on a stationary home trainer within seconds of crossing the finish line. It is meticulous, and hints at Wiggins’s track roots.
But maybe this is who Bradley really is – another elite rider with too many demons, finding at last what he really needs as the race ends, to feel the rage in his guts dissipate, to feel the waves breaking.
After five minutes’ warm-down, in an alleyway behind the podium, he reappears, led by Howes.
‘Brad’s not doing a press conference tonight,’ Nick says, a little unsurprisingly (and unnecessarily).
Which, in my book, is, like, a real shame, given the pleasingly exciting questions my Swiss colleagues had diligently prepared for him since being ticked off the day before!
Instead, I sit in on another short session of tense questions, posed in broken English by Swiss radio, answered tetchily and impatiently by Wiggins. From where I’m standing, it doesn’t look as if the warm-down is working. The more dismissive he is, the more anxious the questioner becomes.
Here’s an unedited transcript:
Swiss radio chap: ‘After the stage, you make a kind of “after-cycling”?’
Bradley Wiggins: ‘Yeah, bizarre isn’t it? What can I say? It’s not complicated, you know. It’s a warm-down. You finish like that, you’re angry – you wanna punch people in the face, and it’s just good to do 10 minutes warming down, easy, for tomorrow. I need to get back to the hotel, eat, rest, massage, sleep. The warm-down is just 10 minutes for myself straight afterwards because everybody’s pulling me, left, right, can you do this? Can you do that?’
Swiss radio chap: ‘Your team is leading from the first day…’
Wiggins: ‘You’re very perceptive. I have the yellow jersey, that’s correct…’
Swiss radio chap: ‘You come here to win in Romandy?’
Wiggins: ‘I don’t race much any more, and when I do, I race to win.’
He stands up and walks, uninterrupted by fans or journalists, through the throng and heads for a waiting team car. Later there are more stories doing the rounds of an angry Wiggins pushing away the anti-doping chaperone, so intent was he on his warm-down.
‘He’s nervous, isn’t he?’ says one Swiss journo. ‘That’s why he’s so angry.’
But what does he mean – why would Wiggins be nervous?
We hang around in the press room, working until about eight, before packing up.
As we drop back down, past the winding ramps to the finish, and into Moutier, I give in to the devil – the Kimmage, if you will – on my shoulder and ask Pete to make a left and swing past the supermarket and café. Both are closed now. The families and buggies, the buses and the team cars, have long gone and the back streets of Moutier are deserted.
We pull over and, for a moment, sit, engine running, in silence. Yes, this is a kind of madness, I think, a kind of creeping delusion, this damned suspicion. This is the legacy of Lance.
We reverse around the corner into the supermarket car park. The bin is empty. Of course it is. This is Switzerland. Let’s keep it tidy. What was I thinking?
‘Ready?’ says Pete, struggling to stifle laughter.
‘Fuck off and drive,’ I tell him.
* * *
The next afternoon, after Luis Leon Sanchez has taken a typical puncheur’s win in an uphill sprint in Charmey, Wiggins again seems determined to avoid the media, sitting glumly in the changing-room-marquee thing behind the podium and then making the quickest possible exit after stepping up to pull on yet another yellow jersey.
Nick Howes looks on, a pained expression on his face.
‘Nick – is he doing a press conference?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ Nick says.
‘Any radio?’ I suggest, hopefully.
‘Nope…’
I can’t help laughing.
After stepping down from the podium, Wiggins snaps impatiently at Howes, asking where the team’s hotel is.
As it happens, Sky are tonight sleeping only 100 metres from the finish line, in the Hotel Callier, which, with its high terraces, has a damn-fine view of famed local beauty spot, the Maleson mountain. As the riders troop through reception, Euro-trash music booms from a nearby beer tent.
The good news for Wiggins is that the hotel is also the site of the salle de presse. Even so, still determined to avoid the hordes of Wiggins maniacs dogging his every move, he slips out of the race leader’s jersey and reverts to the British champion’s jersey.
Half an hour later, I’m making a coffee in the Nespresso machine in the hotel foyer when Cav comes in, pulling his wheely bag, remonstrating, calmly but pleadingly, with a race commissaire.
‘It’s not like I’m fat or something, or not been training,’ I hear Cavendish say, although it’s not clear if it’s an apology or a justification.
There’s a problem for Wiggins, though. The race organisation have told him he has to come to the press room. As his room in the Hotel Callier is all of two floors up, Sky have little chance to refuse.
Ten minutes later, still in kit, with a sullen look on his face that reminds me of a chastened seven year old, he sits down. I can see in his eyes immediately that he hates being here.
I ask the first question, then the second. I wait for anybody else to pipe up. There is a heavy silence. Are they boycotting him after what happened in Moutier, I wonder?
Eventually, there is one question in French, and one more from me, which gives him a chance to eulogise Cavendish’s efforts, on his behalf, during the stage.
‘He was making a lot of people hurt,’ Bradley says.
Yeah, mate, maybe, but it wasn’t as painful as this…
Then it’s over and he stands up, although there’s still time for a parting shot.
‘Your complaint worked,’ he shouts across the room, pointing a finger at nobody in particular, although it’s seemingly directed at the journalists from L’Equipe. ‘You got your interview.’
As he walks out, I feel an unexpected flush of embarrassment – both for his boorish behaviour and for being British.
* * *
The next morning, in Bulle, waiting for the Garmin cars to arrive, I spot Nick Howes, at the foot of the steps of the Sky bus. When he thinks nobody’s looking, he struggles to stifle a huge yawn.
‘Late one, Nick?’ I ask.
‘They didn’t turn the disco off until 2.30. And it was all that Euro rubbish – boom-boom-boom. But luckily the riders were at the back of the hotel so it wasn’t that bad. Not for them anyway…’
It turned out that even after being shouted at, L’Equipe had still got their man, interviewing the recalcitrant Wiggins at the Hotel Callier the night before.
I spot the same Italian commissaire who’d exchanged words with Cavendish in the hotel foyer the evening before.
Cav’s reputation, which he consistently argues is undeserved and unjustified, is that when the road goes uphill, he all too often hitches a ‘ride’ – by hanging on to wing mirrors – from a passing team car.
He’s been accused of it in the past by other riders, as well as by the media. There is no damning evidence, though – just rumour and hearsay, all of which he has rubbished.
‘Looks like they’ve got it in for him,’ Sky’s sports director Sean Yates says, referring to the barrage around Cavendish – the blockade imposed on team cars by UCI commissaires – at the foot of the final climb.
‘They imposed the barrage 30 ‘k’ from the finish and had three commissaires buzzing around Cav!’ Yates says. ‘I mean, three…!?’
A few minutes later, I stroll over to the Italian commissaire and shake hands.
‘What was that about in the hotel last night with Cavendish?’
‘We put some commissaires with Cavendish and he got a bit angry that we were there,’ he shrugs. ‘It’s normal…’
Was he doing anything wrong, I ask – holding onto cars or anything like that?
‘Oh no, no – nothing like that. But he’s world champion, so a lot of people are watching him.’
An hour later, I climb into the passenger seat of Garmin’s number one car, alongside Allan Peiper – white-haired these days, but still as thin as when he was racing. Peiper, once a team-mate of Yates and Robert Millar, then a directeur sportif to Cavendish and now to Garmin, is now something of a veteran.
Within a kilometre of the neutralised roll out, as Peiper and I renew acquaintance, we clip wing mirrors with another team car. Then the speed rises, up to 60 kilometres an hour as we slalom through the suburbs of Bulle.
I’ve been in team cars before – Motorola with Hennie Kuiper on the Tour of Britain, Festina with Juan Fernandez on the Tour de France – and now Peiper, but because Garmin’s hot young talent Andrew Talansky is third overall, Peiper’s number one team car is ranked third on the road. This means that we are constantly close to the back of the bunch. Other than being on a motorbike, it is the best view of the peloton I have ever had.
Peiper, now a directeur for almost a decade, knows Cavendish well.
‘In 10 years’ time, this race will be famous for the world champion having worked for Wiggins. But then,’ he adds, ‘right now, Cav’s in a good place.’
The attacks have already started, and Peiper urges his riders on through their radio earpieces: ‘The boys are saying go, Ramunas,’ he tells Garmin’s Lithuanian rider, Ramunas Navardauskas.
The speed reaches 40 kilometres an hour uphill, 60 kilometres an hour on the flat, pushed along by the omnipresent, unrelenting Sky team, which chases down every move.
‘Be ready guys, eh? Ready to go with the next ones,’ Peiper tells them.
The valley narrows and closes in on the approach to the Col des Mosses. At the foot of the climb, as the gradient bites and the road swings through a beautiful wide hairpin, we pass Lotto rider Kenny Dehaes, bandaged and breathless, dropped on the first real incline. Peiper speaks to him in Flemish but we can both see that, with over 150 kilometres still to come, he’s done for.
Other riders slide backwards towards us, scrabbling to hold on as Wiggins and Sky continue to force the pace. Cavendish is one of them, but he’s fighting hard, with his race face on. Then, as much higher, snowy peaks come into view and Yates and Brailsford roll past in a Sky Jaguar, Peiper tucks into a sandwich, and there is a lull.
American Peter Stetina comes back to the car.
‘It just wasn’t happening,’ he says to Peiper. ‘Sky aren’t letting anything go. Every time, it was just…’ The Coloradan takes his hands off the bars and mimics a throttle being turned.
The top of the Col des Mosses is beautiful. Granite crags glower down on the peloton. Bright spring sunshine floods the Alpine meadows, still carpeted by crystallised snow, the road a ribbon of grey on the mountainside.
At the summit, Peiper speak to his riders again: ‘Guys, it’s a fast descent but make sure you’re eating. It’s a hard finale…’
‘I’m surprised you have to remind them,’ I say.
‘Yeah, but they still forget sometimes – they get caught up in the race, then when they remember, it’s already too late.’
We barrel down the descent, sometimes touching 90 kilometres per hour, pursuing the long line of riders, sweeping through the bends. High winds gust across the hillside and, as we slide through one left-hander, a BMC rider is gripping onto a blood spattered guardrail, left hand in the air, right hand clutching his face.
I check his race number.
‘That’s Van Garderen,’ I say.
‘Shit!’ Peiper, his former directeur, exclaims. ‘Was that TJ?’
We get to the valley floor and slalom through Aigle, within a stone’s throw of the UCI’s headquarters. As the race route turns into the valley towards Martigny, the peloton is met by a brutal headwind and the pace tumbles to 20 kilometres an hour.
With the bunch riding at a snail’s pace, Peiper pulls over to the verge.
‘I’m busting,’ he says before jumping out and relieving himself. We move on. A BMC team car rolls alongside.
‘TJ okay?’ Peiper asks of BMC’s Belgian directeur, Rik Verbrugghe.
‘Yeah – he took a branch in the face, from a tree,’ the Belgian says in clipped English.
Chris Froome appears alongside the Sky team car, and begins loading up with water bottles. I count six stuffed into his pockets and under his jersey, and two on his bike, before he rides back to the peloton.
The wind tugs at the hunched riders. Peiper and I chat some more and he praises the English affection for a cup of tea and a piece of cake.
‘I like London,’ he tells me. ‘Last time I was there I ate at that Ramsay restaurant… What’s it called? Petrus, that’s the one. Impeccable it was.’
I suggest if he comes to London again that we combine Ramsay and a cuppa and should meet for tea in Claridge’s.
‘Aw, yeah – great idea!’ he replies, as we shake on it.
Ryder Hesjedal drifts back for drinks and Alex The Mechanic begins worrying about how many more bidons the team needs.
‘On a long, hot day we can get through 100,’ he says, as he texts ahead to the ‘ravito’ – the ravitaillement, or feed zone – asking the soigneurs to prepare more bottles.
Sky are still working hard, riding relentlessly. Up ahead, Cavendish is battling the wind and leading the peloton as they begin to cut into the breakaway’s lead. The time gap drops and then, as we arrive at the foot of a finishing circuit that includes two first-category climbs, Cav appears again, back alongside his team car.
‘That’s Cav’s race,’ Alex says as the world champion eases up and slips out of view behind the convoy. As we begin the first hairpins, Geraint Thomas – his work for Wiggins done – slips back, too. There’s no need for a barrage this time. Within minutes both he and Cav are announced as abandons.
* * *
After the stage, on the way to the hotel, we take a detour and, on a whim, drive up the hairpins from Martigny, through the hanging vineyards, and up to the Col de Forclaz. There’s one hotel and bar, so we park up, order a beer and take in the view.
A cyclo-tourist we passed on the way up the climb sweats over the top, zips up his jersey and promptly barrels through the first hairpin and into the descent. I watch him pass and, even though it’s cold and getting dark, feel rather jealous and wonder where he’s riding on to.
Wiggins was always expected to win the next day’s decisive time trial. We hang around the Sky bus in the morning, chatting to the ever affable Howes, then drive the course before the race starts. There’s a short uphill section, a quick steep descent, then a left turn onto a steady climb, cut into the mountainside that wends its way into Crans Montana.
In the press room – a school hall this time – the relaxed atmosphere of the race is emphasised by a sleepy and oversized Doberman lolling around in the entrance. Up at the finish line, the riders come and go – Cadel Evans, anonymous throughout the race, cutting a disconsolate figure as he crosses the line, still bereft of anything approaching real form.
Then, after Talansky, Peiper’s protégé, rips up the course, it’s time for Wiggins. The ever-watchful Brailsford monitors progress from the team camper van, parked 50 metres through the finish line. The Londoner pedals away from the start, flies down the descent but then grinds to a halt before the climb begins after his chain drops.
Marginal gains, marginal losses.
Wiggins fumbles with the bike very briefly, decides better of it, and then calmly stops. In the past he would have thrown the bike into a nearby ravine. This time, as the bike is substituted, he keeps his head, gets back on and sets off again.
He wins, if not easily from Talansky, but convincingly enough, the effort bringing him to near collapse as he crosses the line, cradled in Brailsford’s arms. A few yards away, Peiper watches, a wry smile on his face, cursing Talansky’s bad luck.
Half an hour later, Wiggins comes to the press room.
‘I might be a knobhead with the press, but I’m consistent on the bike,’ he says.
* * *
Modern cycling is all about context. The results have to be seen in the context of their time. Then, as time moves on, as cycling’s history evolves, they become fluid, morphing as the landscape changes, becoming less credible – or sometimes more incredible – the more we learn and understand about each era.
So you could argue that Bradley Wiggins – as things stand finished second in the 2009 Tour de France. Take away Lance Armstrong’s third place, Alberto Contador’s win – both guided by Johan Bruyneel, of course – and bingo, Brad’s runner-up.
The flipside is that immediately, of course, even by finishing fourth, behind those infamous names, his performance put him under suspicion. Garmin, even as Wiggins prepared to walk out on Jonathan Vaughters’ team in the aftermath of the 2009 Tour to join Team Sky, defended his reputation – and theirs.
Since then, his old directeur, Matt White – Whitey, to almost everyone in the peloton – has confessed to doping while employed as a US Postal rider. White was sacked by Garmin long after Wiggins’s fourth place for sending a rider to see a doctor deemed dodgy because of his relations with Bruyneel and Armstrong, prior to Wiggins’s fourth place.
At the end of 2012, White offered his resignation to the GreenEdge team after admitting to doping while he was on Armstrong’s team.
Funny how it always comes back to Lance – the amazing Lance Armstrong. Amazing more in the way he managed to permeate almost every corner of cycling than for the ‘incredible’ results. Whitey rode with Lance, Whitey directs Brad, and Brad comes fourth in the Tour. Yates rode with Lance, Yates directs Brad, Brad wins. No wonder it makes some people nervous.
Of course, just because you know somebody with a reputation, it doesn’t automatically mean that you deserve it, too. We all have friends with history, friends with reputations, damaged friends. Guilt by association does not stand up. But if you believe in it, as a signpost, then it’s almost everywhere in cycling. There’s that word again – context: explain yourself, tell us what’s really going on now, what really went on then. Tell us who you really are.
Perhaps, typically, we can lay much of the blame at Lance Armstrong’s door, for his paranoia, his smokescreens, his bizarre and bitter Spanish tweeting from a pseudonym, his obsessions and his secrecy. Armstrong lived on his nerves, never relaxing, even during his downtime on the beach in Catalunya, watching his kids tuck into the calamares romana, while he picked irritably at a salad, and scrolled the messages on his BlackBerry.
Wiggins was never like this; his laid-back persona always seemed genuinely disconnected from the person he is on the bike. An Olympic pursuit is one thing, but how can somebody this outwardly relaxed, this simple in his world view, this happy nursing a pint in the corner of a pub, want to fight to win for three whole weeks?
Now, however, he seems the same: angry, defensive, berating the press, whether in the sleepy backwaters of the Tour of Romandy or the searing hothouse of the Tour de France.
How far removed in sentiment from Armstrong’s extraordinary ‘I’m sorry for the cynics and sceptics who don’t believe in miracles’ Hollywood moment on the podium at the end of the 2005 Tour was Wiggins’s expletive-laden rant about Tweeters, seven summers later? June 2012 in the Rhone Valley. Midway through the Critérium du Dauphiné. I’m driving through the pouring rain to Mont Brouilly, past more tumbling vineyards to Team Sky’s hotel to interview Wiggins.
Bradley will do 10 minutes, says Nick Howes. ‘About 8.15, okay?’
I’d asked for half an hour.
I wait in the dim and tiny reception area of the hotel. Tony Rominger, once a client of Michele Ferrari, mentor to a series of young riders, and now Cadel Evans’s agent, wanders in and out of the lobby.
Wiggins comes past in kit, sheathed in sweat, his bib shorts rolled to his flat waist, rib cage protruding, skin white as a ghost, except for the tan lines above his elbows and around his neck. Not as tanned as others, though. He grunts an acknowledgement as he passes.
BMC directeur John Lelangue, once head of the Tour’s press service, and son of Bob Lelangue, once a team-mate of Eddy Merckx, appears. Evans wanders through and down to dinner.
Rominger and Yates exchange a few words.
‘Hey Sean, you still riding?’ Rominger smiles. ‘Look at you – so thin!’
‘I don’t eat much,’ Yates replies.
An Italian TV crew arrives. Then the British documentary crew, who are following Sky through the year, settle in. I decide this is no place for an interview. Nick agrees and we move out into the car park and step onto the team bus.
Wiggins always sits at the front, Nick says. Or most of the time anyway. He gets on with the driver – they have a bit of a banter. I notice through the windows of the bus, blacked out from the outside, that he would always be able to survey the goings on around the bus.
‘That makes me laugh, Nick,’ I say. ‘I can imagine them sitting here looking out at us, taking the piss.’
Nick smiles: ‘Yeah, well, I won’t say that never happens!’
Then Bradley appears, a little harassed, looking for a missing jacket. After a minute or two of searching, he sits down opposite me in his usual seat and we begin. I don’t raise the issue of doping: he does.
‘I’m only human. I get so upset about it,’ he says, when I ask him about the rumours. ‘My natural reaction is to want to tell somebody to go and fuck themselves. But you can’t, ’cos they say, “Oh, what are you getting so touchy about…?” That’s happening more and more and that’s a shame. But I guess cycling has got itself to blame for it.’
We talk a little longer, but then, after just over 11 minutes, time is up. Nick’s running a tight ship.
‘Enjoy your dinner,’ I say, as I pack away my notes, but he’s already out of his seat, down the steps and gone.
I wait for the riders at the Sky bus after the next day’s stage. Chris Froome warms down shaking his head and chatting to Mick Rogers. Both are relieved that they kept it all together for the finale.
Tim Kerrison, another of Sky’s coaches and the one credited with revolutionising their thinking, stands watching. One by one he’s handed the SRM system pods from each rider’s bike. He stuffs them into the pocket of his team-issue hoodie.
I carry on down the line of buses and run into Charly Wegelius, outside the Garmin bus. Charly is writing a book, with the former rider Tom Southam.
‘Another of our little collaborations,’ he says with a wry smile, recalling the 2005 World Championships in Madrid, when Wegelius and Southam rode on the front of the bunch for several laps early in the race, helping the Italians rather than riding for Great Britain – a decision that cost national road coach John Herety his job.
We chat for a while, and he tells me how much he enjoys directing the team.
‘I’m doing 100 days a year,’ he explains. ‘It really suits me; I love doing this. And I was ready to stop racing, really. I think I did one season too many.
‘I’d always thought I’d handled it okay, but it wasn’t until I stopped that I realised how tired I was, physically and mentally,’ Charly says. ‘I’d been exhausted most of the time.’
The next lunchtime I drive over the Joux Plane and on to Morzine. This is the acid test of Team Sky’s pretensions, not just to win the Dauphiné, but the Tour. Brutal at the bottom and with enough tight hairpins to crack even the most determined grimpeur, it’s worse than I remember it. The tarmac veers from smooth to ruptured and in places is washed by a mixture of mud and cow shit.
Over the top there’s a corniche – stunning, with madly spectacular views – following a steep escarpment, another false summit and then a terrifying plunge through tall trees, down to Morzine.
Vertiginous isn’t a word I use too often – in fact, it is – but it applies perfectly to the descent from the Joux Plane. Evans doesn’t care and, still desperate to find his form, launches himself, first along the corniche and then down into the bends tumbling through the high pasture.
It’s a spectacular attack, but it brings no response from Sky, who instead choose to let him go. Evans is risking his neck, but three weeks before the Tour starts, is it really worth it? Wiggins holds the lead and the race is effectively over.
There’s a steep and rough path from the press room to the finish line. Nick Howes is wondering how Wiggins will get there.
‘Can he ride down it?’ he asks after the finish. In the end they drive.
Stage winner Nairo Quintana and Wiggins arrive in the press room at the same time. The tiny Colombian sits down, expressionless but attentive as the questions are asked. Wiggins stands to one side and looks slightly pained and awkward, but then with a shrug and smile sits down among the journalists as the South American responds.
Then it’s Wiggins’s turn, and somebody asks him if he thinks Sky race like US Postal.
‘Yes, it’s very similar to US Postal, and Banesto used to do the same thing. You race to your strengths as efficiently as possible. It works. We’re not going to change it.’
Before I leave the press room, I remember something, and look up a recent quote from the UCI president Pat McQuaid, elaborating on the theme of the blood passport’s success.
‘For me, the evidence of the success of the passport seems on the road, in the race itself,’ said McQuaid. ‘I am not going to say that cycling has been winning the war against doping, but I will say that we have turned a corner on doping, and that the peloton is cleaner than it used to be.
‘In the big mountain stages, you never see the [team] leader surrounded by three or four domestiques. He usually finishes the climb on his own. That wasn’t the case during the big period of EPO,’ said McQuaid.
Except that that is exactly what Wiggins and Team Sky did on the Joux Plane, in June 2012, as Cadel Evans toiled against them on his own. Four or five riders in black and sky blue set a searing pace and the bunch settled in behind them.
After I have read the USADA report, or most of it, I feel a need to go for a ride. It’s Dave Zabriskie’s testimony that resonates the most. Running from problems at home, from his father’s addiction, he discovers cycling. It’s a liberating experience for him. Then he turns professional and his dream sours. He finds himself in a hotel room, a bloody syringe in hand.
I feel polluted, blocked. I need to get out on the bike. The air gets colder on the road up from Sault, steadily climbing up through the forest. It’s the forgotten side of Mont Ventoux, this old road, partly because it’s less steep, wilder, and partly because it’s not often used in races.
It’s the loneliest side, too, and late on this October afternoon, 24 hours after I’ve stayed up most of the night, trawling through USADA’s demolition of The Legend of Lance, it seems even more desolate.
I’m slow through the bends, painfully slow. I’ve spent too much time at a desk recently, so I churn, metronomically, through the bends that curl across the ploughed lavender fields and on up the gradient deep into the woods, the browned leaves gently falling onto the verge.
I hate the bastard Ventoux, because it’s too hard for me, and always has been – but I love it, too. I’ve loved it since I first came up it in my mum’s Mini Metro in 1986, wide-eyed and enthralled. The brakes seized on the way down and we ended up sliding into an exit lane, slewing through the gravel and sand as we plummeted towards Malaucène.
I love it even more now, on this chilly autumn afternoon. I love it for standing up to Lance the Bully, Lance the Fraud, Lance who thought he could have it all and get away with it, Lance who thought he was Untouchable. Well, he never ‘had’ the Ventoux, he never ‘got’ the Ventoux. It knew, you see – it knew who he really was. It had seen too much already, when Tom Simpson crossed its unforgiving slopes.
Finally the gradient eases – even though it’s hardly that steep – and the road swings around to Chalet Reynard. I stop at the deserted café, lean the bike against the railings and down a café noisette on the terrace.
Lance came past here, many times, most famously with Marco Pantani. For a moment, in my mind’s eye, I see them in tandem, wild-eyed, demented, doped up, haring past me on their way to the summit.
What did they signify as they skipped past and away, on up the mountain? Everything, everything, to the thousands of men, women and children who’d given up their time to come and stand and cheer at the roadside. Now, with Marco long gone and Lance found out, we know: it all meant nothing.
The wind picks up, the sky darkens and discretion gets the better part of valour. It’s getting late. I won’t be riding on to the top today.
It’s suddenly icy cold and I pull on a second gilet before heading down to Bédoin, back home and to the warmth of a deep bath.
People used to say to Lance, ‘What will be your legacy?’
Well, now we know.
Jeremy Whittle is cycling correspondent to The Times, author of Bad Blood: The secret life of the Tour de France,’ and collaborator with David Millar on Racing Through the Dark. A founding editor of procycling magazine, he has written about sport, particularly European cycling, since 1994 and has covered 18 Tours de France.