Historically, 2012 was a momentous year for the Tour de France. Bradley Wiggins claimed Britain’s first victory in the greatest sporting endurance race and then, in the autumn, came the gory exposure of Lance Armstrong and the US Postal and Discovery teams. Wiggins’s success is easy to write and read about: it is the story of one of the most individual and, in his own quiet way, charismatic personalities that modern-day sport has spawned. Conversely, the downfall of Armstrong is painful in the extreme: the revelations colour everything that has been penned about him over the last two decades.
Dave Brailsford, Team Sky’s principal, described the report by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) which led to Armstrong’s disgrace as having the effect of an ‘atomic bomb’ on the sport and the shock waves from that 1,000-page document are ongoing and will be for years. The immediate effect was that Armstrong and his US Postal and Discovery teams were written out of the record books. His seven Tour titles were declared invalid and no other rider was promoted in his place. The world governing body, the UCI, heavily prompted by Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme, decided that the period between 1999 and 2005 was so rife with doping and the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PED) that nobody among the main candidates in the General Classification (GC) could be entirely trusted. It was a harsh but understandable assessment.
Pat McQuaid, the UCI president, a little belatedly for some, declared that Lance Armstrong ‘has no place in cycling history’. In many obvious ways he is correct. However, David Millar, a rehabilitated former doper, takes a different view. He insists that the sport is changing for the better, and that the Texan’s remarkable ‘hero to zero’ story should always be remembered for the message it conveys, not least for the scale of the fall when it came.
Personally, I am with Millar: we shouldn’t attempt a wholesale re-writing of history with all-comers chiming in with their belated wise words after the event. The reality is that for the best part of a decade Lance Armstrong was the biggest star and personality in a worldwide sport. His was the name on everyone’s lips from dawn to dusk. So overwhelming was his presence, on the Tour de France especially, that it was impossible to go twenty minutes with colleagues without his name, and the ‘did he/didn’t he’ question, cropping up. I am struggling to think of an evening meal or long car journey which didn’t end with such a debate. The verdict was usually the same: guilty, but untouchable until hard evidence was unearthed.
We know differently now. Not only about Armstrong, but also Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis, George Hincape, Michael Barry, David Zabriskie, Christian Vande Velde, Levi Leipheimer and Tom Danielson. North American sport has always been the world leader when it comes to using PEDs, even more so than the Soviet bloc in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; all its major indigenous sports have been badly tainted over the years and many of the performances of their top athletes are as equally suspect as those from Eastern Europe. With hindsight it seems crass that the sport and the media were not more suspicious when Armstrong’s rookie US Postal team started taking the Tour by storm and he beat not only specialists like Chris Boardman in Prologues but the world’s best climbers in mountain stages as well. But that was what happened and it does no harm to read within these pages what was written at the time – and then fill in the gaps with what we now know to be fact.
One constant refrain, and a universal truth, is that it is the modern-day riders and sport who are left to pick up the pieces after the USADA report. Many contemporary riders have grown weary of apologising for the past and the beleaguered UCI have been pointing to a long list of big names they have brought to justice in recent years. Your view about the latter depends if you are a ‘glass-half-full’ or ‘half-empty’ individual. On one hand it can be seen as a very positive sign: no other sport chases and bans its poster boys like cycling does; but equally it is arguably a depressing sign that systemic doping still exists.
Everyone reacted to the USADA report in their own way; most, alas, retained a diplomatic silence and did nothing. Not so Sky and the Australian team Orica GreenEdge who both decided to be proactive. Others might follow. At Sky, Brailsford was staggered by the sheer scale of the doping revealed in the testimonies given to USADA by the riders. He decided to go back to basics and re-inforce Sky’s zero tolerance policy to any kind of doping incident, whether past or present.
While confident that his riders would pass muster, Brailsford was shaken to the core that recent team member Michael Barry was one of those who gave evidence of his own doping history as well as Armstrong’s. Barry had denied any involvement when interviewed by Brailsford before joining the team. Less than two months after Bradley Wiggins’s remarkable success in Paris, Brailsford personally re-interviewed all eighty members of the Sky squad and then required them to sign a form denying any doping past. Within a matter of days directeur sportif Stephen de Jong and race coach Bobby Julich had departed, followed by senior directeur sportif Sean Yates, who suddenly announced his retirement. Sky insist, though, that Yates made no admission to any doping incident when interviewed. It was a traumatic time for the team when they should have been basking in the afterglow of their success but it was a stance Brailsford was determined to take, even if it hinged on fleeting associations with doping ten or fifteen years before. His priority was to maintain the integrity of Sky so that people can believe in what they see and celebrate accordingly. Which brings us rather belatedly to the story of how Bradley Wiggins, aided and abetted by his team, won the 2012 Tour de France.
The day-by-day story of Wiggins’s remarkable success, and the impact on the British public, is captured in these pages. But as you would expect with such a fascinating and complicated individual, that is scarcely half the tale. The origins and motivation for Wiggins’s Tour de France triumph go back a long way with many of the key moments unobserved and unrecorded by the general sporting public.
When Dave Brailsford started to put Team Sky together, straight after the Beijing Olympics, he gave his squad the mission statement of winning the GC title in the Tour de France within five years. He attracted widespread ridicule, not least in the Continental cycling press, who mistook goal-setting for arrogance. Their sniggers could be heard after the 2010 Tour when Wiggins, having been expensively and controversially ‘acquired’ by Team Sky from Garmin, flopped so badly during his first race as a team leader that he finished among the also-rans. For a man who had cruised home in fourth position twelve months earlier with very little specific training, it was tantamount to disaster. Physically there was one extenuating circumstance, though it is to Wiggins’s credit that it scarcely warranted a mention at the time. Wiggins pulled a groin muscle when crashing on stage two and required painkilling injections most days, which is not an ideal situation when you have over 3,500km of rugged terrain to negotiate as well as some of the most iconic climbs in cycling.
That was unfortunate, but elsewhere Sky and Wiggins got it badly wrong. The conditioning programme they put together left him short of endurance and punch at high altitudes. They also failed to put together a team capable of supporting Wiggins in a way genuine GC contenders require. Tactically, Sky started messing with history and were left with egg on their face. On the very first day, a Prologue in Rotterdam in which Wiggins should have been a certainty for a top-five finish, they ignored tradition and sent him out early before his main rivals. The result was that he encountered the worst of the weather on a squally day, rode ultra conservatively, and finished a dispirited 77th. From that moment he was on the back foot. All this has been admitted in retrospect and in fairness can be put down to teething troubles for a first-year Pro-Tour team. But the other huge factor in the humiliation of 2010 was Wiggins himself and his inability to feel comfortable in the role of team leader, both as a rider and an individual. That was something that neither Sky nor Wiggins had anticipated, though an objective look at his ‘back story’ should have alerted all concerned.
Wiggins, though a loner in many ways, was and is the ultimate team man and that is still where his true genius lies. For nearly a decade before he became a Grand Tour rider, Wiggins had been a core member of the Great Britain men’s team pursuit squad who eventually achieved true greatness with two world records in the space of 24 hours at the Beijing Olympics. Even his success in the individual pursuit can be seen partially as the result of team work and close collaboration with the likes of Chris Boardman, Shane Sutton and Dr Steve Peters, his off-track support team who worked extensively with him to refine his technique and banish a myriad of mental demons.
The road took second place during this period. Again, though, he accepted the team role with relish, firstly as an old-fashioned domestique and fully paid-up member of the grupetto, then as lead-out man for sprinters such as Mark Cavendish at HTC High Road. His solitary moments of individual glory, and pressure, came in the occasional Prologues and individual time-trials when he was allowed to race ‘full gas’ and remind everybody what an extraordinary engine was housed in that lean frame.
When Wiggins finished fourth in the 2009 Tour with Garmin, he was still essentially just another team member. Christian Vande Velde was the designated team leader, David Millar the road captain and between them tended to be the target of most media attention. Wiggins relished operating under the radar and was still the larrikin at the back of the bus most days, cracking jokes and doing his priceless impressions. But it could never be like that at Sky. He had been hired, at considerable expense, to be the team leader and the man to deliver a Tour de France win. Everything revolved around him and there could be no seeking comfort in the more mundane jobs and worthy team roles of yesteryear. And that was just on the bike. Off the bike, at a start-up team, Wiggins had to be the man who set the tone in attitude and commitment, the man who others looked up to and approached for advice.
It was all too much. Wiggins wasn’t comfortable with the extra pressure and elevated profile, and by his own admission felt a little crushed mentally. The 2010 season started with high hopes but ended in rancour and disappointment. Brailsford and Sutton didn’t spare him verbally at a series of post-season inquests. In truth, though they were only telling him what he already knew, it was in those stormy autumn months that the first serious steps towards becoming a genuine Tour de France contender were taken.
Wiggins clicked a switch mentally. From now on dieting was for twelve months of the year, not ten. From now on he would tell friends and colleagues exactly what was required of them; they would have to accept that when victory came he would get all the glory and they would be largely ignored, which was something that went against his every instinct. From now on he would live like a monk and train like a dog; but would prepare by working on his weaknesses rather than his strengths. Above all else it was decided – and this was Sky’s decision as much as his – that Wiggins would now start contesting every race he entered rather than myopically treating the Tour de France as the only one that mattered. For a rider of such massive talent and achievement on the track, Wiggins had precious few wins on his road-racing palmarès, aside from time-trial victories. Frankly, that was ridiculous.
Tim Kerrison was hired as conditioning guru to address specific physiological problems, brutal training camps in Tenerife were initiated and a much stronger squad gathered who had to share in the same fitness regime. Victory in the Dauphiné Libéré in 2011 suggested that a podium place a month later in the Tour was a strong possibility but a crash at the end of the first week dashed those hopes. No matter: it probably would have been twelve months too early anyway. Fate was actually playing a benign hand.
Wiggins and Sky came out firing in 2012 and reeled off victories – never by much, but always seemingly in control – at Paris-Nice, the Tour of Romandie and then the Dauphiné again. Nobody had achieved that hat-trick before, and at no time did Wiggins appear stressed or riding on the limit. He was installed as the Tour de France favourite and now he was in complete control mentally, both of himself and his role as team leader.
There are some who will tell you the 2012 Tour was a little boring, essentially because Sky had it under control from the off. I disagree with that. There was a daily tension and excitement about whether Sky could maintain their grip because as history had shown they were still a young and callow team. The subplot of whether Chris Froome was really mounting a quiet challenge to his team leader was also gripping but, above all, it was the daily glimpses into ‘Wiggins World’ that entertained and enthralled.
He doesn’t want to be the patron, yet he showed real leadership when he called a halt to racing when the Tour came under attack from saboteurs on the penultimate Sunday. Then, just as the Chris Froome debate was reaching its zenith and the responsibility of team riders was under scrutiny, he provided three sensational lead-outs in the final eight days of racing for Sky sprinters Mark Cavendish and Edvald Boasson Hagen. That is something unheard-of for a rider in the yellow jersey. It was an enormously powerful and timely message: a leader working for his team by way of thank you for their incredible efforts. It’s the message cycling fans like to take from the sport and hopefully you will too from the pages in this anthology.
Brendan Gallagher
The Daily Telegraph cycling correspondent
November 2012