DAVE BRAILSFORD AND Shane Sutton had first chatted nonchalantly about setting up a British pro team at the Melbourne Park Velodrome during the 2006 Commonwealth Games track events. The idea would be that they’d use everything they’d learned from establishing what had become a world-beating track team and apply it to the road.
But if 2006 had been the year the seed was sown in terms of building a top-level, potentially world-beating road squad, 2007 was the year when the seed was watered, and grew; it was not yet flowering – patience was required – but it had begun pushing upwards towards the sky. Or should that be Sky?
It was at the track World Cup in January, nearly a year after the initial idea, that Sutton and Brailsford decided to go for it. Brailsford was the one who then went out pressing the flesh and sounding out potential sponsors for the nascent road team; Sutton was left holding the British Cycling babies, who were to come of age at the most successful Olympic Games a British cycling squad had ever enjoyed.
Fast-forward to 2010, and Team Sky were launched at the Millbank Tower, near Westminster – a fancy do with special blue lighting and Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan as the host. Bradley Wiggins was the star of the show, and Chris Froome was there, too, of course, but as he was still then a bit of an unknown quantity, he was largely ignored by the press. Sky perhaps knew his potential, though, and Brailsford’s stated goal was for the team to have a British winner within five years, which seemed extremely ambitious.
The team got off to the perfect start, winning its very first race when Kiwi sprinter Greg Henderson powered to victory at the Cancer Council Helpline Classic in Adelaide – the ‘warm-up’ race to the Tour Down Under stage race, which started two days later – with Sky’s Chris Sutton taking second. Their positions were reversed on the final stage of the Tour Down Under when Sutton – Shane Sutton’s nephew – won ahead of Henderson. And in March, Russell Downing scored Sky’s first victory by a British rider when he won the second stage of the Critérium International.
But general teething problems, staff issues, and the fact that it wasn’t possible to simply run a pro road team in the same way as British Cycling had always been run, made for a difficult first year on the whole.
‘I really didn’t enjoy Team Sky’s first season in cycling. I wouldn’t ever want to have to go through the stress of 2010 again,’ Rod Ellingworth – the team’s ‘race coach’ as he was then, and their ‘performance manager’ today – writes in his excellent book Project Rainbow.
At time trials, black screens set up beside the big, black team bus, soon nicknamed the Death Star (a Star Wars reference) shielded the riders from the public’s gaze. The idea was that they’d help the riders concentrate while they warmed up, but one of the main appeals of bike racing – versus football, or, in fact, most sports – had always been that the barrier between the riders and fans was virtually non-existent. Sky tried to change the way things were done in that first year, but trying to professionalize what had in the past often been a charmingly unprofessional professional sport didn’t always work.
Things didn’t go well for the new leader of the team, either. Having joined Sky from Garmin, where he’d enjoyed a relatively pressure-free role that had seen him finish fourth at the 2009 Tour, much more was expected of Wiggins at the new team, and he quickly discovered that he wasn’t a natural leader.
Joining the team in the first place had appeared to be a canny move; Wiggins had been a part of the British Cycling programme since he was eighteen, which meant that he and Brailsford knew each other well, while Shane Sutton, who had known Wiggins’s dad, was like a father to him. The process of getting Wiggins out of his two-year contract with Garmin, however, was long and drawn out. Only in December of 2009 did it finally get sorted – the last thing Garmin wanted to do was lose a potential Tour contender – and Wiggins could finally be announced as Team Sky’s new leader.
The contract negotiations, however, had come at a time when he should already have been well into his pre-season training; Wiggins felt he was only really getting going that December – a good couple of months behind where he should have been.
Quite reasonably, Wiggins and the Sky management team tried to replicate his 2009 season by following a similar race programme, which included riding the Giro in May. He won the opening time trial to take the leader’s pink jersey – and from the outside, it looked as if this could be his year – but he had won on natural time trialling ability alone. It was all downhill from there, and he was never in contention, finishing 40th overall in Verona.
The pre-Tour training camp didn’t go much better; Wiggins was getting dropped by the teammates who were supposed to be riding for him. At the prologue time trial in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, which was hosting the 2010 Tour’s Grand Départ, Team Sky’s well-intentioned plan to set Wiggins off earlier in the day – as opposed to being one of the last riders to start, as is traditional for the favourites – backfired spectacularly when the rain they were trying to outwit fell squarely on Wiggins, who finished 77th on the stage, 30 seconds down from the outset on rivals like Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong.
Just like in the Giro, an unfit Wiggins failed to fire on all cylinders during the race, and he finished in Paris a lowly 24th, almost 40 minutes off the pace. As he recalls in his autobiography, My Time, he couldn’t help letting out his frustration when a journalist asked him what the difference was between 2010 and 2009 after Wiggins had finished almost five minutes behind stage winner Christophe Riblon on stage 14 between Revel and the summit finish at Ax 3 Domaines.
‘I’m fucked. I’ve got nothing,’ he told the media back at the team bus. ‘I don’t have the form, it’s as simple as that. I just haven’t got it as I did last year. I just feel consistently mediocre. Not brilliant, not shit, just mediocre. I just haven’t got it right this year.’ Wiggins’s 2010 season ended up with him alone and drunk, in a Milan airport hotel, trying to get home after failing to finish the Tour of Lombardy. Things could only get better.
It had been a steep learning curve in their first season, but Sky soon learned.
The 2011 season went considerably better for the team. Problems were ironed out, things began to click for riders and staff members, and, heading into the Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins was looking in good shape to be in contention for the yellow jersey.
Already he’d finished third overall at the Paris–Nice stage race in March, and then won the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, having taken the race lead after the time trial on stage three and riding consistently on the climbs to defend his lead for the rest of the race.
Once at the Tour, resplendent in his white jersey with the red-and-blue bands denoting him as the British road-race champion – the title he’d taken just a week before the start of the Tour – everything was going to plan for Wiggins. But then – suddenly – on stage seven, from Le Mans to Châteauroux, with 40 kilometres to go, he crashed.
While Mark Cavendish – that year riding for the HTC-Highroad outfit – screamed across the finish line to take the 17th Tour stage win of his career, and the second of what would be five stage victories at that Tour, his former Madison partner was on his way to hospital. Wiggins had broken his collarbone, and was out of the race.
Were Sky really going to be able to achieve their aim of having a British Tour winner within five years? They only had three more ‘tries’ left.
In the Wiggins documentary film A Year in Yellow, filmed across the build-up to, and immediate aftermath of, Wiggins’s 2012 Tour win, Shane Sutton tells the camera: ‘I actually think he’s missed his chance,’ which is typical of his propensity to tell it the way he sees it. ‘If Brad was ever going to win the Tour, it was last year [2011].
‘Last year, Brad Wiggins should have been drinking champagne approaching the Champs-Elysées. But unfortunately …’ Sutton shrugs, and tails off.
He would have been mightily pleased that he was wrong.
Indeed, as Brailsford pointed out after Chris Froome’s win in 2013, Sky ended up winning the Tour twice in four years. Besides, before they’d even won it once, by September 2011, things were already looking up when Froome won a stage and finished second at the Vuelta a España, just 13 seconds behind winner Juan José Cobo, and a recovered Wiggins took third, another minute and a half back, both Sky riders having worn the red leader’s jersey along the way. It ended up having been a mistake making Froome work for Wiggins; the team admits today that Froome could have won had they put faith in his ability.
But, at the time, Froome was still somewhat of an unknown quantity over a three-week race. Indeed, until that stand-out performance so late in the season, he had yet to renew his contract. Suddenly, Froome had become a bona fide grand-tour contender – just like Wiggins.
Less than two weeks later, Froome and Wiggins would be key members of the British national team that helped Cavendish to his road-race world champion’s title. And in October, Sky announced that they’d secured Cavendish’s signature for the 2012 season. He’d become, by then, arguably the biggest name in professional cycling.
That summer, on assignment for Cycle Sport magazine, I’d spent an afternoon pedalling around a couple of laps of the Copenhagen world-championship road-race course with Brian Holm, stopping every now and again for photographer Mike King to get some nice pictures.
Holm was Cavendish’s directeur sportif at HTC, and knew both the course and Cavendish well. The world championships in Copenhagen had been earmarked by Cavendish’s coach, Rod Ellingworth, three years before, as winnable for Cavendish. ‘Project Rainbow’, they’d called it – a painstaking plan to bring everything and everyone together for that one day in September 2011 in the hope of winning Britain’s first rainbow jersey in the elite men’s event since Tom Simpson had won the Worlds road race in 1965.
Ellingworth recalls one of the meetings they had in June 2009, which brought together the riders who were on the shortlist to feature in the Worlds team, including Jeremy Hunt, Roger Hammond, David Millar, Ian Stannard, Ben Swift, Froome, Geraint Thomas and Cavendish.
Wiggins was a notable absence. ‘He wasn’t at the meeting because he didn’t turn up,’ Ellingworth writes.
Ellingworth showed them old film footage of Simpson’s 1965 Worlds win, and when he turned the lights back on, he had one of Simpson’s rainbow jerseys there with him, in a picture frame. Millar and Cavendish in particular, Ellingworth recalls, cooed over it.
Now the goal was that much more tangible.
‘Seventeen laps of this will grind you down,’ Holm had told me on our recce of the Copenhagen Worlds course for my magazine race preview. ‘Although that happens no matter what the course is like. If it’s flat, then the race just goes faster.’
The climb up to the start/finish line – Geels Bakke – was one of two slopes that Cavendish was going to have to get over, seventeen times, if he wanted to be in with a shot of becoming champion of the world.
‘It doesn’t feel too bad riding up,’ Holm said of the final climb, having made short work of it. He stopped, and took a glance behind him. ‘But then you look back and realize that it actually is pretty steep, so it will be important that you don’t start your sprint too early.
‘But a good Cav could win this by 20 metres,’ Holm added. ‘If he’s got the legs, he can win, but he also needs a very strong team around him.’
It was nigh on prophetic – apart from the ‘20 metres’ part.
I was sworn to secrecy, but Holm had also told me then that he was going to be in the British team car, alongside Ellingworth, on the day. He was Cavendish’s long-time directeur sportif, at T-Mobile, Columbia and HTC, and, being from Copenhagen, even used to train on parts of the course as a youngster. Ellingworth would drive the car, and Holm – a voice of reason and experience, and, like Ellingworth, one of Cavendish’s trusted confidants – would make the calls tactics-wise.
The ‘strong team’ that Holm had said Cavendish needed had been whittled down and carefully put together by Ellingworth: Cavendish, of course, and then Steve Cummings, Froome, Hunt, Stannard, Thomas, Wiggins, and Millar as ‘road captain’, who could make the calls on the road if things started to go awry.
It was a veritable who’s who of British road-race talent, with three former national road-race champions in their ranks – Hunt (1997 and 2001), Millar (2007), Thomas (2010) – as well as the reigning one in Wiggins, plus two in waiting, with Stannard taking the title in 2012 and Cavendish himself in 2013.
At the Worlds, getting Cavendish repeatedly over the main climb – the one in the middle of the course – without exhausting him too much would be the experienced Hunt’s responsibility, starting with Cavendish as close to the front as possible on each lap and then letting themselves drift slowly backwards through the bunch over the course of the climb, saving energy, before slowly moving up again once back on the flat.
It worked a treat.
We all filed into the press conference to listen to Cavendish at his most eloquent and grateful, still stunned, just a little perhaps, at having written the newest chapter in British cycling history. For anyone else, it might have taken a while for it to sink in that they’d become world champion, but Cavendish seemed to know exactly what he had on his shoulders – the same-coloured shirt as Tom Simpson had first worn forty-six years ago.
This wasn’t a dream realized; this was a goal achieved. Now Cavendish could get on with achieving others while wearing this most iconic of jerseys.
But he had a few people to thank first.
Ellingworth was singled out, and Cavendish was also grateful to all the riders who weren’t there as part of the squad but had been involved all along, and who had helped qualify an eight-man team by virtue of the UCI points they’d scored in other events.
As for his teammates on the day: ‘The guys rode out of their skins today, and I won on behalf of them. I’ll wear this jersey next year, but there’s always going to be seven guys in my heart when it comes to this jersey. It’s a shame that they can’t wear it as well, because I just did the last part today.’
It was typical Cavendish: always grateful, always aware that he was just a cog – albeit a bloody fast spinning one – in a much bigger wheel. Even early on in his career, he’d taken to buying thank-you gifts for his teammates.
The team had turned themselves inside out to ensure that the race ended in the bunch sprint that they required.
‘No one else was really willing to help,’ Cavendish said. ‘We were attacked every which way by the other nations, but we’ve got the best riders in the world riding for Great Britain.’
And here, he singled out his old friend. If there had been any lasting effects of Cavendish’s frustration when they’d been unable to win gold in the Madison at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they had definitely all been washed away now: ‘Bradley Wiggins pretty much rode the last lap at the front on his own. He did an incredible job. All I had to do was sit there.’
Wiggins had played a major role in helping Cavendish win his 2011 rainbow jersey, but it’s hard to imagine that any rider will ever be shone upon quite so brightly as Wiggins was in the summer of 2012. The British rider’s build-up to the Tour – his crash in 2011 just a distant memory – consisted of winnable races that the team would race full bore, each member practising their role in an effort to recreate, or ‘pre-create’, the roles they’d take on at the Tour.
Wiggins was virtually unstoppable: after third place overall at the Tour of Algarve in February, where he won the final time trial, he won Paris–Nice in March, the Tour de Romandie in April – where he even won the bunch sprint on the opening stage – and the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, defending his title there.
At the Tour – which started in Liège on 30 June, having been brought forward slightly on the calendar to allow the riders sufficient time to recover before the London Olympics – Wiggins and his team appeared to be in complete control. They say you make your own luck, but that’s hard to do at the Tour, where a crash can take you out of the running at any moment. Wiggins, however, really did seem to have used up his bad luck the year before; at the 2012 Tour, he didn’t puncture even once in 3,500 kilometres – almost 2,200 miles – of racing.
Time-trial specialist Fabian Cancellara won the prologue time trial. Wiggins was second, seven seconds off the pace, which was a blessing in a quite obvious disguise: it meant that Cancellara’s RadioShack squad would have to take control of the race to defend the race lead for as long as possible. Had Wiggins taken the race lead that early, it would have put unnecessary pressure on the team.
Stage seven, one of the first true tests of that year’s Tour, was when Sky’s long-term plan was rolled out in earnest. It was time for the team to put into practice what they’d been learning to do at the multiple training camps that they had taken part in on the mountainous Spanish island of Tenerife, and then in full racing conditions at Paris–Nice, Romandie and the Dauphiné.
The climb up to the top of La Planche des Belles Filles – also used by the 2014 Tour – at the finish of the seventh stage was the first serious climb on the 2012 route, and so the first opportunity to use Sky’s ‘climbing train’, which was reminiscent of the ‘sprint trains’ used by sprinters like Cavendish to keep out of the wind at the end of a flat stage before being unleashed.
In the mountains, though, it meant that the man on the front would ride at an uncomfortable tempo for as long as possible – kilometres at a time rather than the hundreds of metres at a time in a sprint train – which would serve to both pace Wiggins at a speed that the team knew he could sustain, and shed as many riders as possible who weren’t able to follow such a relentless speed. ‘Pure’ climbers often prefer to ride the mountains at more of a stop–start pace, accelerating when they want to, or when their rivals look weak. Sky’s more calculated, more scientific approach, relying on the knowledge of what kinds of effort were possible through training and practice, was far more effective than simply going on ‘feel’.
In his book, Wiggins explains how it worked that day on La Planche des Belles Filles.
‘Mick [Rogers] would go as hard as he could which would probably be a kilometre and a half, Richie [Porte] would take over and do the same thing, then Froomie. Eventually we would get to the summit and there shouldn’t be many other guys left with us.’
It had been a method used by Lance Armstrong and his US Postal teammates like George Hincapie and Tyler Hamilton in their heyday – the ‘blue train’, as it became known – and while being compared to the American team’s dominating display in the mountains would have been a compliment a few short years earlier, in 2012 such comparisons were far from gratefully received as the net tightened around Armstrong.
When it was suggested at the post-stage-eight press conference in Porrentruy, in Switzerland, that the internet was alive with suggestions that Sky’s tactics looked very similar to US Postal’s, Wiggins’s response was succinct. ‘It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. ****s,’ he said, ending with one of David Millar’s favourite words.
On La Planche des Belles Filles, Sky’s race tactic had worked like clockwork, and left Wiggins and teammate Froome with only defending Tour champion Cadel Evans and Italian Vincenzo Nibali for company. Evans tried to get the better of the Sky tandem in the final few hundred metres, with Nibali hanging on for grim death at the back of the quartet, but it was Froome who then made an even bigger push for home, winning the stage, while Evans was second, with Wiggins on the Australian’s wheel in third.
A week into the race, Wiggins was now in yellow. The fact that Froome had won the stage was the icing on the cake.
For Sky, the 2010 and 2011 Tours had been an anticlimax, for two very different reasons, but in 2012 the race was under their stewardship. The team controlled the race on the climbs, and Nibali proved to be the only rider capable of staying even within ten minutes of Wiggins and Froome by the time the race reached Paris. The only real ‘threat’ to Wiggins’s lead – not that Froome ever even was one – had come from within their own team. It looked like an enviable position to be in.
But demonstrations of Froome’s climbing ability, as witnessed on stage seven to La Planche des Belles Filles, would be seen again along the way. On stage 11, with its summit finish on La Toussuire, the pace was too much for Evans; it was effectively the day that his Tour challenge ended. Froome, however, was keen to put Nibali in trouble, too, and attacked with two kilometres to go.
‘And that’s when Sean said on the radio, “What are you doing?”’ Wiggins says of the incident in My Time. Sean was Sean Yates, Sky’s sports director at the time, who could speak to his charges from the team car, his messages relayed to earpieces that each rider wore.
‘I was thinking, “What on earth’s he [Froome] doing? I’m leading this race by two minutes,”’ Wiggins writes. ‘So he stopped, we got back to him and then we rode the tempo that we’d planned to ride all day, up to the finish.’
It was played down by the team, but at the time there was clear tension on Twitter (where else?) where things got a little tetchy between Wiggins’s wife, Cath, and Froome’s girlfriend – now wife – Michelle.
‘See Mick Rogers and Richie Porte for examples of genuine, selfless effort and true professionalism,’ Mrs Wiggins tweeted.
‘Typical!’ Michelle added to a retweet of Cath’s tweet.
The episode on La Toussuire had rattled Wiggins, he admitted in his book. ‘After La Toussuire I wanted to come home. I thought, “Fuck this, I’m not doing another two weeks of this, not knowing what to expect.”’
With unequivocal support for Wiggins from Brailsford and Yates, it should have been the end of it. But on the final mountain stage – stage 17 between Bagnères-de-Luchon and Peyragudes – Froome again gave a clear demonstration of who the better climber was. Three kilometres from the finish, on the final climb, Froome pushed on ahead of the group of riders containing Nibali and Wiggins, but then seemed to check himself, and instead began chivvying his team leader along as they began to leave their rivals behind.
With two kilometres to go, the gap between them widened again, and again Froome was forced to slow down and wait for Wiggins. Both of them could be seen talking to each other, too.
In the final kilometre, the road flattened out, and Wiggins stuck to Froome’s back wheel like a limpet as they sped towards the finish. They crossed the line together, 20 seconds behind stage winner Alejandro Valverde, a clear smile on Wiggins’s lips, relieved that the mountains were now behind them. Or was it a grimace? Quite possibly both.
‘Putting more time into our main opposition was just what we needed going into the final time trial,’ Froome told ITV4 at the finish when asked about the late push by the Sky pair. But what was it that he’d been saying to Wiggins? ‘Just that we’d got rid of Nibali and that it was about to flatten out and just stay on my wheel,’ he explained.
And asked whether when he distanced Wiggins it was because his team leader was encouraging him to go on ahead and win the stage, he replied: ‘No. We were just … The plan was to stay together and … yeah, we did that, so … so that’s all good.’
Wiggins, safely still in yellow, could now almost see the Eiffel Tower. Getting through the final mountain stage in one piece, with just three stages to go, including the time trial on stage 19, allowed him to relax a little.
‘I think Chris will have his day, for sure, 100 per cent,’ Wiggins told the TV cameras, ‘and I’ll be there to support him every inch of the way when he does at the Tour.’
Two days later, Wiggins won that 53.5-kilometre time trial by one minute and 16 seconds from Froome. Their Tour one-two was in the bag.
The two riders were never required to be best friends for Sky to succeed. And succeed it had: Froome’s second place overall would have alone been Britain’s highest-ever finish at the Tour; winning it and taking second place was far beyond what anyone had ever imagined. And it meant that Sky had two very real Tour de France contenders in the same ranks.
For Wiggins, being the first British winner of the Tour de France was huge, but to then ‘back it up’ with a gold medal in the time trial at the Olympic Games in his home country, indeed, in his home city, was … Well, it really didn’t get any better than that.
Cavendish finished the 2012 Tour having added three more stage wins to his tally to make a total of twenty-three career wins at the event by that point. The sight of Wiggins in the yellow jersey leading him out for the stage victory on the Champs-Elysées on the final stage was quite something, confirming the sheer madness of British cycling’s success.
No one could fault the commitment of the British national team when it came to getting behind Cavendish for races like the world championships or the Olympic road race. But after just one season with Sky, and having been on a Tour team that had been built around Wiggins, Cavendish decided to move to the Belgian Omega Pharma-Quick Step squad in 2013, where he could enjoy full support as undisputed team leader at the races he was targeting.
Following the 2012 Tour, Cavendish’s focus switched quickly to the Olympic road race. While at the 2011 world championships he had enjoyed the luxury of seven other riders to help him win the title, at London 2012 he was part of only a five-man team, and it told. Wiggins, Froome, Ian Stannard and David Millar tried to control the race for him, but it wasn’t to be, and an Olympic medal continues to elude him. There were rumours, however, that Cavendish could be tempted back to the track in Rio in 2016.
Four days after the Olympic road race, Wiggins won gold in the time trial, with Froome taking bronze, more than a minute down. Germany’s Tony Martin took silver. London 2012 was, from a cycling point of view, just as successful as Beijing in 2008, but with the added lustre that being on home turf brought.
It was Victoria Pendleton’s last hurrah before retirement. ‘The golden girl of British cycling’, as the newspapers always referred to her, had to settle for silver in the sprint, beaten by arch-rival Anna Meares, but struck gold in the Keirin, and could retire happy as the reigning sprint world champion.
Her replacement was needed, and she duly arrived: a new star was born in Laura Trott, who won gold in London in both the omnium and the team pursuit. The fact that Trott’s an endurance rider and Pendleton was a sprinter matters little; it’s inspiring figures that the sport and public requires, and Trott has whatever-it-is-that-she-has in spades.
It was a hugely successful Olympics for British cycling again, then, but there could only ever be one winner of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. Step forward, Sir Wiggo.
‘The most iconic trophy in British sport’, Wiggins once called it, and you got the impression that he was as pleased to be recognized for his achievements as he was to actually win the Tour or his Olympic medals.
The award somehow manages to straddle the ‘divide’ between the Olympics-loving public and the non-Olympic ‘everyday’ achievements of the athlete: a just reward for 365 days a year of training and commitment, rather than just the visible results. Very few athletes seem to have won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award on the strength of a single performance; the public requires a certain longevity from their sporting heroes.
Wiggins was the perfect winner: he could boast a career full of Olympic and international achievements, and then a single year when everything went right. People need a bit of time to get to know their athletes; perhaps it really is about ‘personality’ rather than solely achievement, after all.
But in the aftermath of Wiggins’s ‘Great British summer’, he felt the pressure. Suddenly, he was one of the most famous faces in Britain; or, at least, his sideburns were. Froome had been too close for comfort at the Tour, and then in the off-season Lance Armstrong admitted to Oprah Winfrey that he had doped. More questions were, inevitably, asked of Wiggins, which he found difficult, despite maintaining his innocence. He later revealed that he’d had to move his children to a new school as a result of bullying; if Armstrong had cheated to win the Tour, the other kids had deduced, then their dad must have done, too.
In 2013, Wiggins chose to ride the Giro, which suggested that he might concentrate on that rather than the Tour, but he never looked in Giro-winning shape. He withdrew from the race after stage 12, suffering from both a chest infection and a knee injury, having crashed on stage seven.
In late May, the team announced that his knee was going to prevent him from starting the Tour. This meant that the hotly anticipated showdown between Wiggins and Froome – if there ever was going to be one – never materialized.
The 2013 season was, in short, all but a write-off for Wiggins, although he did come good again late in the season to win the Tour of Britain in September, and to take the silver medal – behind Tony Martin – at the time-trial world championships in Florence.
Some had called Wiggins’s 2012 Tour win boring, such had been Sky’s dominance. But British fans who had been waiting for a win since the Tour’s inception in 1903 certainly didn’t find it boring; neither did Sky. If you have the opportunity to win the greatest bike race in the world, and you find a tactical process that can gain you the title, then it stands to reason that you’ll use it, and Sky went about winning the 2013 Tour in a similar manner.
Froome, lieutenant to Wiggins the year before, was now in the Wiggins role, while Richie Porte, instrumental in 2012, stepped up another level to become Froome’s right-hand man. Would Porte then climb one more step to become Sky’s next Grand Tour superstar in turn? The potential was there for some kind of perpetual Russian-doll production line (right-hand man becomes the following year’s leader, and so on) and indeed Porte was initially being offered his own opportunity at the 2014 Tour of Italy, but was then pulled out of the Giro squad just a month before the start to ensure that he arrived at the Tour in July in the best possible condition to help the team.
Froome, almost unopposed, stormed to victory at that 2013 Tour, giving Team Sky their second win at the event in as many years. While Wiggins appears happy to have won the Tour ‘just’ once, Froome, five years Wiggins’s junior, could perhaps win it four, five or six times.
It wasn’t until December 2013 that it was announced that the two Sky teammates had put their past differences behind them, apparently having talked at the team’s first get-together in Mallorca ahead of the 2014 season. ‘To be honest, we should have done it a very long time ago, just to clear the air, but we are on good terms now,’ Froome told the Daily Mail.
‘The incident in 2012 was at the root of it all,’ he continued. ‘I’m not sure it was that big a problem, but it was all played out so much in the media, it was allowed to escalate.’
‘I think there’s a lot of internal rivalry … But in a healthy way,’ Wiggins then told the Guardian at the start of the 2014 season. ‘We all push each other, and everyone’s vying for places in the Tour de France and other races, and there are a lot of good youngsters coming up.’
Having missed out on seeing Froome and Wiggins riding together at the 2013 Tour, a press corps that had been licking their lips at the prospect of the two men being at each other’s throats come the 2014 race were left looking as though they were going to go hungry. Especially when it was announced that Wiggins hadn’t been selected for the Tour squad. A nation wondered: did Sky not trust Wiggins to work for Froome after all?
Armstrong’s confession in January 2013 to having doped to win his seven Tour titles, and the hangover from that, led to questions and doubts among fans and the media about Froome’s dominating display, upsetting him and his team manager. Brailsford felt obliged to assert the riders’ innocence during the 2013 race, just as Wiggins had had to do in 2012. Armstrong – and others like him – have caused a shadow of suspicion to be cast over dominating displays of bike racing, and it could take some time for the sport to be in a position to shake that off.
In September 2013, it was hoped that the election of new UCI president Brian Cookson – moving from his post as president of British Cycling – would herald a new dawn, with new leadership perhaps shaking up a sport that clearly still contains rotten elements, despite the efforts by many to clean it up. The change in the presidency, with the election held in Florence during the UCI road world championships, was preceded by what proved to be almost a war cry from Cookson who, when the preliminaries had gone on for far too long, decided to cut to the chase: ‘Enough – let’s vote!’
Five days earlier, in the same city, on the start ramp ahead of the team time trial world championship, another Briton – Katie Colclough – was similarly decisive as she put everything into what would be her penultimate race as a professional rider, determined as she was to go out with a bang.
‘I didn’t want to finish thinking I could have gone that bit harder or given that bit more,’ says Colclough, ‘and I knew that if I could tell people I was a world champion, it could make a big difference to the next stage of my life, so I was really committed to it.’
Colclough won, riding with her Specialized-Lululemon teammates, the only world championship event in which riders represent their trade teams rather than their national squads. It was a huge achievement.
So her decision to quit cycling, aged twenty-three and at the top of her game having become world champion, surprised many.
She seemed to leave the sport without much explanation, which was her prerogative, of course. But when I caught up with her during her lunch hour at her new job in London I found she was more than happy to talk about it, and happy, too, to be working in the ‘real world’ now.
‘I’ve never actually had any kind of job before!’ she laughs.
Colclough should have been a poster girl for British Cycling, rising up through its Olympic programmes to become world champion, starting with the Talent Team, having been spotted, aged fifteen, at a local cyclo-cross (racing her mountain bike), before joining the Development programme and then the Academy, combining road and track.
Colclough became junior national points race champion in 1998, and was three times European team-pursuit champion. She then turned professional with HTC-Highroad in 2011, which became Specialized-Lululemon in 2012 – the year in which she also became under-23 national road-race champion.
‘The chance to join HTC was too good an opportunity to turn down,’ Colclough says. ‘It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had, and it was good to step out of the British Cycling bubble for a bit, so I wouldn’t have changed anything. But at the start of 2013, I decided that I couldn’t really see my future in the sport. I could imagine stopping at the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven and still being in the same position as I was, instead of having had another career or another lifestyle.
‘There’s also very little job security, you’re always on the go, you never have a base, you never have a home, and I’d had a lot of bad crashes, too, to be honest: I’d hit my head again at the national championships, which smashed my helmet in two, so I think that was a big factor.’
Colclough nevertheless persevered, and contacted British Cycling coaches Paul Manning and Chris Newton to ask if she could be tested for racing on the track again, having concentrated on the road the previous season.
‘I’m quite a goal-oriented person, so I thought going back to the track to ride pursuits and things might suit me better. But when it came to the night before the first training camp I was due to be at, in July, I just didn’t want to go,’ Colclough says, ‘and I’d never felt that way about the sport before.’
She made a list of the pros and cons of remaining a pro cyclist, and the cons won out. Despite the lack of security, the money side of things never came into it; Colclough says she was getting by OK. ‘There were so many factors, and it got to the point where I just had to ask myself whether this was what I actually wanted: whether I actually wanted to be a professional athlete any more.
‘In the end it was a lifestyle change,’ she explains. ‘I’m enjoying living like a normal person now!’
Where does she see the future of women’s cycling? In Britain, women’s racing appears to be stronger than ever, especially since the introduction of the Women’s Tour of Britain.
‘From a British perspective, it perhaps looks like it, but in France you could turn up to a random race and it would have been cancelled, or there wouldn’t have been any prize money, or none of the junctions would have been blocked off by the police. And nothing had changed in the five years I’d been doing it.’
Directly after retirement, Colclough became an athlete ambassador at the charity Right To Play, before plunging into the world of full-time employment, working for a sports-specific job agency. In May 2014, she announced that she’d joined sports-nutrition brand Science in Sport as their sponsorship and events manager.
On the same day, Colclough’s former national-squad teammate Emma Trott announced her retirement from professional cycling.
Trott – older sister of double Olympic gold-medallist Laura – was racing at the inaugural Women’s Tour, and chose the penultimate stage, which started in her home town of Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, to reveal her decision to retire at the end of the race. The 24-year-old, who raced for the same Boels-Dolmans team as Olympic road-race silver medallist Lizzie Armitstead, told the press at the end of the fourth stage that she wanted ‘a normal life’.
‘I have not said anything until now, but I started thinking about retiring at the end of last year,’ Trott explained. ‘I lost two dear friends in the past year and that changed my perspective.’
Both Trott and Colclough had also been part of a horrific road accident in Belgium in 2010. The pair were with three other members of the national team when they were hit by a car, and were lucky to be alive. Trott broke her collarbone, while Colclough suffered severe concussion. The three other riders in the group were also injured: Lucy Martin suffered a cracked vertebra, Sarah Reynolds hurt her hand and Hannah Mayho broke her arm and leg.
Professional cycling – for men or women – is still a long way from being a normal career choice, and retirement from the sport will now give Trott and Colclough the ‘normal life’ that both cited as their motivation for leaving women’s pro cycling behind them.
It’s a huge shame for the sport to lose riders of such high calibre, but the public and media reaction to the Women’s Tour suggests that women’s cycling is nevertheless on the up.
Leaning on the bonnet of his team car, Sean Yates could be at one of any number of bike races across the world. The fact that he’s in the BMW showroom on Park Lane in London doesn’t matter; this is the launch of the new 2014 NFTO UCI Continental-level team, and Yates, having left Team Sky in 2012, is one of its directeurs sportifs.
‘Cycling is on a massive high in this country at the moment,’ he says. ‘It just seems to be getting bigger and bigger, so it’d be great if, as a team, we could get even more investment and make the step up to Pro Continental, and get out and about racing in Europe.
‘People – big-money people – now want to be involved with cycling, and now, with Team Sky, there’s someone to follow, something to aspire to,’ Yates says. ‘The riders are buzzing: it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and they’ve got to grab it with both hands, and go with it.’
At the other side of the showroom, one of those riders, Russell Downing, resplendent in his red-and-blue-banded white circuit-race national champion’s jersey, holds court.
Downing’s seen it all in his sixteen years as a pro rider.
‘Some years have been better than others,’ he says. ‘Some years it has been a struggle to pay the bills, but I’m still here at thirty-five, so I must have done something right. I’m still enjoying the sport – I’m as keen now as I’ve ever been – but I just wish I was twenty years old again. But then, don’t we all?’ he grins.
He means in order to take even more advantage of the status cycling enjoys in Britain today, but he’s been a huge part of its history, and indeed of making it as popular as it is.
‘My two years with Sky were great,’ he says. ‘To win that stage of the Critérium International with them, and then to ride the Giro d’Italia, was just fantastic. I’d always wanted to do a Grand Tour, and the Giro was the one I wanted.
‘Today, I’m still mentally strong; I don’t think I’ll ever have enough of this sport,’ Downing says. ‘If I wasn’t a pro bike rider, I’d still be riding my bike, so it’s great to still be earning a living from it.’
A month later – Wednesday 12 March 2014 – would have felt incredibly special for Rod Ellingworth. On the same day, two of his former charges from British Cycling’s Olympic Academy – Geraint Thomas, riding for Sky, and Mark Cavendish, now with Omega Pharma-Quick Step, but a Team Sky alumnus – took the race lead in two of Europe’s oldest and most iconic bike races, which run concurrently each spring: Paris–Nice and Tirreno–Adriatico.
Thomas lost his lead in Paris–Nice two days later, and then crashed out on the penultimate stage, but he’d ridden well enough for people to start talking about him as a potential Grand Tour winner one day.
Cavendish, like Thomas, had to hand over his race leader’s jersey at Tirreno after just two days, but the win on the opening stage to give him the lead hadn’t come from a trademark sprint. Instead, it was the result of leading home his Omega Pharma squad in the team time trial – a discipline Cavendish loves even more than sprinting, as it means that the whole team gets to share the joy on the podium, rather than just in the team bus or back at the hotel with a glass of champagne, as they do when they’ve helped him win in a sprint.
Thomas looks set to concentrate on his road career rather than try to take a third Olympic gold medal in the team pursuit, while Cavendish continues to win race after race after race, and has even considered trying to get his first Olympic medal by returning to the track in Rio in 2016.
Other British riders outside of the Team Sky set-up are also finding success: riders of the calibre of Steve Cummings at BMC – a long-time member of the British track and road national squads, and winner of a stage of the Tour of Spain in 2012, and overall Tour of the Mediterranean title in 2014 – and time-trial specialist Alex Dowsett, who rides for the Spanish Movistar outfit, and in 2013 won the time trial on stage eight of the Giro d’Italia.
More evidence of British cycling’s strength in depth are 22-year-old twins Adam and Simon Yates (no relation to Sean) who ride for the Australian Orica-GreenEdge team. Adam opened his account with a well-taken stage win and the overall at the Tour of Turkey in May 2014, while Simon was picked for the team’s 2014 Tour de France squad. Their future is bright; British cycling – and British Cycling with a big ‘C’ – is churning out future champions by the dozen.
Modern bike racing in Britain is in rude health.
In the past, events have come and gone as a result of the stress of organization, the cost and cooperation of policing and the fickle nature of sponsorship. But, almost in their place, sportives have sprung up across the nation – not races, as such, but tough, high-intensity rides that often inspire faster riders to give full competition a try.
At the top level, British Cycling’s nine-event Elite Road Series replaced the Premier Calendar in 2014, and is split into the three-event Spring Cup (including the iconic Lincoln Grand Prix, which will incorporate the national championship road race in 2015) and the six-event Grand Prix Series that runs through summer.
There’s also the 10-round Women’s Road Series, and a six-round circuit series, with burgeoning junior and youth series, too.
Add to that the Tour Series, the Tour of Britain and the new Women’s Tour, plus the resurrected Milk Race, with a men’s and women’s edition.
Biggest of all, in 2014, was the hugely popular start of the Giro d’Italia in Belfast, and the Tour de France Grand Départ in Yorkshire, with a three-day stage race in Yorkshire to make its debut in May 2015 as a legacy of the latter. There’s the new London Velodrome in full swing, and the old London velodrome – Herne Hill – enjoying a renaissance. The new Derby Velodrome is set to open in 2015.
Things have never looked better.
Extraordinarily – in contrast to how things used to be – we’ve now entered an era in which both fans and the media simply expect sprint wins from Cavendish, expect Lizzie Armitstead to be in the mix on the women’s circuit against the very best in the world, expect stage-race wins from Froome and fantastic feats against the clock from Wiggins who, having left Sky, has a team bearing his own name now, and was planning to break the Hour Record in June 2015 ahead of preparing to ride on the track at the Rio Olympics in 2016. On the track, expectation is huge in every discipline: for sprint events and endurance events, for both the men’s and women’s squads.
Getting to such a level has been hard; it’s been a work in progress since James Moore set the bar so high by winning that first bike race in 1868 and winning the first-ever road race the year after. But with British cycling having reached such dizzy heights again, it’s now the target for other nations ready and willing to adopt similar coaching, training and race tactics to take that crown for themselves.
Getting to the top is one thing, but staying there is quite another, as they say.
Stiff upper lip, chaps.