Bradley Wiggins shone at the 2009 Tour de France. He reached a new level, performing as Christian Vande Velde had done the year before. But, unlike Christian, Brad was supported through the race by a brilliant team.
Brad’s performance a few weeks earlier at the Giro d’Italia had hinted that he might perform well in the mountain stages of the Tour, but we didn’t expect him to be one of the best. He was definitely the star of the show, but he couldn’t have done it without Christian and the team.
As Brad blossomed and the Tour went on, Christian reverted back to his old role of the loyal lieutenant. Christian shared his years of experience with Brad, telling him everything he’d learned the previous year, when he’d found himself in exactly the same position.
In fact, it was amazing Christian was even riding in the Tour that year. He’d crashed badly in the Giro, breaking bones in his back and ribs, and had only been on his bike for three weeks before the Tour started. Under those circumstances, Christian’s seventh place finish overall, with little training and despite being still injured, was even more impressive than Brad’s fourth place.
My job at the Tour was to work for Christian and Brad and to protect their place in the classification. I made sure that they were always in the best positions for the most critical moments in the race. As a team, our collective performance was phenomenal. We almost won the coveted team time trial, which, considering that the majority of the team had been struggling after only 8 of the 38 kilometers, was remarkable.
Brad, Christian, Dave Zabriskie, and I rode the last 30 kilometers on our own, with Ryder Hesjedal clinging on for dear life as our fifth man. That was all-important as the collective time is taken on the fifth member of the team to cross the finish line.
July 2009, Tour de France. Team meeting in the back of the bus, with Whitey giving his morning briefing; the fatigue and stress show on all our faces.
It was a close thing, and we narrowly missed out. The Astana team of Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador only beat us by eighteen seconds—and that was with their nine-man team intact for the whole stage.
On the stage to Verbier, we again demonstrated collective discipline and power, leading the peloton to the bottom of the climb and supporting Brad with a fantastic lead-out on the lower slopes, so that when the inevitable Contador acceleration came, he was in the best possible position.
But then I’d never been on a team that rode with the same discipline and motivation as we did in that Tour. Every day we rode our hearts out, and we were finally rewarded with second place in the overall team classification. In only our second year in existence, we were one of the strongest and most organized teams in the world. It was incongruous, given our happy-go-lucky, relaxed, “whatever” reputation.
On the Tour’s final stage, we had planned to set up our sprinter Tyler Farrar, by leading out the sprint on the Champs-Élysées. To ensure that we were as quick as possible, Tyler, Brad, Zab—Dave Zabriskie—and I wore our time trial speed suits and brought out our fastest, lightest wheels, even though we had to ride the cobblestones of the Champs. Wearing speed suits, designed to be skintight and aerodynamic, in a normal road stage wasn’t the done thing, but then we were so keen to support Tyler that we didn’t care if the other riders laughed at us.
We wore our normal race jerseys over the top, thinking that would hide our plan. Zab had even gone so far as to wear two sets of race numbers, one set on the faux jersey he was wearing over the top of the speed suit, the other on the speed suit itself. But, unwittingly, he blew our cover, pinning the race numbers so low on his speed suit that, once he was on the bike, all four numbers were perfectly visible.
Then, rather than concealing our cunning plan, Zab only drew attention to himself. As the race rolled away from the start area, he announced that he needed to do a number two—while wearing a speed suit in the peloton.
Zab takes a keen interest in bodily functions. He even owns his own colonic irrigation machine back in the States. When his house was broken into, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was one of the few items that the thieves left behind. He’s also got an eccentric sense of humor. Sometimes I think his deadpan, desert-dry wit would suit a Coen brothers film.
This, after all, is the man who has his own lubrication company, DZnuts, pronounced Deez Nuts. He even had “Official Applicator” T-shirts made (“For the ladies,” he said). He’s also a little OCD when it comes to cleanliness, so there was little chance of his pooing “wild.” And as he didn’t have his habitual baby wipes, I couldn’t foresee a happy ending.
Taking a dump is not the easiest thing to do while racing in the Tour de France, but it’s particularly inconvenient when wearing a race jersey over a full-body, super-tight, aerodynamic speed suit. Thankfully, his need arose during the promenade section of the stage, as the peloton rolled gently through little villages in the countryside outside Paris.
As I watched his anxiety grow, I couldn’t contain myself.
“Zab, you’re screwed,” I guffawed. “You’ll lose minutes just undressing …”
“I know, goddammit,” he snapped. “I gotta make a plan.” He was clearly using all his mental energy to restrain the turtle’s head.
I was in hysterics as I rejoined the bunch. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of him skidding to a halt outside an Indian restaurant and running through the door, shouting in alarm, much to the complete bafflement of those standing around on the pavement, who’d come to applaud the heroes of the Tour.
About twenty minutes later, he was back in the bunch, riding alongside me, filling me in on the grisly details. He’d run into the restaurant shouting, “TOILET?! EMERGENCY!” while simultaneously struggling out of his speed suit.
Moments later, he’d strolled back through the dining room to his bike, bidding onlookers a cheery good-bye, while thanking them—“Mercyyy, Mercyyyy”—in his deep, Utah drawl.
Our sprint lead-out for Tyler on the Champs-Élysées went almost perfectly, as the whole team did their job—except Brad.
One by one, we took a huge turn at the front, keeping the pace as high as we could to prevent attacks, so preparing the way for Tyler’s sprint. Christian and I led the peloton into the final kilometer, and when I peeled off, expecting Brad to be in his designated position to set up Tyler’s finishing sprint, he was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Ty’s final lead-out man, Julian Dean, had to make double the effort. But without Brad taking his turn, Julian was faced with too far to go, effectively ruining Tyler’s chances in the sprint.
I was furious. It was the one day that Brad was asked to give something back to the team, after we’d given him everything for three weeks. Yet I felt he hadn’t even tried and had remained about eighty places back in the middle of the bunch, without even telling us he wasn’t going to help.
We felt let down by him. We’d done so much to help him, yet he couldn’t even make this final gesture of camaraderie on the last day. He was the polar opposite to Christian, who was always part of the team, whether leading or helping. To me, it was thoughtless of Brad that he did not see the symbolic nature of what he’d been asked to do. It was an omen of things to come over the next few months.
For the first time in my career, I had ridden all three Grand Tours—the Giro, the Tour, and the Vuelta. After I won the final time trial in the Vuelta—my fifty-sixth Grand Tour stage of that year—I headed back to Girona.
Brad had made Girona a second home, spending periods training and living there. In the two months since the Tour had ended, we’d had no contact, but as we’d roomed together for most of the Tour and I’d captained the team that had taken him to his Tour success, I’d been looking forward to meeting up, for lunch or dinner, and celebrating his success.
But I didn’t hear from him. It seemed he had already forgotten the team. All we heard were rumors of his leaving Slipstream and moving to SKY, who were desperate to sign him after his Tour performance. In fact, Brad had another year on his contract, but this didn’t seem to be an obstacle to Brad, Dave Brailsford, or to the people at SKY.
I knew the rumors about Brad and SKY were well founded. During the first rest day of that summer’s Tour, we were sharing a room and Brad had disappeared for a few hours. When he got back, I asked him where he’d been. He told me the truth—he’d been meeting with Dave Brailsford, who wanted him to break his contract and sign him to SKY for the following year.
What he told me didn’t affect our state of mind because we had a professional job to do, and we did it. But I also expected that, whatever the final outcome of his negotiations, Brad would still respect us as teammates and friends.
During that year’s World Road Championships, the speculation continued. In an interview with the BBC, Brad fueled the intrigue even further when he used a football analogy to explain his perception of the difference between Slipstream and SKY.
“It’s a bit like trying to win the Champion’s League,” he said. “You need to be at Manchester United and I’m playing for Wigan.” Brad subsequently said it was a wrench for him to leave Garmin, and too good an opportunity to turn down to work with David Brailsford. It seemed to me, though, that he had no feeling for what we’d achieved as a team. It also ensured that Jonathan and I hardened our hearts toward him.
After he’d made that hurtful comment, we looked forward to watching him fail. We knew what he was capable of as a rider, and we also knew that, in the 2009 Tour, the stars had aligned perfectly for him.
I actually found what he said quite funny. He was digging himself a hole. We were certain that he’d never be on the podium at the Tour, which made it a little easier to hear all his big talk. As we listened to him, Christian and I just shook our heads in amazement.
Nonetheless, I took the whole affair badly. JV and I had wanted to keep Brad—I had agreed to a large pay cut on my 2010 contract so that we could offer a new deal to Brad that came closer to matching what SKY had offered him—and this meant that I became more personally invested in the whole saga. Inevitably, Brad eventually left. He didn’t thank us, nor did we feel we were given the respect we were due. I have found it hard to forgive him.
—
I finished paying off my debts in 2009. Nicole and I had been living off my IVA allowance for long enough to have developed a sensible attitude toward money. I’d broken free from the status-based attitude within the professional sporting world—our lifestyle didn’t match what I earned or my position within cycling—and no longer suffering from “status anxiety” was liberating.
Nicole and I got married that autumn. It was a magical day that exceeded our hopes and expectations. The service was in the church in the village where Nicole had grown up, and friends and family came from all over the world. Stuey, Whitey, Ruggero, and Nicole’s brother Dom were my ushers, Harry was my best man.
Nicole looked stunning and was so wonderfully happy. I would live that day over and over again simply to see everybody I love so happy. In my speech, I thanked everybody for coming and then talked of “a life less ordinary.”
Then I spoke about my parents. “I’ve not been the easiest son. I know I’ve brought you as much heartache as I have joy, but you’ve been wonderful and I thank you, Mum, Pater-san, for making me who I am.”
I thanked Nicole’s mum and dad, Nigel and Desirée—Desirée who had met me in Mallorca when I had been there with the Major, and who, with premonitory powers, promptly telephoned Nicole to tell her she’d found the right man for her—and then spoke about Frances.
“I hope that if Nicole and I are lucky enough to have children, they will have the good fortune to love each other as much as we do, because a life without my sister would have been so bloody dull,” I said.
Nicole had abstained from having bridesmaids, so I had been unable to resist the opportunity to dress some of cycling’s best known names in skirts, with the ushers all sporting kilts.
“It has been an ongoing debate between Stuey and Whitey whether they would be going full Scottish today,” I said, while crediting Nicole for allowing such a lethal combination of gentlemen to have such important roles. “No doubt we will find out before the night is over.”
—
Now that my debts were paid off, Nicole and I could finally start thinking of getting a mortgage and moving forward. We’d done our research over the previous two years; we knew the market and what we wanted, and we had found a house near Girona, close to where we were already living, that fitted the bill. We had a concrete future plan, and life was sweet.
One lunchtime, after I’d got back from training, I was making something for us both to eat when the doorbell rang. There were a couple of letters for me to sign for, one of which was from the Spanish tax office. I presumed it was the receipt for my second payment of 2008 tax, but it was a bill, which puzzled me. I opened it, glanced down, and saw an unfathomable, terrifying number. It didn’t make sense.
I felt physically sick. I’d paid everything back. I looked again. I had a week to pay it all or everything would be seized. In an instant, everything had changed, and I was back in my nightmare of paranoia and hopelessness.
“Calm down,” I told myself. “This is a mistake.”
Then I looked closer. The French tax office had taken advantage of a very new EU law that allowed them to make fresh demands through the Spanish tax authorities.
I was catapulted back in time, reminded of something long forgotten, of very dark places and even darker feelings. The amount they were demanding was within €500 of the asking price for the house we’d found.
The next week was horrible. It was both heartbreaking and terrifying telling Nicole. There were sleepless nights and tearful days. Only three months after concluding five years of paying for my earlier mistakes, our future had been torn from us. We deserved far more. I felt sad for Nicole and fearful that, after living in blissful ignorance, dreaming of a house, kids, and a secure future, I had let her down.
I had to deal with the problems quickly, though, and so went to work with seven different accountants in three different countries. I had already spent £200,000 on accountancy fees.
I transferred our money out of Spain and came to terms with the fact that buying a house and building a life there was no longer an option, as long as the French were still after me. I knew that the tax authorities in France would happily battle for years and that the only place I was protected legally was the UK, due to the IVA that had been agreed in 2005. My Spanish accountant managed to stop the seizure, at the death, but the French clerk in charge of my dossier was on holiday during the whole manic week.
I needed perspective, though, and it came from Fran. She sent me a text message, a week after the arrival of the letter, that reminded me of where I’d come from. I’d been in a much worse place—being reminded of how sad I’d been in Biarritz allowed me to put things in perspective.
We sat on those steps, on that beach, and we promised we’d never be there again.
We spoke about a fast-forward button, and how, in that horrible time, being able to press it and see what the future held would be both scary and comforting.
Well, imagine if we’d had one and pressed it.
You’d have seen that in five years you’d have met and married a beautiful woman, had your bike racing back, and would be held in higher esteem by your peers and the wider world than you ever were.
You wouldn’t have believed it.
Breathe deep. Hang on. And rage, rage, rage, against those who try to break you.
You beat them once. YOU WILL BEAT THEM AGAIN.
I’d felt like giving up when I’d received that letter from the tax authorities. France’s message reminded me who I was, what I’d been through, and it helped me to stop feeling sorry for myself.
I had lived a short time without a future, completely lost—never alone, but very lost. We say in bad times that it’s happening for a reason, perhaps—because it makes us feel better—to give times of strife a higher purpose, even if we find it hard to believe.
Nicole and I were awoken to what we had and where we’d come from. We stopped living in the future. We already lived a wonderful life—we didn’t need anything else. It was time to slow everything down and live in the moment. France was right, I thought—“Fuck ’em …”
I knew that I had paid my debts, that it was unjustified to demand more of me. I could beat them, and I didn’t care how long it took. I wasn’t going to give up or run away. The past is as important as the future, but we live only in the here and now. I hadn’t appreciated that until I’d had my dreams almost wrenched away from me once again.
Eventually, we did win. The claim for further tax payments was dropped.
—
During the off-season, all that remains of Girona’s multinational pro-cycling fraternity are Canadian rider Michael Barry and me. We’re the seasoned campaigners, the veterans.
In the past, this period, leading up to Christmas, had always been the most trying part of the year for me. Unfit, battling bad weather and loneliness, the major races seeming a world away, I never enjoyed riding in winter, putting up with it only because I had to. But Michael and I had spent the previous two winters training together, “getting the miles in,” as they say.
As we rode, we got to know each other even better. I’d never considered myself anything other than a racing cyclist; I was a thoroughbred, baffled by how or why people rode for fun, for relaxation, or simply to escape. Riding with Michael was different. He introduced me to an ideal that I’d never previously grasped: cycling for the sake of cycling—which, in fact, I’d experienced briefly when I’d first got back on the bike after being banned.
We spent hundreds of hours riding around Catalunya, Michael regaling me with anecdote after anecdote. After thousands of kilometers together, he’d got in the habit of starting each story with: “If I’ve told you this before, stop me.” But the stories are just as entertaining the third, fourth or fifth time, and he spends 90 percent of the time talking, so it seems fair to allow for some repetition.
The Catalunyan landscape is sublime at times, and, on our long winter rides, Michael and I experienced this more than most. Now I’m older, there’s no longer a direct correlation between my fitness and enjoyment on the bike. I didn’t really care anymore if we had to go slow because we couldn’t go fast. We’d stop at times and take photos; we had tried and tested enough cafés to whittle them down to particularly trusted regulars; we had mountains we’d climb simply to get to the top, and routes to complement the accompanying weather. Out on the road, we’d talk and talk. It was fun.
Michael comes from a cycling background. His father, Mike, is originally from London, where he was immersed in the post-war cycling club scene—a scene that was social, not competitive, with tea and toast stops de rigueur. Mike Barry migrated to Toronto in the 1960s and eventually became a frame builder, developing his own Mariposa-branded bikes. A traditionalist through and through, Mike’s bikes are from another time and place.
This was the cycling world that Michael knew and loved. He’d grown up around bikes and most of his friends and his father’s friends were cyclists. It was a world about as far away from my independent pure racing stock as could be imagined. I became fascinated with the idea of a cycling club run along those lines.
That growing fascination led me to ask why we couldn’t re-create that club ethos ourselves—I now wanted to be part of it, and if it didn’t exist then why not create it? That was how Velo Club Rocacorba, our own social cycling club, was born. Rocacorba is the nearest mountain to Girona and is a climb often used by pros for training and testing, so it seemed appropriate we should call our club after it.
Michael and I became passionate about the idea. We would meet in a Girona café to brainstorm with a sketchpad and notebook. Over time, we created the look and a basic manifesto for the club. I was to be president of Velo Club Rocacorba, Michael vice president, and we invited carefully selected like-minded individuals to join us. Cycling was no longer just my job—it was my passion again. I was in a place in my life that I had never envisaged.
October 2010, Girona. Velo Club Rocacorba’s first annual general meeting.
We held our inaugural Velo Club Rocacorba dinner a few nights after I had received the traumatic letter from the tax office. It made me appreciate even more how lucky I was to be able to do such frivolous nonsensical things. Our first meeting, celebrated with a brilliant dinner at the renowned Can Roca restaurant, was a great success. The next day everybody from the club climbed Rocacorba.
—
I started my 2010 racing season with the fearless attitude of a neo-pro. I wanted to enjoy being a professional cyclist while my body could still carry me through the biggest, toughest races—I didn’t care about goals or expectations anymore; I was just determined to race my heart out.
In fact, I’d started every race since my comeback with that mind-set, but without really understanding why. Now I knew. Now I lived in the moment when I raced, not caring or worrying about anything beyond, or before, the start and finish lines. It was the final lesson for me to take from all of my trials and tribulations.
After racing in Paris–Nice and a brief trip back to Malta for the first time since my birth, I went to the Classics, winning the Three Days of De Panne, considered to be one of the hardest and most dangerous races on the calendar. De Panne has special resonance for me: it was the scene of one of my very first professional wins, thirteen years earlier, and it was at De Panne that I’d asked Matt White to join Slipstream as a directeur. Appropriately, Whitey was directing as I clinched overall victory.
Then, fueled by my new attitude, I raced in the Tour of Flanders, deemed one of the most brutal one-day races and the domain of specialists and Classics veterans. When Stuey saw me on the start line in Bruges, he was genuinely shocked.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Dave?” he asked in amazement.
“Fancied a change.” I shrugged. “Something new, you know—thought I’d come and have a play with you boys.”
I was a naïf in these cobbled Classics, so there was no way I could be taken seriously. I decided just to have a laugh about it. Although I’d just won De Panne, I decided the best way to play it was that I wasn’t serious, more inquisitive.
“After fourteen years …?!” Stuey exclaimed. “Fuckin’ ’ell, Dave! I worry about you …!”
Starting Flanders turned out to be a good idea, because 250 kilometers later, I was off the front with Belgian champion Philippe Gilbert chasing Fabian Cancellera and Tom Boonen, all three Classics specialists. I don’t think Stuey had expected that, but then neither had I.
Flanders is a wild event, deeply embedded in the Belgian sporting psyche and generating crowds similar to a Tour de France mountain stage. The main difference is that everybody is there to watch the race and to cheer their favorites on, unlike the Tour, when people often wander out from a nearby campsite, simply to have a picnic and to catch random crap tossed from the publicity caravan.
I was a little out of my depth, and my inexperience cost me dearly, because Flanders is like no other race we tackle. Not only do you have to be the strongest rider, but you also have to be the best bike handler, to know the roads like the back of your hand, and to be fearless when it comes to positioning yourself in the frenzied peloton.
I was in my element, but I had been too far back in the peloton when the attacks came, at one point finding myself walking up one of the many cobbled climbs. By the time I’d got back to the front, Cancellara and Boonen were long gone. Yet I was so euphoric just to have fought my way back up there that I attacked. Gilbert bridged up to me and then we were off, flogging ourselves in pursuit of the two leaders.
I wasn’t in the habit of racing close to 270 kilometers, especially in one of the most difficult races that exists, so when we reached the bottom of the penultimate and legendary cobbled climb, the Muur de Grammont, my lights dimmed, flickered, and then finally, as they say, went out.
I crawled up the Grammont “wall.” But I was still one of the first on the road and on my own, an experience very few pros ever have on that hill. I can’t really remember it, as I was having an out-of-body experience at the time, but I know it happened because I’ve seen a photo.
I was caught with 2 kilometers remaining, but recovered enough to lead out Tyler Farrar for the group sprint. I was empty when I crossed the line, rolling to a stop and sitting down against the barriers, just beyond the finish, trying to figure out what had just happened. Euphoric at winning the bunch sprint, Ty came and found me.
“Holy shit, Dave, WE ROCK! The Dave and Ty Show save the day!” he said exuberantly. “That lead-out was perfect, man. Thank God you were there.”
Finally, taking in the state I was in, he paused. “Er, you okay …?” he asked.
“I’m so fucked, Ty,” I said. “Really, I don’t think I’ve ever been this fucked. I was off the front with Gilbert, then, like a junior, I blew. They only caught me with 2 kilometers to go.” I put my head back in my hands.
Tyler stared at me. “NO WAY!”
Now I knew he was impressed.
