Racing again St his demons
A bitter rivalry with his drunken, violent father drives the Brit set to win the Tour de France
THE mountain pass is so steep that it seems almost vertical; its bends so tortuous they twist your blood. The fathomless ravines take your breath away — or at least what remains of it, at an altitude of more than 6,000ft. By the end of the route you are nauseous, parched and drenched in sweat. And that is just what it feels like to travel a stage of the Tour de France cycle race, as I did this week, in one of the cars supporting the British leader, Bradley Wiggins.
What it must take, then, to slog for 125 miles through the Pyrenees on a bike, jostled by pursuing rivals, with a 90-degree sun searing the nape of your neck, and thousands of delirious spectators spilling dangerously across your path, one dreads to imagine.
From the wild-eyed agony etched on some cyclists’ faces as they inched to the summit of the notorious Col du Tourmalet on Wednesday, Lycra suits sodden, veins bursting from skeletal arms and calves, spinning those slender wheels is as close as sport gets to physical and mental torture.
To complete this brutal, 2,162-mile course, the 198 competitors must push themselves to the very limits for three tortuous weeks, with only two rest days to ease screaming muscles and buttocks so bruised that it can be agony simply to sit in the saddle.
That is why Le Tour is widely accepted to be the most exacting test of human endurance ever invented. And it is why tomorrow when — barring some unimaginable disaster — Wiggins glides along the Champs Elysees in Paris to become the first British winner since the race began in 1903, he will achieve one of the greatest feats in our nation’s sporting history.
To put it into perspective, the 32-yearold Londoner has won three Olympic gold medals on an indoor track, and is expected to increase that tally at the Games next month. Yet as he told me this week, he would gladly swap all his medals for this one glittering prize.
Some readers might find this difficult to understand, for though the Tour attracts a huge global following and is almost a religion in France — a wonderfully chaotic feast of sport whose 20 daily stages are celebrated with parades and gourmet food — it has never captured the imagination of the wider British public.
In truth, until this summer our riders had been regarded as second or third rate in an event traditionally dominated by the French, their European neighbours, and the Americans in the form of seven-times winner Lance Armstrong and, earlier, Greg LeMond.
Before 1962, no Briton had worn the hallowed yellow jersey awarded to the race leader after each stage, even for one single day. The first to do so was Tommy Simpson, the maverick Englishman who died of dehydration as he ascended a mountain five years later, having pumped himself with amphetamines.
Now, the astonishing performance of Wiggins (who has frequently declared his abhorrence for performance-enhancing drugs) has utterly transformed the image of our riders, and not only because of his resilience and skill on a bike.
Disarmingly frank and funny, with a Paul Weller-style haircut (plus lambchop sideburns) and a penchant for Mod clothes and music, which he twangs on his vintage guitar collection, he has brought a rock-star’s appeal that the French adore.
Yet he has also won their hearts with his chivalry on the road — a value much cherished in a sport whose competitors routinely hand their water-bottles to thirsty rivals — and the French press call him ‘Le Gentleman Wiggins’.
HIS reputation for fair play was sealed when a saboteur sprinkled tacks across the road once day this week. Realising they had punctured a close rival’s tyre, Wiggins — as race leader — signalled for the entire peloton, or bunch of riders, to slow down so that no one gained an advantage.
‘No one wants to benefit from other people’s misfortunes,’ he shrugged when quizzed about it later. ‘And I think that’s the same in life. We all respect each other in this bike race: the first competitor tries as hard as the last.’
That was typical Wiggins, as was his response when asked how he felt to be in the spotlight. ‘ It’s nice to be recognised for achieving something in life — because so much of British culture is about being famous for not achieving anything.’
As a treble Olympic champion, Wiggins was already a star in his field, and his team, Sky Pro Cycling, reputedly paid him around £1.3 million to spearhead their assault on the Tour.
After his expected epoch-making triumph tomorrow, however, his earthy charisma will turn him into a hugely marketable international sporting celebrity.
Already there is talk of a Chariots Of Fire style film charting a British team’s audacious and brilliantly-planned raid on this last unconquered bastion of sport, with Wiggins cast in the central role. It would certainly have a compelling sub-plot, built around his rivalry with his brutal, drug-abusing father. Garry Wiggins was a hard- drinking, brawling Australian professional track cyclist who left his first wife and baby daughter ( Wiggins’s half- sister Shannon) at 22 to make his way on the European circuit.
Whilst racing in West London he met Bradley’s mother, Linda, then just 17 and a keen cycling spectator, and soon whisked her off to Belgium, then a hotbed of track racing.
They married, and Wiggins was born in Ghent, in April 1980. But his father’s drinking became heavier and, like Tommy Simpson, he swallowed fistfuls of amphetamines to boost his performance.
As a side-line, he also sold pills to other riders, once smuggling a consignment from Australia to Belgium concealed in baby Bradley’s nappy.
He frequently hit Linda and, when Bradley was two, he abandoned them for a Dusseldorf barmaid. They were forced to return to London, moving into a flat with his maternal grandparents, George and Maureen. His mother worked as a clerk to pay for his upkeep.
AS he recalled in his poignant autobiography, In Pursuit Of Glory, Wiggins had little interest in school, and in his teens began stealing money from the teachers’ common room. ‘I was on a bit of a knife-edge at the time and I could have tipped over the wrong way and become a right little thug,’ he wrote. His saving grace was sport. Tall and lean, he was a good allrounder and flirted with the idea of becoming a football goalkeeper.
But when the schoolboy turned on the TV to see Chris Boardman win gold in the 4km pursuit at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and his mother explained that this had been his father’s best event, he became hooked on cycling.
Joining a local club, he discovered he had inherited his father’s ‘cycling DNA’ as he puts it. Victory followed victory and he was chosen for the British junior team.
After leaving school soon as possible, Wiggins worked briefly as a trainee carpenter, then took a course in business studies at a London college, but in 1997 was ‘chucked off the course’ for taking a week off to compete for Britain in Denmark.
His mother apart, Wiggins was closest to his grandfather (who died while Bradley was riding in the Tour de France two years ago) and he did not meet his father again until he was 18.
Then, hearing that his son was training in Australia, Garry Wiggins arranged a reunion with Bradley and his two half-sisters. Wiggins Senior was as boorish as ever, and for Bradley it was an excruciating experience. But matters worsened when his father sought him out again the following year, after he returned to win bronze in the Sydney Olympics.
To impress his friends, Garry persuaded Bradley to enter a race at his local club and cadged beer money from him. When his son ‘only’ came second, however, his drunken father berated him in the bar, claiming he had been the better cyclist.
Thereafter Bradley decided to have nothing more to do with the man who ‘broke my heart’.
Three years ago he was woken at his West Lancashire home with the news that his 55-year-old father had been found dead in the street at 7am, in the small New South Wales town where he lived. Though police have never established how he was killed, Wiggins says his father had been beaten up.
The low-rent home where he had lived alone in his last days was a pigsty. There was just one tidy corner — where he kept photographs and newspaper clippings chronicling his son’s career.
Was Wiggins’s ruthless progress this week spurred by his desire to impress the father who abandoned him? Is he still fighting to prove himself a superior rider?
It’s intriguing to learn that, as Wiggins admits, his early career, though brilliant when he peaked, was marred by bouts of such heavy boozing that he feared his
father had also handed down his ‘drinking genes’.
He was the worse for wear when he met his wife, Cath, in a Manchester club, he says, and his bingeing continued even after they settled down and had two adored children, Ben and Isabella.
Though he had long harboured a romantic image of switching from the indoor track to win the Tour de France — a quantum leap equivalent to an athletics sprinter beating the world’s elite marathon runners — he feared he might never fulfil his potential.
He credits several mentors with ensuring he did so, among them his boyhood hero Chris Boardman, who ruthlessly transformed Wiggins’s training programme, and Dave Brailsford, British Cycling’s meticulous performance director and the boss of Team Sky.
The sheer physical demands of the race call for eye-watering levels of training — which have seen Wiggins lose around 2st in the past couple of years.
For any ordinary mortal, it is impossible to countenance the iron will and single-minded dedication it takes to train the body to power up mountains day after day. ‘Sacrifice’ is the word Wiggins and his ilk most often use.
Throughout the winter, he drags himself out of bed before dawn and pedals for hour upon hour along the narrow lanes near his Lancashire home; when the weather is too bad, he puts his bike on rollers in his garden shed and simply pounds away inside.
The loneliness of the long-distance runner is nothing compared to that of the long-distance cyclist.
When he’s competing in the Tour, Wiggins has a surrogate family of riders whose sole job it is to support him on the road. No wonder Wiggins was lavish in his praise for his fellow Team Sky riders and 20- strong back-up staff. Rightly so, for difficult as it is for the casual observer to fathom, long-distance cycle racing is a team sport.
As I saw while riding in the team’s support Jaguar on Thursday — complete with TV monitors and short-wave radio to keep in touch with the riders — the tactics are complex. Suffice it to say that the role of the other riders — not least the superb Chris Froome who could yet make it a British one-two — is to do everything in their power to bring home their leader (Wiggins) in the fastest time, and their tasks range from acting as a shield against the wind to setting the pace and discreetly blocking the path of an advancing opponent.
The science behind Wiggins’s success is similarly astounding, Team Sky having rightly deduced that a series of small improvements when taken together can make a crucial difference.
The nerve-centre of their operation is the team bus — customised at a cost of £700,000 — which I was given rare access to this week. From the outside it appears much like any other; inside, you marvel at the sheer ingenuity and attention to detail. The original 50-odd seats have been stripped out and replaced with just nine — one for each rider — as comfortable and spacious as those of a first-class airline cabin.
Wiggins always sits front-right, keeping his race number, 101, in a side compartment, with the three big, stuffed lions awarded by one of his sponsors for company. Like the others in the team, he will ‘zone-out’ after a punishing ride by listening to music and watching films on a laptop.
It all contributes to an astonishing leap forward for Bradley Wiggins which should see him ascend the podium in Paris tomorrow, cheered by hundreds of thousands of ungrudging French fans and framed by the Arc de Triomphe. For this singular character, the adrenaline rush will be more potent than the vintage champagne drenching his yellow jersey.
Rightly so, for the notion that a mere Briton could win the legendary Tour was once as laughable as that of a French cricket team beating England at Lord’s. But against all odds, Le Gentleman Wiggins is making it a reality.