WHY BRADLEY WIGGINS IS OUR BEST EVER
MARTIN SAMUEL
EVER. It certainly is a big word. Just the two syllables but huge in sport. Hugely misused, too. The best ever, the first ever. That last word is superfluous. We mean the best, we mean the first. Yet when Bradley Wiggins made his way up the Champs-elysees yesterday, each pumping limb its own little revolution, ever has never sounded more appropriate.
Bradley Wiggins is the first British winner of the Tour de France. Ever. Bradley Wiggins is the greatest British cyclist. Ever. Bradley Wiggins may well be the finest British sportsman. Ever.
These are incredibly unlikely words to be writing. The sentences feel as if they should end, not with mundane little full stops or even a bold exclamation mark, but punctuation of their own. A symbol that expresses our collective surprise, pronounced with the same breathy wonder as an open-mouthed WOW.
We get so used to the tumbling of records, the shifting of milestones in sport, that when a genuine jaw-dropping accomplishment comes along, we are by comparison strangely unmoved. We are so used to Super Sundays and matches of the century and casual hyperbole — ‘Could this be another Duel in the Sun?’ asked a quivering voice on 5 Live on Friday night, comparing the epic meeting of Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson at Turnberry, in 1977, with Brandt Snedeker versus Adam Scott — that when Wiggins scorches through virgin territory for a British rider, words almost fail us.
This is the 99th edition of the Tour de France, yet there has been no winner quite like Le Gentleman.
Cynics snipe that this is not a vintage year for the Tour but Wiggins is most certainly a rider of vintage potential. He is a three- time Olympic champion in the velodrome who has converted that excellence to mountainous, cross-country terrains, road racing and explosive time trials.
The greats of the sport such as Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Wiggins’s boyhood poster hero Miguel Indurain (below) were all outstanding track cyclists, too, but none emulated Wiggins’s success in, for instance, the individual pursuit. This is renaissance work, a movement across cycling’s cultures. Wiggins needs multiple Tour wins to be placed among the greatest names of the event, but is he among the greats of the sport? For sure.
His is an achievement that spans centuries and cannot be attributed to mere advances in training or technology. The first Tour de France was held in 1903 and the first British entrants rode in 1937. Since 1956, there have been only two Tours that have not contained a British presence. Some were lone riders, operating without the protection of a team, but it is not as if Wiggins is the first winner from these shores because no other blighter was interested.
NOR is he winning an event in its infancy. This is not like football where the Premier League and Champions League have become so powerful, it is as if history started just 20 years ago.
Standards in other sports have been skewed by advances in travel and technology. Cricketers play more matches and therefore amass more runs, science — legal and not — has invaded the running track and swimming pool. And the velodrome, obviously.
Nobody would claim Wiggins’s triumph comes without technical support and team orders, or that professional cycling in the 21st century is not vastly different to the sport pursued by Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour in 1903. Yet there remains purity in Wiggins’s achievement. There have been 99 editions of the Tour and 56 of them have contained British riders, and he is the first to the podium.
And purity is not a word that has been greatly associated with road cycling for several decades now. Yet as much as one can ever know with complete certainty, Wiggins is straight. More than this, in a sport tainted by nefarious instincts, he has earned the nickname Le Gentleman because of his courteous conduct in letting the riders reassemble before starting again, when the race was disrupted by tacks thrown in the road.
So, taking it all into consideration, this is one of the greatest achievements in British sport, if not its summit. Its uniqueness, the making of history, the sheer physicality of the challenge, the decency of the champion, puts Wiggins up there.
Sir Chris Hoy placed him higher even than Sir Steve Redgrave, and he may have a case. Put it like this: if Danny Boyle was reshooting his finale for the Olympic ceremony right now, so that Wiggins rode up a ramp to light the flame, it would not be his worst day’s work. All eyes were on Andy Murray at Wimbledon on July 8 but even had he beaten Roger Federer in the men’s singles final, it could be argued that this landmark would be eclipsed by Wiggins now. Even British tennis has Fred Perry as a distant male role model. Wiggins has noone. No inspirational figure, no individual to emulate, not even his cyclist father considering their fractured relationship. He was part of a team on Tour, yet has very much travelled alone: and his journey did not start in Liege, Belgium, on June 30. It began in Kilburn.
Wiggins was born in Ghent, Belgium, but raised in north London. This is where he has much in common with Murray. For just as a man does not rally his way to Centre Court from Dunblane, Scotland, he does not cycle to the Champs-Elysees from London W9 at the point where Kilburn High Road becomes Maida Vale.
Like Murray, Wiggins must have been phenomenally driven, brutally single-minded and self-sacrificing. There are nine mountain stages in the 2012 Tour. For those that are unfamiliar with Kilburn High Road, crampons are not required.
Wiggins’s acceptance as a Tour cyclist of substance finds its truest expression in the ‘Wiggo le Froggy’ headline to be found in L’Equipe this weekend. They have adopted him, just as Ellen MacArthur was a household name across La Manche long before she was lauded in Britain.
The French, steeped in cycling history in a way we simply are not, know the journey Wiggins has undertaken to this point. They see beyond the Tour’s darkness. It is still too new for us. To the average bloke from Kilburn — one that did not idolise Indurain as his mates did Gary Lineker — the Tour means
ARSENAL want £30million for Robin van Persie but will no doubt sell anyway if they do not get it. The moment RVP stayed home from the club tour of Asia, he was as good as gone; it now only depends on whether Arsenal can persuade the Manchester clubs to enter a bidding war. Even if they do not, Van Persie will depart: a club do not remove a player from their pre-season preparations if they believe there is any chance he will kick a ball for them on August 18.
drugs and dishonour. On the continent, they understand that beyond the scandal are some quite outstanding individuals — and that Britain has one; more than one, in fact, considering Wiggins’s teammates at Team Sky include Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome. So set aside the cynical caveats. The Tour has not been 98 years of sheer brilliance and then that time the British bloke won it. ‘I’m not some s*** rider who has come from nowhere,’ snapped Wiggins in response to a question about his pedigree.
He is not on stabilisers here. There will have been stronger fields, but weaker too, in almost a century of competition. Maybe this is not a peak Tour but it was not the greatest Australian cricket team that failed to regain the Ashes on home soil in 2011, and the Brazilian football team of 1970 were considerably superior to the Brazil of 1966. A man can only beat that day’s opponent. Even if it was just Wiggins versus Froome versus Cavendish it would still be some race to win.
As for drugs, Wiggins cannot be held responsible for the fact others have cheated. Dave Brailsford, Team Sky’s general manager, acknowledged there is a reputational risk in his team’s continued employment of Geert Leinders, the doctor used by Rabobank when the Dutch team were embroiled in a doping scandal between 2007 and 2009.
Yet he also said he would stake his life on Team Sky being honest. So would the majority of people. Leinders’s future with the team requires examination, but it is Wiggins’s misfortune to be clean in a dirty sport. Considering cycling’s recent history the questions are understandable, but so is Wiggins’s frustration that he cannot enjoy his moment without them.
Still, as he powered along the Champs-Elysees yesterday, he had every right to embrace a unique outpouring of goodwill and admiration for a British rider in what has remained, until now, a resolutely foreign environment. Wiggins was the best road cyclist of 2012 and in one corner of the globe, at least, he was simply the best ever.
And if that is tautological, who cares? For once it was also, without need for hyperbole or exaggeration, a pure truth.