Missing, however, is the British star. There is no Cavendish, no Wiggins. Brailsford has given up on Cavendish – Bob Stapleton is wealthy enough and certainly determined enough not to budge in his commitment to keep Cavendish for the remaining two years of the contract he signed in July 2008. But Wiggins is a different case. He could still be available at a price, though the one recently mentioned by Vaughters seems calculated to deter, or to increase the offer. ‘You’re risking your title sponsorship if you lose your best GC rider,’ said Vaughters. Pressed to put a value on Wiggins, he added: ‘Really, you look at the real value, it is probably in line with $15m.’ That’s a lot of Swiss chocolate.
As he sits down to sign those contracts in Lugano, Brailsford seems unconcerned. He is optimistic and ebullient. ‘There are going to be teething problems,’ he does concede. ‘If it was NASA there’d be teething problems.
‘My tendency in a new project is to get involved, to be very hands on, so I have to pull back – and go and speak to Steve Peters,’ he continues. ‘I want the people involved, the riders and the staff, to feel that they own a part of this, that it’s their adventure; that everyone is there to contribute to the performances of others, so everyone has to feel ownership.
‘It’s the same as the model at British Cycling. We – the coaching and support staff – are the minions. We’re there to help the riders. It’s all about the riders. They’re the kings and queens of their world.’
THE BEST SPORTS TEAM IN THE WORLD
‘You can’t teach experience.’
Scott Sunderland
Kilmarnock, 31 October 2009
With one hand, Bradley Wiggins jabs a finger accusingly. With the other, he is holding a bottle of red wine. A straw pokes out the neck of the bottle, bobbing like a cork in a choppy ocean. Wiggins takes a swig (ignoring the straw), then lifts his arm and jabs his finger again.
‘You lot just wanna see me fail! You wanna see me fall flat on my face!’ he says, addressing a small group of journalists. He is smiling. Joking. Half-joking. Maybe.
The Tour de France, and Wiggins’ fourth-place finish in Paris, seems a long time ago. Then again, to Wiggins, lunchtime probably seems a long time ago. It was then that he had boarded a train in Preston, bound for a charity dinner in Kilmarnock, accompanied by his wife, Cath, and armed with booze. (We know this from Wiggins’ lunchtime Twitter update: ‘On train with @cathwiggins heading to Braveheart doo tonight, Got a bag of Stella and a bottle of red, the day starts here!’)
Now it’s midnight. But this is the Wiggins of legend, not least of his own legend. As he relates in his autobiography, In Pursuit of Glory, when he’s ‘on’, he’s really on – no wheat, no gluten, no sugar, no booze. But when he’s ‘off’, he’s really off, and capable of sinking a dozen pints in his local pub during the all-day sessions in which he said he indulged for a couple of months after the Athens Olympics in 2004. It wasn’t unusual, he recalled, for him to follow an all-day session in the pub with a shared bottle of wine in the evening, before polishing off some of the Belgian beer he keeps in the cellar – or kept in the cellar, until he realised it was all gone. Tonight, in Kilmarnock, he’s most certainly ‘off’: off season, off the bike, off the leash, off his head, on the lash.
‘You-lot-just-wanna-see-me-fail,’ slurs Britain’s brightest hope for Tour de France glory, the words ceasing to be separate entities and congealing messily. ‘You-wanna-see-me-fall-flat-on-my-face.’
At the same time as Wiggins’ big night out in Kilmarnock (next day’s tweet: ‘Braveheart doo done and dusted, great dinner and a great cause. Hungover like a MOFO’) – and perhaps even explaining his excess – the will-he-won’t-he join Team Sky saga was becoming ridiculous.
Cycling, a sport with no real transfer market, and a noble tradition of riders honouring contracts, had never seen anything like it. The pursuit of Wiggins by Team Sky, who were depicted as arrogantly waving their chequebook in Vaughters’ and Garmin’s face as they tried to lure their rider, drew criticism, as did their attempted signing of another British rider, the Academy graduate Ben Swift, who had also signed a two-year contract at the start of the 2009 season with the Russian Katusha team.
Still the will-he-won’t-he Wiggins affair rumbled on, with Wiggins firing off angry tweets every time the story was reported, as though he wanted it all kept under wraps (and even though most reports were entirely accurate: Team Sky were trying to buy Wiggins out of his contract). Wiggins tried to keep out of it, and to get back into training, but the uncertainty was, he later admitted, unsettling; hardly ideal at a time of the year when the party season is supposed to be winding down, and the hard work beginning. On 5 November, 18 days before Team Sky’s first get-together in Manchester, and with 17 riders already named, it was reported that a Sky delegation were in New York meeting a Garmin delegation. It was in the hands of lawyers now, it seemed (though the New York story was erroneous).
As urgent as the pursuit of Wiggins seemed – as, indeed, it had become, with so much now riding on the eventual outcome due to the fact that Team Sky had no obvious leader, nor, without Wiggins and Cavendish, either of the British A-listers – contingency plans were drawn and re-drawn throughout 2009. The recruitment of a Tour contender, or at least someone capable of aiming for the podium, was essential, and so it was a topic of regular discussion and debate between the key decision-makers: Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton and the senior sports director, Scott Sunderland.
Carlos Sastre, the 2008 Tour de France winner, was discussed as a potential signing, and three meetings held with his representatives. Sunderland, who had worked with Sastre at the CSC team, pressed the case for the Spaniard, who, approaching his mid-thirties, could act as a mentor to the younger riders. For one thing, Sunderland said he was confident that Sastre was clean. ‘I’d stick my hand in the fire for Carlos,’ he told Sutton. (It’s a German saying popular in Belgium. Sunderland, an Australian who’d lived in Belgium throughout his racing career, was almost a naturalised Belgian.)
However, with Sastre there was the same problem as with Wiggins: he was under contract for 2010 to the team that Sunderland had helped set up and then left, the Cervelo TestTeam. Alberto Contador, now a double Tour winner, was also discussed. Again, though, and despite contact being initiated with Contador’s manager – his brother, Fran – interest in the Spaniard was dropped before it really developed.
A concrete offer was made to the young Italian rider, Vincenzo Nibali. Nibali, who finished three places behind Wiggins at the 2009 Tour de France, would have earned a salary of €1m had he joined Team Sky. He opted, however, to stay with the Italian Liquigas team. And so the nascent British team still resembled a headless beast: with the infrastructure, the staff and most of the riders in place – but no leader.
Two weeks later, on 20 November, L’Equipe reported that Wiggins had signed with Sky. But Vaughters refuted that. ‘Brad has a contract with Garmin for 2010,’ he told Cycling Weekly through gritted teeth. ‘That is my statement. If [L’Equipe] has such a great source, they should reveal him/her.’
Three days later, 24 riders gathered in a hotel on the outskirts of Manchester for a week-long camp. They included some big names: Tour de France stage winner, cobbled Classics specialist and free spirit Juan Antonio Flecha of Spain; the young, talented, very raw and very shy Norwegian Edvald Boasson Hagen; the Swede with boy band looks, Thomas Lofkvist; Simon Gerrans, an Australian with stage wins in all three Grand Tours, of France, Italy and Spain. But still no Wiggins – and still no leader for the Grand Tours, though Lofkvist was now talking up his prospects in the Swedish press. The Swede assumed that, if Wiggins didn’t join, he’d be de facto team leader.
The