About halfway through his debut Tour, as he waited one morning in the Village Départ for his wife, Cath, who was over to visit, Wiggins was asked how he was finding the race. ‘Um, I think I can win this thing,’ he said. He missed a beat before cracking a wry, self-deprecating smile. The idea was ridiculous. It confirmed his image – and indeed his self-image – as an outsider.
Not that he was a disinterested outsider. Wiggins’ knowledge of the Tour de France, his respect for it, and his awe of its champions, was obvious; he just didn’t seem to understand what he, Bradley Wiggins, was doing there, or what, if anything, he could bring to the party. Rather, he resembled an English club cyclist parachuted into the biggest race in the world; he seemed oblivious to, or in denial of, his talent.
On another occasion Wiggins sat drinking coffee and reading the papers a little too long. One of his Cofidis directors came hurrying over, shouting: ‘Brad! Allez!’ The race had left without him. Amid scattered newspapers and upturned cups of coffee, Wiggins shot up, grabbed his bike, pedalled hastily across the grass and bumped on to the road just in time to join the tail end of the vast, snaking convoy of vehicles that follows the race, working his way through that and finally into the peloton to survive another day. After three weeks he finished 123rd in Paris. But to the extent that any rider who finishes the Tour can do, he left no discernible trace.
In 2007, his second Tour is proving a little different. He finishes fourth in the prologue time trial, and, with his great escape on stage six to Bourg-en-Bresse, Wiggins is at least getting himself noticed. For five hours he hogs the TV pictures, which depict him toiling for mile after solitary mile. The landscape flashes past, but it is as though Wiggins, in his post box red Cofidis kit, is part of it. Several observers remark on his style, his smoothness, his élan. ‘Il est fort,’ they say, ‘un bon rouleur.’
Halfway through the stage Wiggins’ lead over the peloton is down to 8 minutes, 17 seconds, still a considerable margin. He continues to look strong; the effort effortless. And among some of the journalists gathered around monitors in the press room a theory emerges as to the motivation for his lone attack. The clue is in the date: 13 July. It’s 40 years to the day since Britain’s only world road race champion, Tom Simpson, collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux, while riding the 1967 Tour. Wiggins is a patriot with a keen sense of cycling history; the type who could tell you not only the date of Simpson’s death, but what shoes he was wearing.
So that explains it: Wiggo’s doing it for Tom.
Approaching Bourg-en-Bresse, it even seems that he may defy the odds – and the sprinters’ teams, now pulling at the front of the peloton as they pursue their quarry – and hang on to win. But as he rides into the final 20km – stopping briefly to replace a broken wheel, throwing the offending item into the ditch as his team car screeches to a halt behind him – and Wiggins hits a long, straight expanse of road, the wind picks up. It blows directly into his face, and presents a serious handicap. The peloton can always move significantly faster than a small group or single rider; but especially into a headwind.
As Wiggins passes under the 10km to go banner, his lead having disintegrated, he is a dead man pedalling. The peloton leaves him dangling out front before casually swallowing him up with 6km to go. One of the helicopter TV cameras lingers on Wiggins as riders stream past and he drops through the bunch, and straight out the back.
Tom Boonen of Belgium wins the bunch sprint and is swamped by reporters and TV crews as he slows to a halt beyond the finish line. Other riders attract their own mini-scrums. Finally, after a long 3 minutes, 42 seconds, Wiggins appears – the 183rd and last man to cross the line. As he comes to a weary halt and wipes his salt-caked face with the back of his mitt he also attracts a mini-scrum.
So was it for Simpson? ‘Sorry?’ replies Wiggins. Today is the anniversary of Simpson’s death, he is told.
‘Nah, nah. I didn’t realise,’ he shrugs. ‘But it is my wife, Cath’s, birthday. She’ll be watching on TV at home with the kids. I suppose it was the closest I could get to spending the day with her.’
To the journalists’ disappointment, he admits that it wasn’t planned. ‘There were five of us in a little move at the start, I pulled a big turn, looked round and saw I was on my own. You don’t choose to end up on your own like that, it just happens. I thought, bloody hell, what are you supposed to do? Sit up? … This is the Tour de France – you don’t sit up. So I thought I’d continue. When I got a minute I thought there’d be a counterattack and some bodies would come across to me, but that never happened. So I just kept going.
‘When I got 10, 15 minutes, I thought maybe it could happen and I could win the stage. Even at 15km to go I thought it might happen, but it was that bloody headwind towards the finish. I was still doing 45kph, but I knew they’d be doing 52 or 53. At 10km I knew really that I had no chance with that headwind.’
Still, it was a day on which Wiggins could look back with pride. And he’d earned himself a first-ever trip to the podium, the steps of which drained the last ounces of energy from his legs, to receive le prix de la combativité – the day’s award for most aggressive rider.
Two places in front of Wiggins, having also been dropped by the main pack as the speed picked up towards the finish, another British rider had gone past as we waited for Wiggins. He was young, it was his debut Tour, but grave disappointment was etched on his face in the form of an angry scowl. It was Mark Cavendish, and his much-anticipated debut in the biggest race in the world was one of the main reasons for the appearance in Bourg-en-Bresse of Dave Brailsford, the British Cycling performance director.
An hour later, with the dust settling on the stage and the finish area being noisily dismantled by members of the Tour’s vast travelling army of workers, Brailsford sits in a bar and reviews the day. While his companions drink beer, he orders mineral water. ‘I’m in training,’ he explains. ‘I’m riding l’Etape du Tour [a stage of the Tour, the popular mass participation ride] with Shane.’
Until now, Brailsford, though he has become a familiar figure at track cycling events, has not been a regular visitor to the Tour de France. But there’s a good reason for that: it falls outside his remit. Three years earlier he had inherited the track-focused programme, known as the World Class Performance Plan, devised by his predecessor, Peter Keen. As Brailsford sits down in Bourg-en-Bresse he can reflect that Keen’s World Class Performance Plan is exactly a decade old; what he cannot see, other than in his wildest dreams, is that in 13 months it will come to glorious fruition at the Beijing Olympics.
Something else is afoot here in Bourg-en-Bresse, however, and it has nothing to do with Beijing, and it has nothing to do with track cycling. Brailsford, even as he basks in the afterglow of his team’s domination of the recent World Track Cycling Championships in Palma, and plots the 13 months to Beijing with the kind of supreme confidence that can only come from such domination, appears to be looking beyond all that, to some distant, imagined horizon. You can see it in his piercing blue eyes; they blaze with enthusiasm and sparkle with the excitement of a child catching a first, thrilling glimpse of … well, of the Tour de France.
As he outlines his dream, his enthusiasm intensifies; in fact, the plan seems to be progressing rapidly and taking shape in his imagination right here, under the large canopy of a tree, just outside a bar in Bourg-en-Bresse.
There have been several catalysts, says Brailsford, which all add up to ‘a critical mass’, or a tipping point. ‘That was a good effort from Brad today,’ he says. ‘Good to see him having a go.’ But Wiggins’ big day out had been the icing on the cake – or the cherry on the icing on the cake. A few days earlier, Brailsford and a million or so others had been in London for the Tour’s first-ever Grand Départ on British soil. The Tour had got underway with a prologue time trial around the British capital, passing the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park, before, the next day, a road race stage took them to Canterbury along roads lined the entire way with spectators. It had been extraordinary – a weekend in which