Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession.

Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession. Bradley Wiggins With a foreword by Eddy MerckxThe world of professional cycling is fraught with fierce competition, fervent dedication and unerring ambition, and only a handful of competitors reach iconic status. Among them is Sir Bradley Wiggins – a man uniquely placed to reflect on the history of this remarkable sport and its unforgettable titans.In Icons, Wiggins takes the reader on an extraordinarily intimate journey through the sport, presenting key pieces from his never-before-seen collection of memorabilia. Over the course of his illustrious career, he amassed hundreds of items – often gifts from its greatest and most controversial figures. Each reflects an icon, a race or a moment that fundamentally influenced Wiggins on both a personal and professional level.By exploring the lives and achievements of 21 of the sport’s key figures – among them Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Miguel Indur?in and Tom Simpson – Wiggins sheds new light on what professional cycling demands of its best competitors. Icons lauds their triumphs, elucidates their demons and sheds light on the philosophy and psychology that comprise the unique mindset of a cycling champion. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_89486421-5e2a-5c12-9aa2-96eca2d01d69) HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 FIRST EDITION © Bradley Wiggins 2018 Jacket design by James Empringham © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Jacket photographs (front, left to right) Roger-Viollet/Topfoto, Agence France Presse/Getty Images, Imago Sportfotodienst/Imago/PA Images; (back, left to right) Presse Sports/Off side, Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images, © AGIP/Bridgeman Images, courtesy of Elisabetta Nencini A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Bradley Wiggins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green) Source ISBN: 9780008301743 Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008301750 Version 2018-10-12 CONTENTS Cover (#u6fcb12f2-1aee-573a-b8e4-20d82861114c) Copyright (#ulink_2d70ecb2-4862-5e7c-a552-736366256b96) Title Page (#u86d598ed-992c-5a3c-b9fc-f1eda3017a13) Foreword: Eddy Merckx (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction (#ulink_19b49526-0eff-5069-9b5f-6fa614c44921) 1. Johan Museeuw (#ulink_e8c4cf96-b781-5c09-bb8e-befc824a729f) 2. Franco Ballerini (#ulink_c565d133-6486-5f5e-9209-7b9a0395bb9d) 3. Chris Lillywhite (#ulink_194924d2-78b2-59f7-9779-e17ef3818f52) 4. Miguel Indur?in (#ulink_ff4ba4fb-42b6-5627-b05c-b99e274fedc9) 5. Sean Yates (#ulink_5618f057-681d-5690-ae48-80ac623b0bae) 6. Eddy Merckx (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Patrick Sercu (#litres_trial_promo) 8. Tom Simpson (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Barry Hoban (#litres_trial_promo) 10. Phil Edwards (#litres_trial_promo) 11. Francesco Moser (#litres_trial_promo) 12. Gianni Bugno (#litres_trial_promo) 13. Lance Armstrong (#litres_trial_promo) 14. Jacques Anquetil (#litres_trial_promo) 15. Gastone Nencini (#litres_trial_promo) 16. Felice Gimondi (#litres_trial_promo) 17. Jos? Manuel Fuente (#litres_trial_promo) 18. Luis Oca?a (#litres_trial_promo) 19. Hugo Koblet (#litres_trial_promo) 20. Fabian Cancellara (#litres_trial_promo) 21. Fausto Coppi (#litres_trial_promo) Afterword (#litres_trial_promo) Glossary of Cycling Terms (#litres_trial_promo) List of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Credits (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Merckx rode for the short-lived Faemino-Faema team between 1968 and 1970. The team mostly comprised Belgian riders, with a few Italians. FOREWORD (#ulink_4ae6c8af-f116-517e-bcf2-e66cb30719be) FOOTBALL WAS MY FIRST LOVE, and like most kids from Brussels I was an Anderlecht fan. However, one day I discovered the great Stan Ockers, and fell in love with cycling. Stan was a hero to me, just as he was to many Belgians. In 1955 he won the World Championships, Fl?che Wallonne and Li?ge–Bastogne–Li?ge, but in general he tended to lose more races than he won. He was popular because he was a great rider, but most of all I think because he was a great sportsman. I liked to pretend I was him as I rode my bike, but then in 1956 he died following a crash on the track at Antwerp, his home town. I was only 11 at the time, but his death broke my heart. Ultimately, Stan was the reason I started racing. I went on to win 525 professional races, so I guess you could say that he changed the course of cycling history. The point is that we are all dreamers. We’re all fans first and foremost, because if we weren’t we wouldn’t become sportsmen. I started out pretending to be Stan, and through him I learned about Rik Van Steenbergen, Briek Schotte and Fausto Coppi. Eventually I became a professional cyclist, and I wanted to emulate Coppi and Jacques Anquetil by winning the Tour de France and breaking the Hour Record. Brad’s story is more or less the same. He started out watching Miguel Indur?in, and decided he wanted to understand cycling history for himself. That led him to me, to the Tour de France, to the Hour Record and eventually to our friendship. We were lucky enough to be blessed with the talent to win bike races, but in reality we were no different to millions of starry-eyed kids down the years. History repeats itself in cycling, and I know for a fact that there are thousands of young British guys who took up cycling because of Brad. That’s the way it rolls in cycling, and the way it always was. Enjoy the ride … In among all the jerseys in my collection, Eddy’s gloves mean a hell of a lot. INTRODUCTION (#ulink_695a7272-8278-5b97-8771-93e653733879) CYCLING SEEMS TO ATTRACT A LOT OF COLLECTORS, probably because it’s always been so important historically and culturally. You could say it’s just a sport, but the bike itself still plays a big role in the way human civilisations think and act. You only have to look at places like Holland and China to see this, and to understand that, long after fossil-fuel cars have disappeared, the humble bike will still be around. I genuinely don’t think there’s any one single invention that has been healthier for the human mind and body, so while it is ‘just’ a sport, for many people it’s also a way of life and of living. Bike racing is unique among mainstream sports because its development was totally organic. It didn’t have to be ‘invented’ like the others, because Europeans have been learning to cycle for well over 100 years. Going fast on a pushbike is the most natural thing in the world, and organised racing is just an extension of that. As a professional sport it has two special characteristics. The first is that it’s free to watch; the second, that it goes to its public and not vice versa. What I mean by this is that there are no filters – the riders are literally within touching distance, and the public are intrinsic to the spectacle. It’s much easier to watch cycling on TV, and actually being there means you’re only going to see a tiny fraction of the action. The feeling a bike race generates, however, is electric, and I think that’s one of the reasons people stand by the roadside for hours waiting for what often amounts to a few moments. The key is its sheer intimacy, and that’s why the sport is so closely linked to its fans’ identity. Of course, there are millions of hobby cyclists, but there are also people like me, for whom it’s all-consuming. Thinking I’m Joey McLoughlin at Herne Hill in 1988. I think all of the above – and certainly some complex anthropological stuff – explains the collecting thing. People go nuts for bidons, but also musettes, caps, race numbers, race direction signs and accreditation paraphernalia. There are guys with massive collections of postcards, cigarette cards, autographs, race books, photographs, miniatures, badges and magazines. There are also people who collect specific brands, especially exotic Italian ones like Campagnolo, Bianchi and Colnago. There are guys who collect stuff from specific races, typically the Giro and the Tour, and of course there are collectors of the bikes themselves. There are loads of personal museums, and I know of a chap in Italy who has over 300 perfectly restored professional racing cycles. He keeps them in a massive house he rents halfway up a mountain, and it has more security than Fort Knox. That guy also has three ex-wives, but such is life … Eastway 1995, in the exact spot on which the finish line of the velodrome now sits. For people like me, however, it’s all about the jerseys. Football and cricket teams get a trophy if they win, or an urn full of ashes. In track and field they get a medal. In golf the winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, and in World Series baseball the champions get a ring. I’m sure they’re fantastic things, but they’re basically inanimate. They’re not used in competition, and there’s nothing used or worn in any of these sports that distinguishes the champions from the mere mortals. Diego Maradona and Michael Jordan had a number on their backs, but essentially they wore the same kit as the others, as did individual sporting greats such as Borg, Bolt and Ali. Like all great sportsmen, champion cyclists come and go. So do their sponsors, but their jerseys remain. Over the years they accumulate value, because through them we learn the history of our sport and, as cycling people, of ourselves – they’re also a mirror of the times, on our habits and our culture. First, the sponsors were the bike manufacturers and then, after the war, companies that made leisure items and consumer goods. It started with toothpaste, because as we became wealthier dental hygiene became more affordable. Next came things like aperitifs, and status symbols such as domestic appliances. They were followed by fitted kitchens, televisions, colour televisions, ice cream for the kids. Then cars, travel agents, video recorders, telecoms … As you work through the collection, it becomes apparent that the evolution of the brand logos is of as much interest and importance as that of the shirts themselves. Cycling jerseys not only tell us the story of cycling and of cyclists, but also, if we look closely, of the continent. Then, of course, there are the leaders’ jerseys and champion’s jersey. They are the cycling icons, and there’s a small army of people like me who collect them. Of course, what we’re really collecting is proximity. Through the jerseys we feel closer to the champions who wore them, because they’re the people who wrote the history of the thing we love. This book constitutes a thank-you note to 21 of them and, overwhelmingly, a love letter to the sport of cycling. I hope you enjoy it. Me with 1980 and 1986 world champion Tony Doyle. Great Flintstones’ shorts! (#ulink_90bb1b19-d02a-574b-ab01-50eff3acac91) One of my first real cycling memories is the final-day time trial of the 1989 Tour de France. I was nine, we were round at my nan’s house and my grandad was watching the race as usual. I wasn’t much interested in Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond – in truth I barely knew who they were – but I very well remember being struck by the visual elements. Fignon’s ponytail, his yellow jersey and disc wheels, LeMond’s fluorescent kit, strange handlebars and that futuristic helmet he had … I didn’t understand the magnitude of what I was witnessing, but aesthetically it was spectacular. Like most inner-city London kids, however, I was a football fan. The sportsmen I identified with had names like Adams, Merson and Thomas, not Chioccioli, Delgado and Van Hooydonck. The Arsenal players used to drink in the local pub after the game, and most of them were Londoners. Tottenham had Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne in their side at the time, and Lineker lived quite close by in St John’s Wood. Me and my mates saw him walking back from the shop with a pint of milk one day, and followed him to this house in Abbey Gardens. Once we knew where he lived we just knocked on the door and asked his wife if he was in, in pretty much the same way we used to ask one another’s mums. She sent us on our way with an autographed publicity card each, but I’ve an idea the whole episode is quite illustrative. Famous sportsmen seemed more accessible, and I don’t think there were so many filters between them and ‘normal people’ back then.Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter anyway. By the summer of 1992 Lineker was playing in Japan, and my sporting world paradigm was about to be turned completely on its head. The king of his generation. BACK THEN GREAT BRITAIN WASN’T WINNING A GREAT DEAL at the Olympics, and it wasn’t winning at all at Olympic cycling. As such, when Chris Boardman dominated the pursuit on his futuristic Lotus bike at the 1992 games in Barcelona, it was front-page news. Here was a British cyclist using a marvel of engineering made by a quintessentially British company – and conquering the world. The following morning I had to take the Tube across London to play football, and when I got to the station I noticed that the news stands were full of it. For better or for worse (!), British cyclists often occupy the front pages nowadays, but back then it was unheard of. Chris on ‘that bike’ at the 1992 Olympics. Chris had captured the public imagination, and that included me as well. I mentioned it to my mum, and she said I ought to think about giving cycling a go. I had a racing bike from Halfords, and she reasoned that I might be quite good at it. My dad had been a professional bike rider, so I had the genes if nothing else. Then if I was talented I’d have a much better chance of making it, because everyone else wanted to be a footballer. Besides, she still knew a few people in cycling and said it was a great sport. I saw no reason not to try, and so off we went to Hillingdon, where we met a guy named Stuart Benstead. He’d brought my dad over from Australia in the 1970s, and the two of them had lived together for a time. He ran the Archer Road Club, and he remembered me as a toddler. He said I ought to join the club, and before I knew it I was racing. Truth be told it was a pretty chastening experience, at least initially. I was a 12-year-old doing under-16 races, so the others were much bigger and stronger than me. Most Friday nights I’d get an absolute pasting, then shuffle off home with my tail between my legs. Somehow, though, cycling’s perverse logic started to take hold of me. The worse it got, the more I seemed to like it and the more I resolved to get better at it. By the following spring I was half decent. I was still getting shelled out on the climbs, and the others were much more committed than I was. They used to train, where I’d pretty much just turn up and race. I’d started to look forward to the races, however, and to take an interest in the gear. By then cable TV had come to London, and Eurosport showed quite a lot of cycling. Cornering in Bury St Edmunds in 1996. 1993 Belgian champion’s jersey This was the point at which I began to understand that cycling mattered a lot in Europe, that it was very much a mainstream sport. I remember looking forward to Milan–San Remo, as well as the feeling of disappointment when I heard it wasn’t going to be televised. I had to wait until the Thursday, when Cycling Weekly came out, to discover that an Italian named Maurizio Fondriest had won it. That waiting seems incredible now, because you can get the results of the races within seconds, but that’s the way it was back then. It really was a different world. The first live road race I watched was the Tour of Flanders. Hitherto I had really no idea that so many people would come out to watch a bike race, but there seemed to be seas of them. Nor had I any real appreciation of just how fast it all was and how ferociously the professionals raced. Johan Museeuw won it in this beautiful tricoloured jersey – red, black and yellow – and Mum told me he got to wear it because he was the Belgian national champion, which I thought was a really wicked idea. She explained some of the rituals around De Ronde, as the Tour of Flanders is known in Flemish. She said it was the highlight of the year for Flemish people, almost irrespective of whether or not they were cycling fans. She also told me that Museeuw would be like the king over there. He was a Flemish rider wearing the national champion’s jersey to win Flanders, and nothing came close to that as regards performance or prestige. Thus Museeuw, the ‘Lion of Flanders’, became my first cycling hero, and so began the long and winding road that has been my journey in bike racing. It’s impossible to exaggerate how good Museeuw was, and how aggressively he rode. Almost any article you read about him at the time included words like ‘warrior’ or ‘fighter’ somewhere along the line. These were – and remain – the oldest clich?s in the cycling book, but they fitted him like a glove. Other cyclists were more stylish, but nobody was ever as brave, nor looked as purposeful. The Flemish people identified with him because he was the identikit classics rider, the living embodiment of their cycling tradition. Where Boardman had been about method, science and discipline, Museeuw was an old-school blood-and-snot cyclist like no other. A few years later, when I was 16, I went to Belgium for a week with my mum, stepdad and half-brother. We went to watch the classics, and I saw Museeuw in the flesh. I’ve italicised that for dramatic effect, but only because dramatic is precisely what it was, at least for me. My mum still has a load of photographs she took that week. Some of them are a bit bizarre, but collectively they tell an unforgettable story. Most of them are of my eight-year-old brother, standing with the champions at the start of the Tour of Flanders. Like most 16-year-olds I was too cool for school, so I’d send him up to them instead. In some ways he was acting as a sort of proxy for me, because I didn’t want to come across as the smitten, star-struck teenager that I was. I feigned indifference and pretended to take it all in my stride, but in reality I was just overcome by the whole thing. Maybe I was afraid they might reject me or some such, but the long and the short of it was that metaphorically I was wetting my pants. I was at the Tour of Flanders, but I wasn’t of the Tour of Flanders. I was trying desperately hard to pretend it was just a normal day at the races, but the reality was I was all over the place. I’d been looking forward to the moment for years, but now that it had arrived it was too much for me to compute. During the race we went to the feed, and I remember grabbing all the musettes as they threw them away. I think I got about 20 of them from that one race – I had the others scrambling about for them as well – and the Rabobank one had a rice cake in it. I had to decide whether to eat it or keep it as a souvenir, and I can assure you that was quite a decision. I ate it in the end, and then we went to the second feed in Zottegem. We scrounged a load of caps from the soigneurs, watched the riders come through again, and then made for the bar to watch the last 60 kilometres on TV. At a certain point this guy walked in with long, curly, strawberry-blond hair. I realised it was Eric Vanderaerden, and I knew all about him. By then I’d amassed the world’s largest collection of cycling videotapes, and one of them showed him winning the race in 1985. Now he was getting towards the end of his career and he’d climbed off, got changed and just walked into the bar with his soigneur. He wasn’t one of my favourites, but I was blown away all the same. I was in the same bar as Eric Vanderaerden! Anyway, Michele Bartoli attacked on the Muur van Geraardsbergen and time-trialled to the win. He was a new star and I didn’t know much about him, but after the race we went and stood around the team buses waiting for Museeuw to emerge. When he came out he didn’t look happy – he’d been going for a third Ronde and had been undone by some sort of mechanical failure – but he had to walk 100 metres across the car park to get to his dad’s car. I didn’t dare speak to him, but I got close enough to be able to delude myself that I’d ‘met’ him. What I’d actually done was walk alongside him for a few steps, and my mum has a grainy old photo to prove it. 1996 world champion’s jersey The first time I raced against Johan would have been the 2002 Tour of Flanders. Actually, no, strike that. Technically I was taking part in the same race as Johan Museeuw, but I wasn’t racing against him as such. He was in a different stratosphere as a bike rider, and my abiding memory of that race is thinking, ‘Hang on a minute. That’s Johan Museeuw and I’m doing the same race as him!’ Beyond that I just remember the size of a) his calves and b) the gear he was able to turn. There was a big fight to get to the Molenberg in front, and I think it was there that my education as a professional road cyclist began in earnest. People were just pushing me out of their wheels all the time, and I didn’t have the fight in me to do anything about it. If one of them asked me what I was doing or tried to shunt me into the gutter, I’d find myself apologising to them, in essence just capitulating. I was there, but I never felt like I’d earned the right to be there. The Wednesday after Flanders it was Gent–Wevelgem. It was quite windy that day, and I decided not to allow myself to be pushed around. One of my jobs was to make sure I took my team-mates up to the front before the Kemmelberg, and I was determined I’d accomplish it. The Acqua & Sapone team were there, and their leader was Mario Cipollini, a big, macho, alpha-male Tuscan. He’d won San Remo and was favourite for the race. So I checked that my team-mates were on the wheel, and started making my way up the side of the road. Eventually I came up alongside the Italians, by now feeling quite good about myself because I felt I was doing the job that I was asked to do. The problem was that Cipollini was looking across at me with something approaching total contempt. Unbeknownst to me my colleagues had just sat up, and like a dick I’d ridden to the front of Gent–Wevelgem on my own. Cipo obviously assumed I was French – I had a Fran?aise des Jeux jersey on – and he turned to the rest of his team and said something along the lines of, ‘Look at this French wanker!’ Museeuw in the 1993 Tour of Flanders, his first win in the race. I’d thought I was being a real pro, but now these Italians were laughing at me, quite literally. I had to creep back to my place at the back of the group, and I felt like a wimpering dog. Then we hit a crosswind, then I went out the back, and then I climbed off at the first feed. It was pretty embarrassing, to say the least. Cipo could make you feel really small. I hated him for that at the time, but cycling was much more hierarchical back then. People like me didn’t dare go near people like him and Museeuw, because you had to serve your apprenticeship first. The idea that I might try to converse with them never even occurred to me, and I reasoned that Museeuw wouldn’t have known who I was anyway. I was a nobody, and he was far too busy trying to win the bike races I was nominally competing in. He retired in 2004, blissfully unaware of the fact that he’d been my boyhood idol. How, realistically, could it have been otherwise, given that I hadn’t managed to utter a word to him? You live and learn, and eventually I got pretty good at it. I had a long career, and towards the end of it I began a sort of sentimental journey. In the spring of 2015 I was doing an interview with the Belgian press. I was about to take part in my final Tour of Flanders, and they asked me about my cycling upbringing. I started telling them the story of how Museeuw’s 1993 Flanders had been the first race I’d really watched, and it got back to him. He speaks some English, and he sent me a message on Instagram. It was something like, ‘Good luck and thanks for what you said about me.’ I replied, and he told me that his 15-year-old son, Stefano, was a big fan of mine. He then asked if it would be OK for them to come and meet me before Paris–Roubaix, and I said that yes, of course it would. Then I started to panic, because Johan Museeuw was coming to meet me. So next thing I was having a massage after a training ride, and Servais Knaven, our DS, came up. He said, ‘Johan’s downstairs in the lobby waiting for you.’ He was early, but I started panicking because I was keeping the great Johan Museeuw waiting. I asked Servais, ‘What am I supposed to say to him?’ Servais thought that was quite funny. He said, ‘How should I know? Just talk to him! He’s only human!’ Eventually I went down, and I was that teenager all over again. I was basically 16, but by now Johan was almost 50. He has this gentle, soft, fairly high-pitched voice anyway, and in some way he seemed almost the opposite of the ferocious rider he’d once been. When I asked him about Roubaix he gave me the usual ‘Stay near the front and don’t forget to eat’ advice. It was exactly the same advice that cyclists have been giving one another for 100 years, because staying near the front is quite important if you want to win a bike race. The difference was that the advice came from Johan Museeuw, so it was – and is – worth its weight in gold. I had one of my rainbow jerseys with me that day. I’d ridden De Panne a few days earlier, and there’d been a time trial. I got the jersey out, signed it and gave it to Stefano. Then Johan opened up his bag and pulled out a jersey of the same design as the one he’d worn to win the 1993 Tour of Flanders, the Belgian tricolour. He said he wanted to give it to me, which as you can imagine was pretty humbling. He also pulled out one of his famous bandanas and signed it, ‘To Wiggo, Cheers. The Lion of Flanders.’ Then for some reason he gave me a load of cans of beer, as you do. They’re a little bit mad, the Flemish. It had only taken me 22 years, but I’d got there in the end. I’d finally had the courage to meet Johan, and he’s a mate now. However, the fact that he’s a mortal, and vulnerable like the rest of us, doesn’t in any way diminish the bike rider he once was. It’s true that he wasn’t much for talking back then, but he’d bike races to win and he was under a colossal amount of pressure. He was the torchbearer for Flemish cycling, and that’s one hell of a weight to have to bear. I keep telling him I’ll go over and ride the cobblestones with him some time. I’ll probably get round to it eventually, but then again maybe not. Time rolls on, but I’m still not sure I’m worthy. I may have won the Tour de France, but he’s still Johan Museeuw. Still the Lion of Flanders. Museeuw winning the World Championships, 1996. (#ulink_cea6be11-5266-59f6-87ba-bc4785e154f7) Riding through the mud in his last victory at Paris–Roubaix, in 2001. I was speaking to my mum after having watched Museeuw win Flanders, and she explained that Eurosport would be showing something called ‘Paris–Roubaix’ the following Sunday. She said, ‘You know the mews out the back here, with the cobblestones? Well, they ride over roads like that, and the cobbled sections are called pav?.’ I couldn’t for one minute imagine how they’d be able to race their bikes over stuff like that, but I couldn’t wait. And so it was that, on 11 April 1993, I was acquainted with the wonder that is Paris–Roubaix. My first impression was just how crazy the whole thing looked. And how spectacular. I’d only ever seen sporting events that took place in hermetically sealed stadiums, but this was something else entirely. Where Boardman had gone round and round the velodrome, here they were just flaying themselves for hour after hour. You had potholes, mud and dust everywhere, and those cobbles. Then you had guys just keeling over and falling off, people running with their bikes or carrying them, noise and bodies everywhere. I can only really describe the scene as organised anarchy, and I loved it. It may sound dramatic, but it’s no exaggeration to state that it was a life-changing moment for me. It was an epiphany. Two riders had broken away. One was a Frenchman named Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, who’d won the previous year after having tried 15 times. The other was an Italian named Franco Ballerini, and he was doing all the work. He was trying to shake Duclos off, and every time he surged the electricity went straight through me. Somehow Duclos kept clinging on, and ultimately they came into the velodrome together. Then they did the sprint and literally crossed the line simultaneously. To the naked eye it looked too close to call, but Ballerini was convinced he’d won. The race officials were looking at the photo finish, but he started riding his lap of honour anyway … The closest Paris–Roubaix finish ever. Ballerini (left) being pipped to the line by Duclos-Lassalle in the Roubaix velodrome, 1993. I UNDERSTAND WHAT PARIS–ROUBAIX means to people now, and I genuinely think he didn’t dare contemplate that he hadn’t won. I think he was actually trying to convince himself that he hadn’t lost. Paris–Roubaix was who Franco Ballerini was, and winning it was all he lived for. In the end they gave it to Duclos, the French guy. He’d been on Ballerini’s tail for an hour, and then stolen round him and won by a few centimetres. Franco had been stronger (and nobody was in any doubt that he was the moral victor). Duclos, though, was one stealthy, resourceful bike rider, and he’d won by making damned sure he didn’t lose. Ballerini had lost Paris–Roubaix, but in the process he’d won himself a new fan across the English Channel. I don’t suppose, in that precise instant, he would have cared one iota, though, because he was utterly inconsolable. Franco Ballerini was a big, handsome guy with a unique way of riding across the cobbles. He had this straight-armed, slightly rocking, metronomic style that was completely different to the others. He also wore those wonderful, fluorescent Briko glasses, and I’d often find my teenage self trying to imitate him. Physically he was the Italian cycling archetype, but as a racer he was made-to-measure for the northern classics. In 1994 he was second at Gent–Wevelgem, third at Paris–Roubaix and fourth at Flanders. He was always among the strongest, but he tended to lose because he wasn’t particularly fast. In order to win he needed to drop everyone else, and of course that’s the hardest thing to do in cycling. His greatness lay in the fact that through all the disappointments he never buckled, and he never lost his conviction that one day he’d win Roubaix. By 1995 he was riding for Mapei. They had Tony Rominger, Museeuw, Abraham Olano, Fernando Escart?n and a young Frank Vandenbroucke, and were developing into the best team in the world, a team that would dominate cycling for almost a decade. Talking of which, it kind of makes me smile when cycling journalists refer to Sky as the ‘ruination of cycling’. In actual fact, there have always been wealthy, immensely powerful teams, and history tells us that they’ve generally been extremely good for the sport. The Bianchi, Peugeot, Molteni, Raleigh and Renault jerseys are iconic not because they’re particularly beautiful (though to my mind some of them are), but because they are synonymous with a moment in time. Sky are just the latest iteration of the superteam. 1996 Mapei jersey I digress. Ballerini won Het Nieuwsblad (Het Volk, as was) in the freezing rain, and had really good form. However, three days before Roubaix he crashed at Gent–Wevelgem and dislocated his shoulder. He put the shoulder back in himself, but Ballerini’s Law seemed to have struck yet again. He hung around the hotel with his arm in a sling, praying that he’d recover in time, but when he went to bed on Saturday night it was 50–50. He agreed to give it a go the following morning, but he was kidding himself. He hadn’t been able to use a knife and fork for four days, let alone train for a 266-kilometre bike race over the cobblestones of northern France. The odds were stacked against him, to say the least. But he was fresh, if nothing else, and it turned out that this was his day of grace. First one of his team-mates, a beast of a rider named Gianluca Bortolami, towed him across to the lead group. Then on Templeuve, a cobbled section 30-odd kilometres from Roubaix, Ballerini simply put on another gear and just rode away. From the best classics riders in the world. It’s often the commentary that characterises the most iconic sporting moments. Just as Sergio Ag?ero’s title-winning goal for Manchester City has become indivisible from Martin Tyler’s commentary, my abiding memory of that race is David Duffield’s singalong voiceover. As Ballerini rode around the velodrome alone, old Duffers put on his very best Italian accent. It went something like, ‘Fran-co-Ba-lle-rini-born-in-Fi-ren-ze …’ Duffers’s accent was rubbish, but that didn’t matter at all because the moment was magical – and if I’m honest, it still is. Through all the stresses and strains of my own cycling career and post-career, that episode still brings a smile to my face. It’s the unadulterated pleasure of cycling, pure and simple. Ballerini celebrating after winning his second Paris–Roubaix. Ballerini won Roubaix again in 1998, and it’s no coincidence that he chose to retire there in 2001. By then he was 36, and he rolled into the velodrome alone in 32nd place. He was caked in Paris–Roubaix mud, and that was entirely appropriate given that the race had defined his cycling career – and vice versa – for the preceding 15 years. You’ll often see bike riders zip up their jersey as they approach the finish line, the better to expose their sponsor’s name to the TV cameras. Ballerini, though, did the opposite. He unzipped his jersey, because he wanted the world to see his undervest. On it, in large blue letters, were printed two words: MERCI ROUBAIX. Just perfect. With unzipped jersey in the Roubaix velodrome at his last major professional race, in which he finished 32nd. By the time I turned professional I’d seen Ballerini’s exploits ad infinitum, so when I was selected for the 2003 Paris–Roubaix it was a dream. I was 22, I’d got round Flanders the previous week, and I was about to join the Paris–Roubaix pantheon. I was with FDJ, and our protected riders were Jacky Durand, Christophe Mengin and Fr?d?ric Guesdon, a previous winner. Our DS was Marc Madiot, whom I’d watched win it on TV, and before the race he gave us this big, dramatic, stirring team talk. He explained what it signified, the legend behind it, all the stuff I’d been daydreaming about since I watched Duclos and Ballerini slugging it out ten years earlier. To say I was excited would be an understatement. So I knew all about it, knew every sector of the pav?, knew all the theories about riding it because I’d seen it on TV so many times. Nobody else really knew the first sectors because they were never televised, but I’d spent the preceding days reeling the names off to anyone who would listen. And indeed to anyone who wouldn’t. I was a proper nerd. Although Ballerini had retired, a lot of my boyhood heroes were still racing. Museeuw was there, Peter Van Petegem was there, Erik Zabel and Fabio Baldato were there … About 10 kilometres from the first sector I was near the front and, I have to say, doing a decent job. I was staying out of the way of the champions while simultaneously keeping Durand out of trouble. I’d have been about 20th, then suddenly there was a massive crash just behind me. It wiped everyone out, so now you’d a select group of 20. Essentially it was comprised of everyone who was anyone – and me, Bradley Wiggins, who wasn’t. I wasn’t trying to mix it up at the front because I had no place there, but by the time we reached the entrance to the Arenberg I was feeling really pleased with myself. That’s because the Arenberg is … well, the Arenberg, and I was in the lead group with the best of them. Then, wouldn’t you just know it, 100 metres into the forest the guy in front of me, Kevin Van Impe, got his front wheel stuck in the gutter. He hopped it out, but his back wheel stayed in. He slid off in front of me, and I had no chance whatsoever. I just clattered straight into him and flew straight over the top of the bars. I’d gone into ‘The Trench’ with the champions, and come out of it with a little group of back-markers. I had a buckled back wheel, and my knee and elbow hurt like hell. I couldn’t hold the bars, let alone ride over the cobbles, so I had no choice but to climb into the broomwagon. Paris–Roubaix had broken me in two, but I was immediately transported back to A Sunday in Hell, a documentary film about the 1976 race that I’d watched fanatically as a kid. There was a shot of two riders in the wagon, and they were telling the driver what had happened to them. Now here I was doing exactly the same thing. It sounds perverse – well, it actually is perverse – but I took some pleasure in that because in some way I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Giants in the sagwagon, but giants all the same. The Arenberg, Paris–Roubaix 2014. I went back the following year, and again in 2005. I packed in both times, and by then the ‘romance’ of Paris–Roubaix was starting to wear thin. As a spectacle it was great, and I never failed to appreciate the grandeur of it. The problem was that actually riding it was ridiculous, a shit-fight I had not a prayer of winning. However hard I tried, something always went wrong. I couldn’t figure it out. I seemed to be one of the hopeless, anonymous dozens that get sent there to make up the numbers. And yet, I was desperate to be a factor there, and deep down I still believed I could be. I could ride, I knew how to read a race, and my bike-handling skills were good. I’d been World Madison champion, and logic suggested that if I were ever going to be competitive in a classic, it would be Roubaix. The problem was that Roubaix always did have its own twisted, indecipherable logic, and it kept making a mug of me. In the summer of 2005 I finally got to meet Franco Ballerini, at the World Championships in Madrid. By then he was manager of the Italian national team, and he walked into the GB tent an hour and a half before the time trial. I thought, ‘Bloody hell! That’s Franco Ballerini!’, and then Max Sciandri introduced us. Max started talking to him in Italian, telling him who I was and what I’d done. I felt ten feet tall. I signed for Cofidis in 2006, having finally resolved to make a go of my road career. I decided to give Paris–Roubaix another shot, and found myself in a good position headed into the Arenberg. I wasn’t strong enough to stay with the likes of Cancellara, Boonen and Ballan, but I settled into the main chase group of about 50 or so. Looking round I noticed that many of them were classics specialists, real class acts. I was relatively comfortable among them, and I remember being interviewed in the velodrome afterwards. I said, ‘Well, even if I never do it again I’ll always be able to say I finished Paris–Roubaix.’ Three years later I went back, finished 25th and realised I had the ability to be competitive. I was a million miles away from winning the thing, but at least I was relevant. Franco Ballerini died tragically in 2010, co-piloting in a rally in Tuscany. It had a profound impact on me, but also on the Italian riders who’d ridden under him. I’d idolised him as a bike rider but guys like Pippo Pozzato loved him, almost without exception, as a human being. All of which largely explains my own efforts at the 2014 and 2015 Paris–Roubaix. In 2014 I was focused on trying to earn selection for the Tour team, so I wasn’t specifically prepared for Roubaix. I was in decent form, but I was mainly concentrating on being good for the Tour of California. Notwithstanding all of which, I was at the front all day, and I had the strength to attack in the finale. They caught me, and Niki Terpstra went clear, but I came in with Boonen, ?tybar and Cancellara. I finished top ten in a race I’d never really targeted, because in my best years my career path had taken me elsewhere. Roubaix requires colossal strength and stamina, but as I’d acquired them I’d been focused, necessarily, on the Tour. Regardless, I’d proved that I could be a player at the Hell of the North, and in 2015 I wanted to have a serious shot at it. I knew I’d need the cards to fall my way (you always need that at Roubaix, unless you’re a Boonen or a Cancellara), but I was one of the elder statesmen of the peloton. The flip-side was that I was in a team containing guys like Flecha, Thomas, Stannard and Hayman, experienced riders who were more than capable of challenging for the win themselves. The DS was Knaven, and he’d won Roubaix in 2001. When I put my hand up I knew I’d have the support of all of these people, but it was implicit that I’d need to perform. If you’re asking guys like Stannard to sacrifice themselves for you, you’d better have the legs to justify it. The rest is history. I attacked on the Templeuve, and that was no coincidence. Rather it was my way of paying tribute not only to the race itself, but also to Franco Ballerini. It was my way of honouring his memory, while simultaneously realising, as best I could, my own boyhood dream. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to have done, but cycling’s not all about watts, power meters and tactics. To me this was the very opposite of those things, and I like to think that Ballerini was of the same mind. I didn’t win Roubaix – I wasn’t half the classics rider he was – but hopefully he’d have approved. Franco Ballerini’s 1994 Mapei-Clas Colnago Titanio Bittan (#ulink_6567ab6c-e8ec-5e7e-a526-6fbf4e170e51) Racing in 1992 for the Banana-Met team. So I’d ‘met’ Museeuw and Ballerini, and shaken hands with Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. Next up would be a visit to the Milk Race, a pro-am Tour of Britain. I couldn’t wait to see real-life riders in the flesh, but in the meantime I had my 13th birthday. Like anyone starting out in cycling, I’d quickly become obsessed by its equipment and I wanted the same gear as the champions had. I wanted to ride like them and look like them, and that meant one thing and one thing only. A date with destiny for me, and a long haul down to the cycling heartlands of deepest, darkest Croydon for my poor, put-upon mother. It was a hell of a trip from Kilburn, and it wasn’t as if we had much. She was a single mum working as a receptionist at the local school, but I wasn’t interested in all that practical nonsense. Geoffrey Butler’s was probably the best bike shop in the south-east in those pre-internet days, and at that age you just want stuff. The stuff I wanted was cycling stuff, and so off we set. Before we went I made it clear that I wasn’t mucking about, and that I absolutely needed a pair of proper cycling sunglasses in the first instance. Then there was the legwarmers issue, which I felt needed to be addressed urgently. Previously I’d worn a pair of mum’s tights, and she’d elasticated the bottoms to make them seem real. I’m sure it was well meaning and all, but I wasn’t prepared to put up with it any longer. As an Olympic gold medalist in the making I wasn’t prepared to compromise, and I couldn’t be held back by substandard equipment. And besides, you wouldn’t have seen Franco Ballerini riding around in a pair of his mum’s tights … I THINK ROOTING AROUND IN THE BARGAIN BIN AT BUTLER’S is one of my very best childhood memories. I got a pair of shorts, and I found a Carrera headband like the ones I’d seen on TV. Then a Motorola cap like Sean Yates’s, a Tulip winter rain hat, a pair of Bernard Hinault cycling shoes and some Look clipless pedals. I was like a kid in a sweet bike shop. It seems crazy now, but it’s a classic cycling story. It’s rites-of-passage stuff, and I don’t suppose I was any different to thousands of other kids all over Europe. What was different was the fact that cycling was small-fry in Britain in just about every sense. Because there were so few shops you had to travel further to get kit, and I think that made it more of an event. There was a rarity value to the things you bought, and that was maybe because you had to do something and go somewhere to get them. British cycling is unrecognisable these days from what it used to be. Back then it wasn’t in the least bit ‘aspirational’, but rather price-sensitive. You didn’t have the likes of Rapha with their huge marketing budgets, and the British cycling industry was strictly of the cottage variety. It was centred around functionality and economy as distinct from ‘design’ and fashion, and such marketing as existed was quite primitive. It amounted to photos of the champions on their bikes, whereas these days it’s infinitely more sophisticated. Apparently it works – and whichever way you swing it, the more people out riding the better. None of this concerned my all-new teenage self. I was far too busy strutting around the flat and preening myself in my new headband, cycling shoes and cap. I was a racing cyclist, and by hook or by crook I was going to assert my new identity. The place to do that was the Archer Road Club. At first I’d been suspicious, but I was starting to feel at home there now. We had something – cycling – in common, but the collateral effects were positive as well. I was much happier, and my general demeanour was much better. Even school, which had never particularly interested me, became less of a drag. The teachers would say to my mum, ‘His behaviour has improved no end. He’s much more polite …’ From an Archer R.C. programme. Finally kitted out and no longer wearing my mum’s tights. I guess it was because I was going over to West London and riding with all these Oxford University types. They were all older than me, and they had ambitions to become doctors and academics, things like that. They weren’t ‘lads’, they weren’t always swearing and posturing, and they didn’t go around trying to intimidate people. I’d never really been exposed to people like them before, and they were nice. Like any impressionable adolescent I looked up to the bigger kids in my social circle, and the only thing I had to prove to them was my ability to ride a bike. Everything fitted around that – I felt like I was part of a community of equals, and people were genuinely interested in me. We rode our bikes, talked about riding them, and when we weren’t talking about riding them we were talking about other people riding theirs. It was a bit geeky in some ways, but I liked that aspect because, put simply, so was I. Club nights were social events, and the thing that bound us together was our love of cycling. These weren’t the kind of people I’d generally run across on the estate, but I soon realised that there was nothing not to like. I’d like to pretend I made a conscious decision to change course, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. I knew right from wrong, but if I’m honest it was cycling that chose me, not vice versa. I guess that’s just the way of it when you fall in love, but the long and the short of it is that my football ‘career’ was over. As a matter of fact, so was everything else. Now it was just cycling, cycling and more cycling. Probably just as well, because I was the beginnings of an adolescent. Everything was changing on the estate, and the innocent games of football we’d always played had started to mutate into something else. The lads I’d been knocking around with had started to ape their big brothers, which of course meant smoking, peering into car windows, that sort of thing. They were generally starting to get into a little bit of bother, and my mum could see where that might be headed. She encouraged my interest in cycling as much as possible, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Chris winning the 1993 Milk Race. And so to the Milk Race. Obviously I hadn’t seen the Tour de France at this point, so this was the first time I’d been exposed to a stage race. For me the idea that there was a two-week Tour of Britain was wonderful, mystical even. In the 1950s it had been an amateur race, because there had been no British professional riders. Initially it had been sponsored by the Daily Express, but then the Milk Marketing Board stepped in. By now it was a bit of a hybrid – a pro-am whose peloton was made up of British domestic professionals and national amateur teams from around the world. It started in Tunbridge Wells, and the opening stage was effectively a sort of Tour of Kent. They organised a junior criterium in Sevenoaks in advance of the race coming through, and I took part in it. After that I took my place on the side of the road with everyone else and waited for the peloton to arrive. It came through in a flash, and then we went home. That was it. Bike racing … I remember very little – there was very little to remember! – but in my mind’s eye I have a picture of Tony Doyle. He was a big star in British cycling, because he’d won the World Pursuit Championship twice. He was off the back getting a bottle or some such, and my mum said, ‘That guy there used to race with your dad! You had your photograph taken with him when you were little. Do you remember?’ Sky Sports showed the highlights every night, and I spent hours studying the minutiae of the event. I was making it my business to know everything – and I mean everything – about the race itself, the riders and the gear they used. It was a useful geography lesson, but most of all it was a lesson in bikes, shoes, gloves, helmets, jerseys, glasses … One of the teams was called Banana Energy. They were British, they had a really cool jersey with a big banana on it. You could buy the jersey at Yellow Jersey Cycles in London, and I went and got one in much the same way that other kids bought Arsenal or Spurs tops. A guy named Chris Lillywhite clinched the GC for them up in Manchester, and I became a fan. A quintessentially ‘English’ scene. Fording a stream in Westerdale, Yorkshire, during Stage 12 of the 1969 Milk Race. Later that year I rode down to Crystal Palace to watch Lillywhite win the British Criterium Championship. That was my first real exposure to professional riding, because I saw the team cars, the presentations, all the stuff of bike racing. I also got to see professionals, albeit domestic ones, close up. They weren’t perhaps as good as the top continental riders, but at 13 I wasn’t making comparisons. Their kits were just as shiny, the cars just as colourful, and their bikes seemed just as beautiful. Back then the Archer used to run the Grand Prix. It was one of the biggest races in the British calendar, and as a member you were expected to go and marshal. So each year I’d get my fluorescent bib and my flag, and watch the best of the Brits fly by. Over time I became part of the furniture of the club, and ultimately of the national junior team. I’ll never forget the first time I spent time with that generation of riders, though. It was 1998, and I’d earned a place at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. I was on the track team, and Lillywhite and co. were in the next door apartment. I was only 18, and they all used to laugh at me because I was this oracle of cycling knowledge. One night at dinner one of them, Matt Illingworth, said, ‘Right, Bradley, tell Chris what shoes he was wearing when he won the 1993 Milk Race.’ Quick as a flash I said, ‘They were Carnac Podiums, and they were black and white!’ They were all dumbfounded – I probably knew more about their careers than they did themselves. I always did have an obsessive streak. The upshot of all this is that when I set up Team Wiggins a few years back, Chris Lillywhite was the guy I wanted as sporting director. I was talking to him one day, explaining that I’d been a massive fan, and he said, ‘Stop winding me up!’ I think he assumed that, because I’ve been successful as a cyclist, I was being facetious, but he couldn’t have been further from the truth. I felt a little bit aggrieved, to be honest – regardless of my own career, the relationship you have with your heroes doesn’t tend to change. Guys like Chris don’t see themselves as stars, but for me in some way it’s still – and will forever remain – 1993. I’m still that 13-year-old kid, I’m still in awe of him and he’ll always be one of my all-time cycling champions. And that’s why, for all the yellow jerseys, rainbow jerseys and champion’s jerseys, I was so thrilled when he finally gave me his leader’s jersey from the 1993 Milk Race. Chris’s final yellow jersey as race winner of the 1993 Milk Race (#ulink_4c69f880-c9a2-5a18-9fec-bf9b629d899e) Miguel in cap and sunnies at the 1996 Tour de France; he was undoubtedly one of the best descenders of his generation. There were always copies of Cycling Weekly around the house. I’d never bothered with them, but after having watched Roubaix I started to devour them. I found the 1992 Tour de France editions, and started to read about the winner, this giant Spanish guy … Then in June a new magazine appeared. It was a monthly called Cycle Sport, much glossier than Cycling Weekly, and much slicker. It focused almost exclusively on continental pro racing, as distinct from boring time trials in some far-flung corner of the British Isles that I’d never heard of. There was more photography, more history, more colour and more glamour, and I thought it was fantastic. I’ve an idea that the first issue, or at least one of the first, was a Tour de France preview. I’d never watched the Tour before, but now I couldn’t wait. If there’s anything you ever want to know about the summer of 1993, I’m probably not your man. If, however, there’s anything – and I mean anything – you want to know about the 1993 Tour de France, I’m categorically your man. I tuned in religiously, thought of nothing else, and obviously bought the compilation video when it came out. It was the first cycling film I owned, and I’m fairly sure I watched it every night that winter. Those riders became my heroes, and to this day I can still reel them off. The sprinters were Nelissen, Cipollini, Ludwig, Moncassin and Abdoujaparov. In the GC group you had Rominger (second), Jasku?a (third), ?lvaro Mej?a (fourth, for Motorola). Chiappucci won a stage, Armstrong won a stage, Skibby and Bruyneel won stages. The teams had mysterious names, like Chazal, TVM, Ariostea and Telekom. I had no idea what they did or where they came from, but wherever it was I wanted to go there. Those three weeks in front of the TV were, and remain, one of the most immersive experiences of my life. And then there was Miguel. 1994 Tour de France podium maillot jaune CYCLING IS A VERY HARD SPORT. As often as not you’re operating right at the end-stops of your physical and psychological capabilities, so it can be extremely uncomfortable. You’re also competing against people whose job, essentially, is to destroy you. Any sign of weakness and they’re going to bury you, because that’s the business they’re in. The business of suffering, and of enduring. When I visualise guys like Marco Pantani, Tom Simpson and Luis Oca?a, I see pain etched into their features. That’s maybe because they’re synonymous with tragedy, but not so Museeuw, Jan Ullrich, even Eddy Merckx. They wore their suffering as well, because in cycling nobody is immune. The great champions aren’t successful because they’re talented per se (though talented they clearly are), but because they have the ability to hurt themselves a lot. Whatever your physical gifts, you’re not going to complete the Tour, let alone win it, unless you’re prepared to go really, really deep. And that’s why we need to talk about Miguelon … Miguel Indur?in was the same, but completely different. He won five consecutive Tours de France because he was freakishly engineered, but also because he was a tremendous competitor. Where he was different, though, completely different, was in the way he won his Tours. While his opponents seemed to be wrecking themselves, he gave the impression of being out for a bike ride. They were the best climbers in the world, right at the top of their form, and yet he made beating them look easy. As a matter of fact it was anything but easy, and still less so given that he was much heavier than them. He was six foot three and 82 kilos, and there are mountains – big ones – to get over in France. Imagine how soul-destroying it must have been. Whatever you tried, this great man was going to be completely unflappable. His facial expression was never going to alter for three weeks, but come what may he was going to beat you, and he was going to make beating you appear the easiest thing in the world. The horrific, brutal days in the Pyrenees were going to seem entirely routine for him, the heat and humidity only minor inconveniences. He’d hammer you in the time trial, maybe demoralise you in a couple of the mountain stages, and for the other 18 days just ride alongside you, seemingly without himself. That sounds horrendous, but it’s also entirely the point. Miguel was much, much better than the rest, but the key to the five Tours he won is that there was nothing at all gratuitous about them, or him. Where guys like Merckx and Armstrong seemed to want to crush their opponents, he killed them softly. He didn’t do it painlessly – it’s the Tour de France after all – but wordlessly and, in some way, mercifully. People say he was machine-like, robotic, all that stuff, and watching him race they are easy conclusions to draw. For me, though, he was the opposite of these things. Miguel made sure he beat the guys that mattered when it mattered, but he wasn’t interested in winning stages for the sake of it. In fact, he never won a single road stage in those five Tours, just time trials. That’s because he had no ego, and he was more than happy for everyone to have a share of the cake. Now it could be said that they were fighting over the crumbs, but he took pains to ensure that there were plenty to go round. It’s no coincidence that he always won by around five minutes, because he only ever took as much as he needed. That, I think, is what makes him unique among the five-time Tour de France winners. On his way to gold in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics time trial – his last big win. The first of them, Jacques Anquetil, understood that he needed friends in the peloton. He had a caustic rivalry with Raymond Poulidor, and the notion that Poulidor might beat him at the Tour was unthinkable. He knew that he needed as many allies as possible in the peloton, so he made it his business to ensure that the rank and file were on his side. Bernard Hinault understood this as well, but his methods were different. He was a patriarch or, in cycling parlance, a ‘patron’. His reign was built around psychology and strategy, and at times it was quite feudal. It’s inarguable that his wins at the 1982 Giro and the 1985 Tour were achieved more with his head than his legs. Tommy Prim and Greg LeMond were each stronger than him, but each was brow-beaten into settling for second place. Everything Hinault did was calculated and calibrated, and nothing happened by accident. Miguel was much less calculating than either Anquetil or Hinault, though contrary to popular misconception he was anything but na?ve. He understood that it paid to have friends in high places, but he was the polar opposite of someone like Hinault. He raced hard, but he wasn’t one of those who turned into an animal when he pinned a number on. The context changed, but he didn’t, and his innate kindness didn’t ever desert him. He didn’t generally do many interviews, but when he did he was humble, respectful and courteous. The other riders liked him because it was impossible not to. I don’t ever remember him punching the air or shaking his fists when he won the Tour. The one and only time I recall him being demonstrative was at a race he didn’t win, the 1995 World Championships in Colombia. He’d won the time trial, and now he was away on the final lap with the Italians, Pantani and Gianetti, and with Abraham Olano, the ‘Baby Indur?in’. When Olano attacked, the Italians didn’t respond, so Miguel was able to sit on as his countryman disappeared up the road. Olano subsequently punctured, but famously managed to roll over the line on his rim. That left Miguel contesting a sprint for second with the two Italians, and when he won he celebrated as if he’d won the rainbow jersey himself. Of course he hadn’t, but that’s entirely the point. He was delighted for Olano in the first instance, and for his country in the second. Spain had been failing to win the Worlds for 62 years, and finally his friend had achieved it. The bike ridden by Indur?in in the TT stage of the 1992 Tour of Romandie, his last race before winning his first Giro d’Italia With the Pinarello bike at the Tour de France, where his time-trialling ability did much to secure him his five victories. Stories about Miguel are legion, but I think his character is best summed up by a couple that Juan Antonio Flecha told me while we were training together. One of Miguel’s sponsors was Sidi, the Italian shoe manufacturer. They had a rider-liaison person there, and if the riders wanted something she was their point of contact. She told Flecha about her dealings with Indur?in, and he passed the story on to me. The first story goes that Miguel, who had won maybe four Tours de France by that point, would ring the girl and ask, extremely politely, whether it might be possible for him to have another pair of shoes, on account of the others being worn out, or broken, or whatever. The girl would say, ‘Well, yes! Of course it is! You can have as many as you like! You’re Miguel Indur?in!,’ but she said she never really felt as if she’d convinced him. Very obviously he knew he was Miguel Indur?in, but he seemed to not have the faintest idea of what that meant. When he finished he rang the girl again. It was 1996, he’d finally lost the Tour, and then they’d pretty much obliged him to do the Vuelta. He really hadn’t wanted to do it, but in the end he’d succumbed to pressure from the Spanish public, the team and the sponsors. He’d only just turned 32, but he was spent psychologically as much as physically. Alex Z?lle beat him in the time trial, then dropped him on Monte Naranco, and the following day Miguel famously climbed off on the road to Covadonga and walked into a bar. He said not a word to anyone, and in truth he didn’t need to. He didn’t want to be a cyclist anymore, so he stopped. (The extraordinary thing is that the other riders stopped as well, to see what was wrong. This was a guy who had been hammering them for five years, and yet they were worried about his well-being.) Anyway, that was that. Career over. Now this took place on 21 September. It was the fag end of the season, and in retiring he probably missed ten days’ racing, no more. Keep in mind that over the previous five years he’d delivered five Tours de France, two Giri d’Italia and goodness knows how many others, so sponsors like Sidi had gotten more than their money’s worth. Miguel being Miguel, however, picked up the phone and rang the girl again. He said, ‘I think I’m in breach of contract, so you need to tell me how much money I owe you, and I need to send the shoes I have back.’ The other story that springs to mind came from Txema Gonz?lez. He was a lovely guy, a Team Sky soigneur, who died during the 2010 Vuelta. He said it was one of those horrible wet days at the Tour of the Basque Country, and the staff were all sitting on the team bus waiting for the stage finish. It was belting down with rain, and the poor spectators were standing behind the barriers waiting by the finish. One of the guys on the bus looked out of the window and said, ‘There’s a guy over there in a green cape, and I’m sure it’s Indur?in. He’s the spitting image!’ So Txema got off the bus and went over, and lo and behold it was – it was Miguel. He said, ‘Miguel, what are you doing standing here? Come in the bus and get dry!’ The issue here is that Miguel wouldn’t have dreamed of getting onto a team bus, for two reasons. First, he wouldn’t have wanted to intrude, and second, the last thing he’d have wanted was to be treated differently to the other people standing there. It was raining, so as he saw it that would have been rude. We’re talking about a cyclist here, but he didn’t exist in a vacuum. Spain was in turmoil while he was winning the Tour, and ETA was waging a war. Miguel is from Pamplona, on the doorstep of the Basque Country, and yet in some way he was a unifying force. They may have tried to exploit him or appropriate him, but there was a sense that, even in conflict, he represented a line that couldn’t be crossed. It was as if everyone in Spain decided, subconsciously, that in some way he transcended the war. As if he were a deity. Likewise the fallout from the doping scandals. It’s a matter of public record that he rode during the EPO years, and yet he’s the Tour winner that nobody – journalist, judiciary, former rider – has ever gone after. They’ve gone after Riis, Ullrich, Pantani and Armstrong, and history tells us they’ve been going after Tour winners (myself included) since Jan Janssen in 1968. There has to be a reason why only Miguel has been left alone, and to me it’s pretty clear what that reason is. Whatever the context and whatever was happening in cycling, Indur?in’s morality is bomb-proof. When I won the time trial at the 2012 Tour I did an interview for Spanish TV. I mentioned having grown up watching him smash them, and the journalists went to see him. Evidently he said nice things about me, and TVE said they wanted to revisit me on the second rest day, to show me the film. I said that would be fine, and when they came they had something for me. They gave me this claret-coloured neckerchief with the Indur?in family crest on it. To be perfectly honest I didn’t really understand what it was, but then they explained that it was from San Ferm?n, the summer festival in Pamplona where they run the bulls. Afterwards I showed it to the Spanish guys on the team and they were taken aback. They explained that for someone from a Navarro family to make a gift of something like that was extremely rare. It signified my being an extended part of the Indur?in family, so it was just about the highest honour Miguel could have bestowed on me. As you can imagine, I was really touched. The Indur?in family neckerchief from San Ferm?n, gifted to me by Miguel Two years later I went to the Gran Fondo Pinarello in Treviso, and Fausto Pinarello told me Miguel was coming. He’d always ridden Pinarello bikes, including the legendary Espada on which he broke the Hour Record after the 1994 Tour. He’d ridden it when becoming the first man to ride over 53 kilometres in an hour, and he’d remained a friend of the Pinarello family. So it was not unlike that Museeuw moment, me panicking about meeting one of my boyhood favourites and fretting about what I would say to him. The day before the event we were wandering around the square looking at the sponsor’s stands, and Fausto spotted Miguel. He said, ‘It’s Miguel! Come on – let’s go and see him,’ but I wasn’t ready. I’d been building myself up for the moment, but the moment wasn’t supposed to be until the following morning. I said to Fausto, ‘Can’t we leave it until tomorrow?’ because I went into full panic mode. It sounds like a stupid clich?, but growing up on a council estate in Kilburn I couldn’t have imagined something like that. He was this perfectly calibrated cycling machine from Pamplona, and I hadn’t even known where Pamplona was! The moment Fausto Pinarello introduced me to Miguel – one of my favourite riders as a boy. Hopefully not looking totally overwhelmed. Anyway, he was everything that everybody had said he was, just a lovely man. He and I sat together at dinner that evening, having one of those European conversations. He spoke no English but a little bit of French, I spoke good French but no Spanish, and Fausto helped us because being Italian (and very smart) he understood a bit of everything. I mentioned the fact that I was minded to attempt the Hour, and he asked me some questions about it. When I asked him how he’d trained for it he said that he hadn’t really, at least not specifically. That says it all, because he’d just ridden a time trial. He didn’t expand on that, because he much preferred listening to talking about his own achievements. Then again, his achievements speak for themselves. Volumes. He’s Miguel Indur?in. (#ulink_4e43eedf-da37-5645-bcf6-f6c60f7d39d1) ‘The Animal’ looking achingly cool in the British champion’s jersey and gold earring. As I became a rider in my own right, so my list of cycling idols began to take shape. Museeuw was a warrior, Gianni Bugno some sort of a magician, Indur?in this serene, beautiful winning machine. Top of the list, however, was a guy who wasn’t a great champion. I’d never seen him win a single race, and yet somehow he was the very embodiment of everything I loved about bike racing. When Duclos and Ballerini slipped away at the previous year’s Paris–Roubaix, there was a chase group of seven or eight. Museeuw and Olaf Ludwig were in it, and so too were the classics specialists Edwig Van Hooydonck and Adri van der Poel. Then there was this other guy. He was wearing a white jersey with two horizontal stripes across the chest, a red one and a blue one. My mum explained that he was the British champion and that his name was Sean Yates. She also said he’d ridden for the Archer, just like me. My mum still loved cycling. She’d met my dad through it and had never really stopped following it. In the past I’d never given the sport a second thought, but this all changed after that Paris–Roubaix. Back then Cycling Weekly used to put a poster on the back cover, and on 15 April 1993 it was of this guy Yates. He was rounding a corner, that beautiful jersey covered in dust. Unlike the rest of them he had no gloves and no helmet, and his shorts seemed to be shorter than anyone else’s. He was wearing an earring, and I thought that was impossibly cool. I cut the poster out and put it up on my bedroom wall. It’s also true to say that I spent far more time than was probably healthy staring at it. My guilty little secret? Not really. Not at all, in fact. Thing is, I just really, really wanted to be like Sean Yates. Complete with earring and thinking that I’m Sean Yates, in 1994. IN THE MID-NINETIES, top-end British road cyclists were few and far between on the international circuit. There were dozens of Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians and Spaniards, and quite a lot of Dutchmen and Germans. There were a few talented Swiss, some Colombian climbing specialists, and beyond that a bit of a mishmash. You had the odd American, Scandinavian and former Soviet, with a few stragglers from elsewhere thrown in here and there. The Brits were very much in the latter category, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. It meant that while the chances of one of them winning any given race were pretty slim, as a fan it wasn’t hard to choose your favourites. Boardman was immense, but essentially a time-trial specialist. He and Graeme Obree were engaged in a titanic struggle for the Hour Record, but I wasn’t yet dialled into that, and Obree was a complete enigma. Chris was his total opposite, and I found him a bit methodical. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate him, and there’s no question he was a phenomenal athlete. He’s gone on to become a really important advocate for cycling as a whole, but back then it was all a bit clinical for me. I was a romantic, idealistic teenager, and his approach seemed rather too scientific. Robert Millar’s winning days were behind him, and beyond that there was hardly anybody. Harry Lodge was holding down a job with an Italian team, Malcolm Elliott had gone to race in America, and I seem to think that Brian Smith had a contract at Motorola. Max Sciandri had been born in Britain, and that would come in handy when the Olympics came around. In reality, though, he’d been raised in Tuscany, and to all intents and purposes he was Italian. I knew about Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, but they were coming to the end by then. Of course, they are Irish, not British. It was not about nationality either – at 13 I admired them all the same. Thank God, then, for Yates. Hanging in there to win Stage 6 of the 1988 Tour de France – with a record average speed at the time. 1983 Four Days of Dunkirk leader’s jersey 1988 Paris–Nice leader’s jersey 1992 Leeds Classic, national champion’s jersey 1992 National Championship jersey Britain was far from a ‘traditional’ cycling country – road racing had been outlawed here before the Second World War – but contrary to popular belief it wasn’t a complete desert as regards pro racing. The Milk Race was essentially for British domestic riders and foreign amateurs, but we had the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain to look forward to in August. That was followed two days later by the Leeds Classic, which had been founded by Alan Rushton in 1989. It was part of the new World Cup series, and all the big teams raced there. The UCI were trying to globalise cycling, but the race was typically British in the sense that, with the best will in the world, there was no money in it. The first edition had been in Newcastle, then it had moved to Brighton, and now it was up in Yorkshire. Everyone said they loved racing it, and the crowds were great. In retrospect, though, Britain just didn’t have the critical mass for a race like that to succeed. The Leeds (or Rochester, or Wincanton …) would fold the following year, and Hamburg would take its place in the World Cup. That’s just the way it was, I’m afraid. The sporting landscape was different back then, totally dominated by football, cricket, rugby and golf. Oh, and snooker. Whatever. First and foremost, the 1994 Tour de France was coming back to England. I say ‘coming back’, because I’d learned that there had been a stage in Plymouth twenty years earlier, though seemingly it had been a bit of a dog’s dinner. They hadn’t managed to get it televised live – I assume it would have interfered with the wrestling on World of Sport – but evidently that was no bad thing because the ‘racing’ had been hopeless. They’d literally just ridden up the new bypass to the roundabout, and then ridden back down it again. Thirty times. This time there would be two real stages, on days four and five. Everybody at the club was talking about them, not least because Boardman might be in yellow. He was the best prologue rider in the world, and if he could get the jersey and survive the team time trial we’d have one of our own in the maillot jaune when the race crossed the Channel. I learned that no Brit had worn the yellow jersey since 1962, when a certain Tom Simpson had kept it for a single day. Chris duly won the jersey but his team, GAN, couldn’t defend it in the time trial. Museeuw took it from him and wore it on the stage from Dover to Brighton, but the next day one of his team-mates, an Italian guy named Flavio Vanzella, got it in the break. He wore it into Portsmouth, and that was that for the British stages. As ever with the Tour, the fun seemed to be over before it had really begun. That’s the nature of cycling, I suppose, and I was starting to understand that part of its beauty is the fact that it’s so ephemeral, so fleeting. Yates hadn’t particularly extended himself in the prologue. He’d shipped almost a minute because he wasn’t a GC rider, but also because he was a serious professional with a job to do. Motorola had made the team time trial one of their main objectives, and Sean would need to preserve every ounce of energy he could for that. Motorola also had the likes of Steve Bauer and Phil Anderson, really powerful rouleurs with big engines, but you’d be hard-pushed to find any team time triallists better than Yates over 65 kilometres. In the event they finished second in the TTT, but as a consequence Sean found himself in seventh place overall when they got back to France. Yates wearing the maillot jaune in 1994 for a single day, before losing it to Museeuw on Stage 7. The first French stage was Cherbourg to Rennes, 270 kilometres. A break went, Sean and one of his team-mates got in it, and then one of the escapees, Bortolami, jumped off the front. Now all hell broke loose because you had Bortolami trying to win both the stage and the jersey, Sean and co. desperately trying to bring him back, and Vanzella’s team turning themselves inside out to bring them back. There were effectively three races in one, which is typical of the frantic, dramatic, desperate stuff you often see during the opening week of the Tour. Bortolami held on for the stage, but Sean was a monster. When the dust settled he’d taken the jersey by a single second, with Bortolami second and Museeuw third. Now it could be argued that he fell on his feet that day, because I am not sure that he’d set out with the objective of claiming the jersey. That wasn’t his job, but by the same token you don’t get to wear it by accident. That’s the key to it, because Sean’s day in yellow was fundamentally a consequence of both his physical strength and, paradoxically, his altruism. He’d shipped some time initially, and then buried himself for his team. That had left him there or thereabouts on GC, but not so close to the race leader that they weren’t prepared to cut him a little bit of slack. He grabbed it with both hands, and there was nobody better equipped to keep hold of it on that kind of terrain. It was his first yellow jersey in his 11th Tour de France, and nobody was ever more deserving. It was breathtaking, heroic stuff, the stuff of the Tour … My prized possession – 1994 Tour de France maillot jaune Meanwhile, back in down-at-heel Kilburn, I had no interest in anything but cycling. I was extremely ambitious, and my mind was set on winning Olympic gold on the track and wearing the yellow jersey on the road. Boardman had won the pursuit and now, in him and Sean, Britain had claimed two yellows in under a week! For me that was confirmation that it was possible, because I figured that if they could do it there was no reason why I couldn’t. My mind was made up, and by the end of 1995 I was up and running. I was winning quite often, and I too had a British champion’s jersey. It was only the junior points race, but it presaged another big moment in my cycling life. There was a prize-giving dinner, and of course everyone who’d won a title was invited. Robert Millar was present because he’d won the road race championship, but I seem to recall that Boardman was absent because he’d had a big off at the Tour and was convalescing. Sean was presenting the prizes, though, and what with me being at the bottom of the undercard I was first up onto the stage. I asked him to autograph the programme, and suffice to say this was the highlight not only of my cycling year but also of my fledgling career. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/bradley-wiggins/icons-my-inspiration-my-motivation-my-obsession/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.