Bradley Wiggins: My Time Read online

  By the end of the Tour it was clear that we needed to look at where it had all gone wrong. There had to be a review of how we had built up to it, taking in everything: my racing programme, how we selected the team, how we dealt with the media, how we rode the race. At one point late on, Dave said to me, ‘Look, we know you’ve got the machine. We know you can do it. You finished 4th last year. We just need to figure out how to get your body working properly.’ But after Paris the whole team went their separate ways: we were all exhausted, and at the end of the Tour, all you want to do is get home. I didn’t ride my bike for a week and then the Sunday after the Tour de France finished, I took part in the Manchester Sky Ride, one of a series of mass-participation cycle rides where thousands of members of the public could get on their bikes and pedal along with the stars.

  That night I was sitting at home when my phone rang. It was my mum and she said, ‘George has had a heart attack.’ I said, ‘Fucking hell’, or something, and I hung up on her. I had absolutely no idea what to say. George was my granddad.

  CHAPTER 2

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  ROCK BOTTOM

  WHEN I CAME off the phone, Cath asked me, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I said, ‘George has had a heart attack.’

  We had no idea what to do. It was about ten o’clock at night, so we dropped everything and drove to London. We got to the hospital at about two o’clock in the morning and stayed all through the night. He was on a life-support machine, so I stayed for three or four days at the hospital, day and night.

  George had always been there. He was the father figure, the role model in my young life, from the day when my mother Linda and I moved in to my nan and granddad’s flat in Kilburn after my father Gary had walked out on us. Gary didn’t so much walk out on us in Christmas 1982 as throw us out. I wasn’t even two-years-old. We’d gone from our home in Ghent to see my mum’s parents, and he called my mum to say she and I weren’t to come back to Belgium. He’d got together with someone else. For a while, until Mum got a small place of her own, I ended up living in a family consisting predominantly of women: Nan and Granddad and their three daughters and me. For a long time, George was the only other male in that environment until my aunties had kids. For my first eight or nine years I spent a lot of time with him, so he was like a father in many respects; he brought me up. I find it difficult to explain what he was like. I suppose everything I am, everything I say, all my mannerisms and so on, all come from him.

  Granddad loved sport, so I used to go greyhound racing with him every Saturday night at Wimbledon dog track. We had a weekend routine of our own: Saturday morning I’d go and get Sporting Life and a handful of betting slips from Ladbrokes for him, go back home and fill in all the betting slips for the Saturday afternoon horse racing on the telly, and after that it was off to watch the dogs. Through him, I learned all about betting: how the odds work, all the signs the tic-tac men use. I guess as I got older he was incredibly proud of me, but he never showed it to me. Even now, that side of my family doesn’t hold me up as anything special, I’m just like any other cousin or grandchild. They don’t really say, ‘I’m so proud of you’, they’ll still put me down or whatever – ‘What’ve you got your hair like that for?’ – which helps you keep a sense of who you are.

  George had been to watch Gary Wiggins race when he was with my mum. Gary was a hard-drinking Australian bike racer who had come over to Belgium to make a living competing on the track in the Six Days in the winter and the kermesses – the little circuit races that make up the bulk of the Belgian calendar – through the summer. George would tell me about a time when Gary had crashed somewhere, and he had pulled all the splinters from the wooden track out of his back with pliers. Gary shut us out of his life from before I was two until I was in my seventeenth year, from the day he came back to London with four black bin liners containing our stuff from Belgium and dumped them at the bottom of the stairs to the flat where Nan and Granddad lived. He moved to Australia later, and briefly, in my late teens, we spent a little time together there, but we never built a proper relationship.

  Gary had used amphetamines to race; he’d sold them to other bike riders, and worst of all he’d knocked my mum about. In spite of all that, George never, ever said to me what he thought of my dad until I was about eighteen or nineteen, and he told me, ‘Look, he’s a wanker …’ But he never said that through my childhood years. Instead, he always spoke of him, perhaps not affectionately, but along the lines of ‘He was a bike rider’, or ‘He did this; I remember when your dad crashed once; I remember when your dad did this race once.’ I suppose he left me to find out in my own way what kind of a person Gary was. I do know, however, that from the point of view of a father, he never forgave Gary for what he did to us two.

  After a few days in the hospital, the doctors told Cath and me that we might as well go home for a little while, pick up the kids and collect some stuff. There wasn’t a lot more we could do, so we went back north for a couple of days and then it was back down to London. We got as far as the Tuesday, nine days after it had happened, and the doctors told us they were going to turn the life support off. His brain had been deprived of oxygen, so even if he did come round he would be a cabbage. They said, ‘Look, we’re going to turn it off but it might take twenty-four hours for him to pass away.’ They turned it off and we sat there most of the night with my nan; in the morning he still hadn’t gone. My nan said, ‘Just go home, it don’t matter. He knows you’re here, he could be another couple of days yet. Go on, go home, I’ll sit him out, you need to get home.’

  So off we went. Cath and I were on the M1 about ten minutes away from Watford Gap services when my mum rang me and said, ‘George has died.’ We stopped in Watford Gap and had a coffee and that was it. He’d gone. I had last seen him properly the year before when we’d had a party in the golf club near our home, funnily enough on the day after Sky and Garmin had thrashed out my transfer deal in New York. He’d been ill for quite a while but he hid it well. Losing this man who’d been there all through my childhood and my teens, who had given me some stability when I was a kid, was a massive blow. It came at a time when I was struggling with my career and it left me dealing with one of the hardest periods of my life.

  I’d had to go through the disappointment of the Tour, the way I felt that not everyone in the team had been there with me. I felt a bit of a failure. I felt as if I’d let a lot of people down. People were saying publicly that I was never going to win the Tour, that I had been stupid to sign with Sky, that them hiring me was a waste of money and a bad investment. I didn’t know how to deal with it. Cath sometimes describes me as emotionally retarded but what she means is that I really struggle to express my emotions and I bury my head in the sand over a lot of stuff. I always try to remain positive even when I’m not feeling it inside. So if someone asks me if I’m all right, I’ll tend to say, ‘Yeah, yeah I’m fine.’ So at the time, I just tried to take it in my stride, making it look as if I was coping with it. But in fact I was in a bit of a state with everything that had happened.

  We drove home, trying to get our heads around it all, and on the Wednesday Shane rang me.

  ‘You need to fucking get into the office.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You need to get into the fucking office.’

  And I started thinking: what’s happened? What could it be? The next day I went into Sky’s office in the Manchester velodrome; apparently they had been fuming. The trouble was that I hadn’t switched my phone on during this whole period. All that time I’d had no thoughts of cycling at all; I had been on another planet. My phone had been off since the Tour, so for nearly two and a half weeks Shane or Dave or Fran Millar, the logistics manager, or other people from the team had been trying to ring and they were getting annoyed with me. They were really angry, in fact. They had no idea what had happened.

  I had thought I would be in for the hairdryer treatment, but by the time I got there, Shane had got hold of Cath and
she had told him what had happened to my granddad. I think that dampened it down a little bit. The line that I was given was that something had to change. I think I’d told a journalist that that was it, I wasn’t going to race for the rest of the year after the Tour, I was knackered. The journalist had rung Dave and told him what I’d said and Dave was annoyed because he hadn’t heard it from the horse’s mouth. In the office they reeled off the names of my rivals: Cadel Evans, then the world champion, who’d had a disastrous crash in the Tour; the former Giro winner Ivan Basso; they were already back out there racing, they told me, and I needed to get out there now. Brad, they said, you don’t ever answer your phone, people can’t get hold of you, you’re unreliable. They were very unhappy with me and I can understand why. I’m not saying they were wrong. We couldn’t go on like this.

  The Sky management were determined that I get back on my bike, so we had a look at the race programme. The first thought was that I might race at the Eneco Tour of Belgium and Holland, the following week. That didn’t sit well with me because it was George’s funeral that week and there was no way I was missing it, so I opted to go to the Grand prix de Plouay in Brittany, then the British Time Trial Championships and Tour of Britain. A week later I went back down to London for George’s funeral on the Saturday. We had the wake, I had a few drinks; I was racing the following day so the next morning I flew out of London City to Nantes to race at Plouay. There I just made matters worse. I was asked at the start by French television, ‘What are you expecting today?’ and I let slip that I wasn’t really in the mood, something like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t even really want to be here if I’m honest.’ Shane saw that and was really annoyed about it but it was the day after the funeral; I still stand by that. I was just trying to take it all in my stride as I did at the Tour, when I didn’t have the form, I didn’t want to be there and I’d had to keep bluffing. I already felt really insecure because I felt as if I had let everyone down during the Tour, so I didn’t have the guts at that stage to say, ‘I’m not racing, my granddad has just died, it’s a hard time for me and I need a week or two off.’

  So I got on with it. I finished Plouay, went home, back to Gerona with Cath and the kids, and I started training again; I was out on my bike every day getting in some decent work. I had the British Time Trial Championships at the start of September, which I won, and then I did my job at the Tour of Britain but, as a team, Sky didn’t have great form. We won a stage; I nearly won another, but overall we weren’t in the hunt. I didn’t feel like a leader at that point, and there were a few things that went wrong on that race, in front of the home media and the home crowd.

  For the rest of the season it was a matter of getting through. I’d already opted out of the Commonwealth Games and the Road World Championships; they were in India and Australia which was just too much travelling. But again after the Tour of Britain I didn’t ride my bike for a week. I had no motivation whatsoever. About ten days after Britain finished, I was in bed and there was a phone call at midnight to the landline. Cath answered. It was Shane and he was just going absolutely bonkers.

  ‘Where’s Brad, what the fuck’s he doing in bed?’

  ‘Well, it’s midnight, you know.’

  Shane was with the Great Britain team and they were in Australia, in Geelong, at the Road World Championships, in a totally different time zone.

  ‘Dave’s fuming. Fran’s tried to get hold of Brad and he hasn’t answered the phone to her.’

  Cath explained that I had lost my phone. We’d just bought our new house, I’d been up there doing some work on it and I’d left my phone in the garage when I went back to our old house down the road. It was typical of the way things went that year: the day I left my phone up there, everyone was trying to get hold of me.

  Then Shane added: ‘Dave sent you a text, it’s pretty fucking damning, you need to go and read it.’ Actually I couldn’t find my phone for days so I didn’t find out what was in the text. Anyway, I was dead worried. I didn’t sleep all night. The next day I went in to see Fran in the team office, feeling like a little kid who’s been told off. The Great Britain team are all based in the Manchester velodrome, just down the corridor from Sky, so I asked to see Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who works for the GB team, who had helped me out on occasions in the past. Steve calls himself a ‘mechanic of the mind’, but he has a broad-brush approach because so many of the psychological issues you have in sport go back to your personal life and your background. What that means is that if there’s a big problem, a really big problem, and particularly one that concerns your relationships with other people within the team, he’s the man you turn to.

  ‘Look, Steve, I don’t know what’s happened but nothing I seem to do at the moment is right. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. It’s just been a disaster. I’m sort of mourning a little bit and I’m trying to bury my head in the sand with it.’

  ‘I know the situation, I’ve spoken to Dave. Obviously Dave has talked to me about it, he’s said, “What should we do with Brad? He’s a bloody nightmare.”’

  ‘Am I going to lose my job, Steve?’

  ‘Well, I won’t lie to you, it’s been mentioned.’

  And that really shook me.

  Steve explained to me about a few pieces that had appeared in the media. I think there had been an article in The Times saying I was difficult to work with, calling me arrogant. Dave had seen it and he wasn’t happy about how it reflected on the image of the team. He felt I wasn’t leading the squad as I should be and clearly he was right. As Steve told me, Dave had a job to do, which was to run the team, and he was wondering what Sky, as our sponsors, were going to make of their leader drawing such negative coverage.

  ‘Steve, what do the other trainers in the team say?’

  ‘The other trainers say, “Look at getting someone else in.”’

  If Sky replaced me as leader, perhaps demoting me to a team role, it would be disastrous for me: an admission that I couldn’t win the Tour and that Sky had put their eggs in the wrong basket. My name would be mud. I would take a massive pay cut, but worst of all I would be branded a failure, not up to the task of being at the top of the biggest project that British cycling had ever seen. I headed for home, beating myself up and convinced something had to change.

  Cath was struggling with it as well. She kept saying, ‘They don’t quite understand what has happened, with George dying and just what that means. Have you told them, have you told them exactly?’

  ‘Of course not, I don’t want to appear weak.’

  The thing is, it’s hard to go into the office in Manchester and stand there in front of Dave and Shane, who are quite intimidating guys, and say to them, ‘You know what, I am really struggling at the moment. I just feel like crying all the time.’

  I had envisaged Shane going, ‘Pull your fucking self together’, or something along those lines. That’s what you expect it’ll be like.

  That seems over the top but at that time I was already feeling pretty low. Everything I did seemed to turn into a disaster of some kind. Around the time of the British Time Trial Championships I did an interview with Procycling magazine, where the journalist asked me what the mistakes were that we’d made at Sky. I remember talking about Garmin and how much of a good time I’d had there, how they were a great team. It came across in the interview that I was saying how great Garmin was and how Sky was too serious, for example, having the massive team bus with all its high-tech kit. Dave read the interview, was really fed up with me and sent me a text, the gist of which was, ‘Nice piece in Procycling, slagging the team off.’ But 2010 hadn’t been an easy year for Dave, of course. He was struggling a bit too, because it was his first season as a team boss on a professional road-racing team and questions were being asked. He was under pressure as well.

  I decided from that summer that I couldn’t carry on in this way. I wasn’t enjoying it. I had to make amends and I was ready to do that. That year I had shied away from a number of
my more stressful responsibilities as team leader, simple things like dealing with the media. They weren’t to do with being a cyclist but they were the kind of things that go towards how you are perceived by your teammates. I’ve always had a tendency to withdraw into myself. That didn’t matter when I was an individual on the track going for individual gold medals because I only had to focus on bringing the best out of myself. Sky is a big outfit. It’s not three other guys like you have in a team pursuit, but twenty-six riders plus thirty-odd staff. I wasn’t carrying them with me. I didn’t appreciate the knock-on effect it would have on everyone around me when I withdrew, as I had often done in the past. The possibility that I might be demoted from leadership, reduced to the ranks, was a massive wake-up call, a huge disappointment. In a word: humiliation. Dealing with it would mean growing up.

  The turning point had already come. George’s death had had something to do with it. It wasn’t exactly that I went out and said, ‘Oh, I’m going to win the Tour de France for my granddad.’ It wasn’t like that. His death had a huge impact on me that year. I wouldn’t say it was the only thing that turned me around but, looking back, I was a changed man after that whole episode. It was more that his death came on top of everything else that had gone wrong. I don’t know if it was a matter of standing on my own two feet because I had lost my father figure. I really don’t know. Even now I think more than anything I threw myself even harder into trying to win the Tour as a way of forgetting about it.