Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France. Richard Moore
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allow him to control what at times seemed uncontrollable.
Martigny, Switzerland, 21 July 2009
Dave Brailsford and Jonathan Vaughters are standing together, but apart from the crowd, in the Village Départ of the Tour de France, locked in conversation. In less than an hour stage 16 of the Tour de France will get underway from the Swiss town of Martigny, crossing the Col du Grand-Saint-Bernard and the Col du Petit-Saint-Bernard, both enormous Alpine passes, before finishing in Bourg-Saint-Maurice.
They make for an interesting, contrasting pair: Brailsford in British Cycling uniform of blue jeans and polo shirt, the quirkily debonair Vaughters, manager of the Garmin-Slipstream team, in a crisply ironed pale blue shirt, white jeans and brown suede loafers. Vaughters also wears small rectangular, subtly shaded glasses, and has long sideburns, two thin wedges extending down his cheeks towards the corners of his mouth. Since riding with Lance Armstrong in the US Postal team in the late 1990s, Vaughters has cast himself as an outsider, with an original, innovative approach. His team was set up to be different, from their Argyle-patterned strips to the anti-doping culture and the central hub – rather than being strewn across the continent, most of Vaughters’ riders live in Girona, Spain. In fact, Vaughters has perhaps stolen a march on Brailsford here. His Garmin team, with its anti-doping ethos and internal testing programme, and its centralised base (unlike other teams, Vaughters knows where his riders are in between races), is doing some of the things Brailsford said he’d do.
Brailsford and Vaughters have much to talk about. Since the pre-Olympic holding camp, in Newport 12 months ago, everything has changed, in particular with regard to Bradley Wiggins. After winning his two gold medals in Beijing, Wiggins, now riding for Vaughters’ team, turned his attention, finally, to road racing. And his aspirations seem to extend further than long, doomed solo breakaways. At the Tour’s start in Monaco he even admitted that, for the first time in his career, he was aiming for a high overall placing. By ‘high’, he said, he was thinking top 20. Privately he was thinking top 15, maybe even top 10.
Now, in the final week of the 2009 race, to widespread astonishment, Wiggins sits third overall, just behind Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong. On the previous stage, to the ski town of Verbier, his performance was befitting his lofty placing. After his teammates David Millar and Christian Vande Velde set a searing pace to the foot of the mountain, Wiggins rode like someone trying not merely to finish in the top 20, but like someone trying to win the Tour. Here, for the first time, was the sense that Wiggins wasn’t merely surviving: he was a major player, instructing his team to set him up, then assuming responsibility for finishing the job off, taking over like only a natural-born leader – or someone at the very peak of their form and confidence – can.
In Verbier, although Contador jumped away to win the stage, Wiggins’ fifth place, in the company of climbing specialists Frank Schleck and defending Tour champion Carlos Sastre, and 30 seconds ahead of seven-time winner Armstrong, had left him in third place overall. Only four days remained to Paris. The podium beckoned.
Whatever happened in those final four days it had become clear: Wiggins had managed a metamorphosis of Kafka-esque proportions, in his case from Olympic track star to Tour de France contender. How had he done it? The loss of 7kg clearly helped – his new, pared-to-the-bone physique saw him re-(nick)named: from ‘The Wig’ or ‘Wiggo’, he was now ‘The Twig’ or ‘Twiggo’.
Whatever the cause, the implications of his transformation are enormous, especially for the two men locked in conversation in the start village in Martigny. In Newport Wiggins had signed a two-year contract with Garmin, and so Vaughters has Wiggins for the 2010 season. Brailsford, meanwhile, is in the process of scouting and recruiting for Team Sky for 2010. But he is faced with the prospect of running a British team without a British star. Mark Cavendish, on his way to following his four stage wins of the previous year’s Tour with six at this year’s race, is locked into Bob Stapleton’s Columbia-HTC team until the end of 2011. It is difficult to overstate how desperate this situation is. Wiggins and Cavendish are proving two of the stars of the 2009 Tour, both are British, but neither is available to Brailsford’s new British team.
Eventually Brailsford breaks off from Vaughters and stops to talk. He describes rider recruitment as ‘like a game of poker at the moment’.
‘It’s a fluid, dynamic situation,’ says Brailsford. ‘I’ve been sitting there with my budget most nights, rejigging it on an hourly basis almost, thinking, shit, we can do this, we can’t do that. I think we’ve filled 17 slots. We’re getting down to the sharp end now. The element of poker is the question: should we wait to the end of the season and see if any teams collapse, and get some top riders cheap?’
Brailsford describes the ‘intelligence gathering’ he’s been doing, which seems to refer mainly to sussing out whether riders can be trusted; whether they are ‘clean’. Indeed, there is a rumour that one prominent rider has been turned down on the basis of suspect data on his biological passport. Brailsford won’t confirm this. ‘It’s not a black and white science,’ he says of the analysis of the passports, which monitor a rider’s blood and hormone levels over a long period. There is a margin of error, so I can’t say for certain that so-and-so is using drugs. But we’re taking a no-risk approach.
‘When I talk to every agent,’ explains Brailsford, ‘the first thing I want is consent to see their biological passport. I get all the data sent over to Manchester to get our experts to pick over it. We also look at the history of the guy, his progression over a number of years. All the best bike riders, the clean ones, you see steady progression; you can graph it. The ones whose performances go up in a spike usually test positive. There are no secrets. It’s basic stuff; intelligence gathering.
‘But yeah, some of the data that comes through – you think, Jeez! I wouldn’t say I’m surprised. It just makes me laugh, the audacity of some of them. But like I say, we’re taking a no-risk approach.’ (I later learn more about one suspect case from Shane Sutton. The rider in question, a top one-day rider, had been offered a contract at the Milan-San Remo Classic in March. ‘Then we looked at his [biological] passport,’ said Sutton. ‘It was all over the place. We just said, “Sorry, mate, see you.”’ The rider in question subsequently found a place on another big team: possibly a disturbing outcome; or perhaps Brailsford and his team misread his passport. As he says, it’s not an exact science.)
Brailsford admits he’s been stung by the reaction in some quarters to his stated ambition of winning the Tour with a clean British rider. On both counts, ‘British’ and ‘clean’, he has been accused of naivety. ‘Everyone says it’s impossible to win the Tour clean,’ says Brailsford. ‘It’s been said for a while now. I don’t know whether these people think we just stick our heads in the sand in Manchester. We’ve got some of the best sports scientists in the world. And we use that knowledge and do our homework: we don’t just come out with irrelevant comments.
‘I think Brad’s a case in point,’ he continues. ‘Bradley Wiggins is clean, and he’s here performing with the best in the world. Correct me if I’m wrong, but he could win this bike race. He hasn’t changed into a new athlete. He’s the same person, taking the same full-on approach to another discipline within the sport. It vindicates our idea that if you take a proper approach – analysing everything, looking at the sports science – then it’s possible.
‘To be honest,’ Brailsford adds, ‘for the last couple of years I’ve been quite confident we’d get a British winner of the Tour de France, and people have said, “Yeah right, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”’
And is Wiggins one of the riders he had in mind as a potential winner?
Brailsford, now standing with his arms folded like a football manager, rocks back on his heels and, with his mouth clamped shut, shakes his head. ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘No, no, no.’
What had he and Vaughters been discussing? ‘Actually,’ he says, unfolding his arms, ‘we were talking about Swiss chocolate.’
Bourgoin-Jallieu, 24 July 2009
In a hot and dusty field in Bourgoin-Jallieu, where stage 19 of