Sky’s the Limit: Wiggins and Cavendish: The Quest to Conquer the Tour de France

Not that he was a disinterested outsider. Wiggins’ knowledge of the Tour de France, his respect for it, and his awe of its champions, was obvious; he just didn’t seem to understand what he, Bradley Wiggins, was doing there, or what, if anything, he could bring to the party. Rather, he resembled an English club cyclist parachuted into the biggest race in the world; he seemed oblivious to, or in denial of, his talent.

On another occasion Wiggins sat drinking coffee and reading the papers a little too long. One of his Cofidis directors came hurrying over, shouting: ‘Brad! Allez!’ The race had left without him. Amid scattered newspapers and upturned cups of coffee, Wiggins shot up, grabbed his bike, pedalled hastily across the grass and bumped on to the road just in time to join the tail end of the vast, snaking convoy of vehicles that follows the race, working his way through that and finally into the peloton to survive another day. After three weeks he finished 123rd in Paris. But to the extent that any rider who finishes the Tour can do, he left no discernible trace.

In 2007, his second Tour is proving a little different. He finishes fourth in the prologue time trial, and, with his great escape on stage six to Bourg-en-Bresse, Wiggins is at least getting himself noticed. For five hours he hogs the TV pictures, which depict him toiling for mile after solitary mile. The landscape flashes past, but it is as though Wiggins, in his post box red Cofidis kit, is part of it. Several observers remark on his style, his smoothness, his élan. ‘Il est fort,’ they say, ‘un bon rouleur.’

Halfway through the stage Wiggins’ lead over the peloton is down to 8 minutes, 17 seconds, still a considerable margin. He continues to look strong; the effort effortless. And among some of the journalists gathered around monitors in the press room a theory emerges as to the motivation for his lone attack. The clue is in the date: 13 July. It’s 40 years to the day since Britain’s only world road race champion, Tom Simpson, collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux, while riding the 1967 Tour. Wiggins is a patriot with a keen sense of cycling history; the type who could tell you not only the date of Simpson’s death, but what shoes he was wearing.

So that explains it: Wiggo’s doing it for Tom.

Approaching Bourg-en-Bresse, it even seems that he may defy the odds – and the sprinters’ teams, now pulling at the front of the peloton as they pursue their quarry – and hang on to win. But as he rides into the final 20km – stopping briefly to replace a broken wheel, throwing the offending item into the ditch as his team car screeches to a halt behind him – and Wiggins hits a long, straight expanse of road, the wind picks up. It blows directly into his face, and presents a serious handicap. The peloton can always move significantly faster than a small group or single rider; but especially into a headwind.

As Wiggins passes under the 10km to go banner, his lead having disintegrated, he is a dead man pedalling. The peloton leaves him dangling out front before casually swallowing him up with 6km to go. One of the helicopter TV cameras lingers on Wiggins as riders stream past and he drops through the bunch, and straight out the back.

Tom Boonen of Belgium wins the bunch sprint and is swamped by reporters and TV crews as he slows to a halt beyond the finish line. Other riders attract their own mini-scrums. Finally, after a long 3 minutes, 42 seconds, Wiggins appears – the 183rd and last man to cross the line. As he comes to a weary halt and wipes his salt-caked face with the back of his mitt he also attracts a mini-scrum.

So was it for Simpson? ‘Sorry?’ replies Wiggins. Today is the anniversary of Simpson’s death, he is told.

‘Nah, nah. I didn’t realise,’ he shrugs. ‘But it is my wife, Cath’s, birthday. She’ll be watching on TV at home with the kids. I suppose it was the closest I could get to spending the day with her.’

To the journalists’ disappointment, he admits that it wasn’t planned. ‘There were five of us in a little move at the start, I pulled a big turn, looked round and saw I was on my own. You don’t choose to end up on your own like that, it just happens. I thought, bloody hell, what are you supposed to do? Sit up? … This is the Tour de France – you don’t sit up. So I thought I’d continue. When I got a minute I thought there’d be a counterattack and some bodies would come across to me, but that never happened. So I just kept going.

‘When I got 10, 15 minutes, I thought maybe it could happen and I could win the stage. Even at 15km to go I thought it might happen, but it was that bloody headwind towards the finish. I was still doing 45kph, but I knew they’d be doing 52 or 53. At 10km I knew really that I had no chance with that headwind.’

Still, it was a day on which Wiggins could look back with pride. And he’d earned himself a first-ever trip to the podium, the steps of which drained the last ounces of energy from his legs, to receive le prix de la combativité – the day’s award for most aggressive rider.

Two places in front of Wiggins, having also been dropped by the main pack as the speed picked up towards the finish, another British rider had gone past as we waited for Wiggins. He was young, it was his debut Tour, but grave disappointment was etched on his face in the form of an angry scowl. It was Mark Cavendish, and his much-anticipated debut in the biggest race in the world was one of the main reasons for the appearance in Bourg-en-Bresse of Dave Brailsford, the British Cycling performance director.

An hour later, with the dust settling on the stage and the finish area being noisily dismantled by members of the Tour’s vast travelling army of workers, Brailsford sits in a bar and reviews the day. While his companions drink beer, he orders mineral water. ‘I’m in training,’ he explains. ‘I’m riding l’Etape du Tour [a stage of the Tour, the popular mass participation ride] with Shane.’

Until now, Brailsford, though he has become a familiar figure at track cycling events, has not been a regular visitor to the Tour de France. But there’s a good reason for that: it falls outside his remit. Three years earlier he had inherited the track-focused programme, known as the World Class Performance Plan, devised by his predecessor, Peter Keen. As Brailsford sits down in Bourg-en-Bresse he can reflect that Keen’s World Class Performance Plan is exactly a decade old; what he cannot see, other than in his wildest dreams, is that in 13 months it will come to glorious fruition at the Beijing Olympics.

Something else is afoot here in Bourg-en-Bresse, however, and it has nothing to do with Beijing, and it has nothing to do with track cycling. Brailsford, even as he basks in the afterglow of his team’s domination of the recent World Track Cycling Championships in Palma, and plots the 13 months to Beijing with the kind of supreme confidence that can only come from such domination, appears to be looking beyond all that, to some distant, imagined horizon. You can see it in his piercing blue eyes; they blaze with enthusiasm and sparkle with the excitement of a child catching a first, thrilling glimpse of … well, of the Tour de France.

As he outlines his dream, his enthusiasm intensifies; in fact, the plan seems to be progressing rapidly and taking shape in his imagination right here, under the large canopy of a tree, just outside a bar in Bourg-en-Bresse.

There have been several catalysts, says Brailsford, which all add up to ‘a critical mass’, or a tipping point. ‘That was a good effort from Brad today,’ he says. ‘Good to see him having a go.’ But Wiggins’ big day out had been the icing on the cake – or the cherry on the icing on the cake. A few days earlier, Brailsford and a million or so others had been in London for the Tour’s first-ever Grand Départ on British soil. The Tour had got underway with a prologue time trial around the British capital, passing the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park, before, the next day, a road race stage took them to Canterbury along roads lined the entire way with spectators. It had been extraordinary – a weekend in which you’d have been forgiven for thinking that London was cycling’s spiritual home – and which prompted Christian Prudhomme, the Tour director, to eulogise London and Britain in a way that no Frenchman had done since Napoleon III. ‘I do not know when we will come back,’ said Prudhomme. ‘But one thing is certain: it is not possible for us not to return.’

Yet Brailsford feels that something even more significant than the London Grand Départ is brewing. Five British riders are riding – the biggest British participation since the last British team to ride the Tour, the ill-fated ANC-Halfords squad, took part in 1987. And among those five riders are two highly promising youngsters, Mark Cavendish and Geraint Thomas.

This has got Brailsford thinking. Twelve months after watching the then 19-year-old Cavendish win a gold medal at the World Track Championships in Los Angeles, Brailsford and Sutton found themselves at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. It being the Commonwealth Games, at which riders compete for the home nations rather than for Great Britain, Brailsford and Sutton were not as occupied, or under as much pressure, as they’d usually be during a major championship. They spent a fair amount of time sitting together in the stands, watching Cavendish win another gold medal on the track, this time for the Isle of Man, and they discussed the future. They cast their minds back to the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002, and forward to the Delhi Games in 2010. In between, of course, were the Olympics. But a sense of repetition, of being locked into a cycle of major games, was evident. Because that is the limitation of track cycling: it’s all about the major games and world championships; there is no velodrome-staged equivalent of the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia, or Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. These road races are the monuments of the sport; where the history, the prestige and the money is. ‘We were thinking,’ Sutton said later, ‘that we can’t keep doing this forever. We’ve got to do something different.’

The conversation went no further. But 10 months later, back in Los Angeles for a track world cup meeting, Brailsford and Sutton once again found themselves with time to kill, and again they began to project beyond Beijing. Ironically, this owed to a stroke of misfortune for one of the latest of the talented young British riders to emerge, Ben Swift. Swift had been due to ride the madison with Rob Hayles, but he crashed and broke his collarbone. ‘Shane and I had a lot of time on our own and a lot of time to chat,’ Brailsford said, ‘and we inevitably got to talking about future plans.’

And so to Bourg-en-Bresse, and the bar in which Brailsford is sipping water as the late afternoon turns to evening. What is always most striking about Brailsford is his enthusiasm; his shoulders hunch, and he cups his hands in front of his face, almost like the rugby player Jonny Wilkinson preparing for a goalkick; then he moulds those hands into constantly shifting shapes as he talks. ‘I was inspired by London,’ says Brailsford, ‘but this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I feel that the time’s coming for a British pro team.’

‘Here,’ he clarifies. ‘In the Tour de France. From a personal point of view, if someone asked me what I wanted to do next, that would be it. We had a gut feel that Cav [Cavendish] and Geraint would come through at this level, but thinking it and seeing it are two different things. When I saw Geraint leave the start house for the prologue in London it was that moment of realising that it’s not just something we’re thinking about. I see Cav and Geraint now and think: it’s on.’

Brailsford outlines how such a team could work, in particular with regard to funding. Because what he’s talking about would need serious backing, with a sponsor able and willing to pump millions into the project. ‘The type of partner we’d be looking for would be British. It would be a British initiative. We’d be all about innovation and about doing it clean. In the first instance it would be about being competitive: that’d be our aim. But ultimately you’d want to win. You wouldn’t run a pro team if you didn’t want to win. It wouldn’t fit our mentality not to aim to win.

‘The money? It’s difficult to be clinical about it, but there’s a huge amount of money floating around the City, and a very small circle of people managing a huge amount of money. If you’re in that circle … it’s not finding money that’s the obstacle. I don’t think so. I mean, all the teams here are investing between £3m and £8m a year. It’s a shed load of money, and they’re all committed for four years, but if there weren’t decent returns on that, they wouldn’t be doing it, would they?’

But how would Brailsford do it? Would he combine running a Tour de France team with his current job, as British Cycling’s performance director? ‘It’d have to be done as a private enterprise – or as part of the governing body, which would be a first,’ he says. ‘No other governing bodies run a pro team. But not many countries have the kind of funding structure for elite sport that Britain has.’

One of the reasons for Brailsford being here at the Tour, he explains – and apart from riding l’Etape du Tour in a few days’ time – is to negotiate some of the British riders’ contracts. He is almost, it seems, acting as their agent, which is curious. But this too has highlighted a problem – or an opportunity. The problem is that the riders are contracted to, and under the control of, teams that operate independently of British Cycling, and with fundamentally different – even opposed – priorities. They are not, for example, remotely interested in the Olympics. Which is a problem for Brailsford, and a frustration. The riders in question, with Cavendish and Thomas to the fore, have been nurtured and developed by British Cycling. Brailsford wants to bring them back under an umbrella that he is holding.

‘The lads here know I want to do this [set up a pro team] and they’re all absolutely mad for the idea,’ says Brailsford. ‘I’m here negotiating their contracts for them; so I know what’s in their contracts. And I know – or I’m learning – how the teams are structured and how they operate.

‘We’ve got a set philosophy about doing things at British Cycling,’ he continues, ‘with the riders at the centre. But look at a lot of teams here at the Tour – that’s not how they operate. Between races they don’t even see their riders. They don’t know where they are, never mind what they’re doing. It’s bonkers.’

It is also, thinks Brailsford, one reason why a doping culture is so prevalent in professional road cycling; the theory being that expectation/pressure coupled with absence of care/responsibility equals ideal conditions for such a culture to develop. He’d do it differently, he says. ‘If we did anything it’d be 100% clean. We’ve got this young generation coming through, riders who don’t want to cheat. And there’s wider enthusiasm; untapped potential. We saw it in London and on the road to Canterbury; the crowds, screaming by the roadside … despite all the doom and gloom and the negativity around the doping stories.’

And what about the older guard – Wiggins and the reformed doper David Millar? Would they be involved? ‘You’d like to think it’d be possible to do this before they’ve retired,’ says Brailsford. ‘I want to bring together lots of different elements in cycling in Britain. Instead of factions, let’s get behind this thing and see what we can do.

‘It’s dependent on these riders progressing and coming through,’ he adds. ‘We’re not going to do it until the riders are good enough to do it; until we have the critical mass of British talent we can’t do it. It’s unlikely you’re going to get 25 British riders, but you need the critical mass; we wouldn’t do it with an international team. But knowing what I do of the young lads coming through, there’s plenty of talent. That’s not the issue.

‘And with Cav, we’ve got a winner. He’s your goalscorer.’

Brailsford mentioned doping, and doing it clean. The British track team had proved it could be done: there was no mud sticking to them, yet they were winning left, right and centre. But it was quite different to the road; track cycling didn’t have the ingrained doping culture of road cycling, which was precisely why Brailsford’s predecessor, Peter Keen, had decided, back in 1997, to ignore the road.

Blond-haired and boyish, and blessed with infectious enthusiasm, Keen, when he was appointed performance director, was acclaimed as a visionary. He was the sports scientist who had coached Chris Boardman to an Olympic gold medal – the first by a British cyclist in 84 years – in Barcelona in 1992, and subsequently helped Boardman with the difficult transition from track to road racing, going from his Olympic and world pursuit titles, and world hour record, to winning the prologue time trial and wearing the yellow jersey at the Tour de France.

But in 1997 Keen accepted an even bigger challenge: to turn round the fortunes of the British Cycling team. For the first time, the sport had money, thanks to lottery funding. Keen was given an annual budget of £2.5m and charged with drawing up a plan that could transform Britain’s cyclists from mediocrity to … well, just about anything would be an improvement on performances that, with the odd exception (Boardman, Graeme Obree, Yvonne McGregor), ensured Britain occupied the lower tiers of world cycling.

Keen’s proposals, to focus the country’s efforts, and funding, exclusively on track cycling, were radical and controversial. But he had thought about it long and hard, and he felt that he had little choice; that to try and produce a road team that could compete with the best in the world would be pointless. ‘My view at the time,’ Keen told me in 2007, ‘was that men’s professional road cycling was almost completely dominated by an underlying drugs culture. And … in the context of the programme I was charged with creating, having a drugs system, or even a tolerance of a drugs system, was just not an option.

‘The idea that you could plan for men’s road racing success at world level … to me it couldn’t be done,’ continued Keen, for whom planning is like breathing. ‘It seemed to me that the furthest we could go with road racing for men was to create a development programme where we could take promising young riders to that line in the sand – of what I’d call performance credibility – and then say, “If that is the world you want, as far as we understand it, then off you go and good luck.”’

As he spoke, Keen measured his words carefully, but the implications and subtext to what he was saying were as devastating as they were damning. That phrase, ‘performance credibility’, had particular resonance, not least because of Keen’s intimate knowledge of the sport. He was speaking not as an outsider, but as someone whose protégé, Boardman, was now part of the world he was describing. Although Boardman had showed flashes of brilliance in road races, the highlight perhaps being his second place – to five-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain – at the 1995 Dauphiné Libéré, his potential on the road appeared to be limited. By what? His limitations over the longer distances, or the three-week duration of the Tour de France? Or his refusal to take drugs? Keen wouldn’t say explicitly. But he might have said that Boardman’s performances fell within the realms of ‘performance credibility’, and left it at that.

Nevertheless, for many, Keen’s track-focused plan was tantamount to treason. Ignore road cycling? Pretend the Tour de France doesn’t exist? He was trampling on the dreams of all those – the overwhelming majority of cycling fans – who are drawn to the sport by the glamour and excitement of the greatest race in the world.

Keen argued that he had no choice; he was under pressure to produce a return on the new funding under the terms dictated by the distributors of lottery cash. UK Sport was the agency charged with sharing out the money among all the governing bodies, but the cash came with conditions attached and targets to be reached. For UK Sport, the challenge was this: how to set comparable targets across all sports. The answer was to focus on world championships and Olympics. Sports would be assessed and evaluated purely on their performances in these events. Olympic and world medals would effectively write lottery cheques. Conversely, no medals would see funding reduced.

In cycling, the maths was simple. At the Olympics there were 12 gold medals available on the track, just four on the road (and two in mountain biking); and it was the same at the world championships. Keen concluded that a British rider could win the Tour de France or the Paris-Roubaix Classic and become a household name in mainland Europe, but it would count for nothing as far as UK Sport was concerned. So he had no choice: the bulk of the money had to be directed towards the track.

But Keen went further than that. As he settled into his office in the Manchester Velodrome in 1997 – having first visited a used furniture shop to buy a desk and chair – he pored over files describing road races all across Europe to which British teams were invited every year. And every year they went, invariably to be soundly thrashed by their continental rivals, blowing holes in the budget with no tangible return. As far as Keen was concerned it was madness. Even worse, it was pointless. So he took a more radical step than merely cutting funding for a men’s senior road squad: he took his axe to it. In the British cycling revolution, at least in its first phase, it was not – to paraphrase Lance Armstrong – all about the bike. It was all about the track.

Ten years later, even as Brailsford, who took over from Peter Keen in 2004, spoke in Bourg-en-Bresse with such breezy optimism of running a clean team and entering the Tour de France, the omens seemed less than encouraging.

In fact, Keen’s prescience had proved remarkable, and his decision not to fund a road programme eminently sensible. A year after he drew up his World Class Performance Plan, with its track focus, a major doping scandal erupted at the 1998 Tour de France. It blew the lid on the scale of organised, endemic doping at the highest level of professional road cycling. The so-called ‘Festina affair’ – involving the world’s number one team – proved to be merely the start, however. It was followed, over the following years, by a drip-drip-drip of doping allegations, revelations and scandals.

Drip-drip-drip they went, like an irritating leak that isn’t quite bothersome enough to actually fix. Finally, in 2006, came the next deluge: an international blood doping ring uncovered by a Spanish investigation, which removed the favourites, Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich, on the eve of the Tour de France. This, coupled with a positive test for the eventual winner of that year’s Tour, Floyd Landis, seemed, finally, like it could be the tipping point, and the catalyst for change. If the first step to changing is to admit you have a problem, then such a step appeared to be taken towards the end of 2006, cycling’s annus horribilis, when the sport’s world governing body, the UCI, commissioned an independent audit to discover the extent of the doping problem: a small step, but a significant one for an organisation that stood accused of burying its head in the sand, or, worse, being complicit in the problem. Meanwhile, and under pressure from the World Anti-Doping Agency (founded in response to the Festina affair), the number of anti-doping tests were stepped up; and the first steps were taken by the UCI to establish ‘biological passports’ for riders. When these were finally introduced, for the 2008 season, they were hailed as being at the vanguard of anti-doping.

But in Bourg-en-Bresse, as Brailsford spoke about lifting the ‘doom and gloom and negativity around the doping stories’, his optimism was to prove premature. The 2007 Tour was hit by a series of catastrophic scandals, from the yellow jersey Michael Rasmussen’s series of missed drugs tests before the race had started, to double stage-winner Alexandre Vinokourov’s positive test for an illegal blood transfusion.

‘La mort du Tour,’ read the front page headline of the French newspaper Libération, in thick black letters, above the ghostly silhouette of a racing cyclist, as the Tour stumbled towards the finish in an ever-thickening fog of drugs-related scandals. France Soir even devoted its entire front page to an official-looking ‘death notice’, announcing the passing of the Tour de France on 25 July 2007, in Orthez, ‘at the age of 104 years, as a result of a long illness’. The paper stated that ‘the funeral will be held in a strictly private circle’.