To be a really good road racer, he needed to climb better; to climb better, he would have to lose weight. He had tipped the scales at more than 80kg (12Åst) in Beijing but began slimming down with a diet supervised by the British Cycling nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell.
“They summed it up as trying to transform from a petrol engine to a diesel,” Wiggins explains. “I had to change my whole way of eating and what I ate at certain times. Off the track, you just eat pasta every day and as much of it as you like, but with this, on rest days I’d have to have salads.
“We were gluten-free for the whole year with Garmin, so we just had white rice, no pasta. I cut salt out of my diet; I cut sugar out of my diet — I used to have so much sugar in my coffee — it was just simple things.”
The season was two months old when he first noticed the difference during the mountain stage of the Criterium International in March 2009. “In other years, I would always get dropped on the first climb and just about make the time trial in the afternoon, but I was still with the front group until 5k to go.”
He had weighed in that morning at 77kg and went to bed that night with a smile on his face. “I thought, ‘Blimey! I wonder if I lost another two kilos?’ And I kept going like that. I started the Giro [the Tour of Italy in May] at 75 kilos — three kilos lighter than I had ever raced before — and hung on for as long as possible on the first mountain stage. I was only about 40th, but everyone was saying it was brilliant. The next day I was 20th and it just went from there.
“[Teammate] Tom Danielson actually said to me: ‘The way you are climbing, there is no reason you couldn’t do top 10 at the Tour’. And I was like, ‘No, don’t be silly’, but he was like, ‘No, I'm serious. The climbs will suit you much better’. So I came away with this idea for the Tour ... I said [told journalists] I could finish top 20 but I knew I was capable of top 10.”
While the track formed him and is in his blood (his Australian father, Gary, was a wizard on the boards), it was always the road that fuelled his dreams. As a boy, he would rush home from school to the exercise bike in his bedroom and spend hours pretending he was climbing with the favourites in the Tour. And for three weeks last July, that’s exactly how it was.
“It was amazing, actually,” he recalls. “I remember arriving with the group in Andorra [at the summit finish]. There were about 10 of us — Armstrong, Leipheimer, Cadel Evans, everybody was there. I was on the telly. It was a dream come true.”
But the dream was only beginning. Two days later, during the rest day in Limoges, Wiggins borrowed a team car and drove to a local hypermarket for a clandestine meeting with Dave Brailsford, the head of British Cycling and its soon-to-be launched professional road superteam, Team Sky.
“I knew what it was about, obviously,” Wiggins says. “They had been searching all year for someone [clean] to lead the team and a [contender] for the Tour, so it was the perfect scenario for them because they knew my performances were legitimate.
“He told me what he was planning, and after 10 minutes I said, ‘Yes, I’m sold on it’. Dave is like a big brother to me. I’ve known him for 10 or 12 years and done three Olympic cycles with him and I knew he wasn’t bull******** me.”
Dave Brailsford told me what he was planning and after 10 minutes I said, 'Yes, I'm sold on it' “What about Vaughters?” I ask. “You were still under contract at Garmin.”
“We had dinner in Girona after the Tour,” he replies.
“Did you tell him you were going to Sky?”
“I said I would like to go, obviously. I said, ‘I love you, Jonathan. I love the team, but if I am ever going to do something at the Tour de France, I am going to have to put everything into it, and that means having the best equipment and support’. I knew how they [Brailsford] had taken track racing to a new level and the sort of things they could do.
“And I know JV [Vaughters] didn’t want to let me go, but for my career, and to see how much further I can take this, I had to. It wasn’t financial. They [Garmin] offered me exactly the same money as what Dave offered me to stay, but I would have kicked myself if I had had to look at this team [Sky] from the outside and knowing what I was missing out on."
Pressure of being The Man
Wiggins has performed solidly during his first six months at Sky and finds himself, on the eve of his fourth Tour, as a team leader, a race favourite and one of highest-paid riders in the history of professional cycling. A year ago, he was a support rider at Garmin and on nobody’s radar. I ask about the pressures of being The Man.
“Well, that was my childhood dream,” he says, “and that’s what sport is all about. If I don’t want to do it, I can go back to the gruppetto [the last group on the climb] but I won’t get paid as much. I am physically in the ballpark to do something at the Tour de France, so why not try and give it a go? I’d feel pressure and worried if I hadn’t done everything right or knew I wasn’t in the condition, but I’m looking forward to going out and going through the process of each stage.
“I am 30 now. I feel like a totally different man to Athens in 2004. A lot changes ... and this sport does a lot to you as well.”
“In what way?”
“It just changes you. I am certainly a lot more professional about what I do now because I feel a responsibility in the sense of the money I am getting paid. And I have a duty to my family to make sure I do this properly. I am not going to be doing this much longer than the four years that I am with this team. I always said I would retire at 32-34, and don’t want to look back in 10 years’ time with any regrets. I want to get it out of my system now.”
“So if I made you an offer now, what would you take for the Tour?”
“Well, not position-wise ... all I would take is to do my best.”
“So you haven’t put a number on it?”
“No, I think that would be the first step to failure.”
“But you put one on it last year,” I remind him. “In an interview after the Tour, you said: ‘Winning the Tour has to be my goal now’.”
“Winning the bike race is always the goal,” he counters, “but I’m not going to say that anything after that would be a disappointment. To finish fourth again would consolidate everything and prove last year wasn’t a fluke, but I don’t think I’d be personally satisfied to finish fourth again. It’s not about pleasing other people. It’s about going out each day and putting a plan and a process together.”
“You sound like Steve Peters [his sports psychologist],” I tease.
“Yeah, I know,” he says with a smile, “but this is what we have trained for, mentally as well as physically, because, yeah ... anything could happen. Alberto [Contador] on paper is the strongest. He is the favourite, without doubt. He has proved it on a number of occasions, but he is not unbeatable. He could crash on the pavé [cobbled] stage and break his arm or whatever and [suddenly] the race is wide open.
“The first week this year is as decisive as the mountain stages with the Roubaix [cobbled] stage and the stage into Spa. So I am not going to put a number on it, I’m just going to keep fighting until Paris and see where I end up. I will be happy if I get on the podium but I don’t want to limit myself . . who would have thought last year that I could finish fourth?”
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram