Читать книгу Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession. - Bradley Wiggins, Bradley Wiggins - Страница 10

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