Читать книгу Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession. - Bradley Wiggins, Bradley Wiggins - Страница 12

‘The Animal’ looking achingly cool in the British champion’s jersey and gold earring.

As I became a rider in my own right, so my list of cycling idols began to take shape. Museeuw was a warrior, Gianni Bugno some sort of a magician, Induráin this serene, beautiful winning machine. Top of the list, however, was a guy who wasn’t a great champion. I’d never seen him win a single race, and yet somehow he was the very embodiment of everything I loved about bike racing.

When Duclos and Ballerini slipped away at the previous year’s Paris–Roubaix, there was a chase group of seven or eight. Museeuw and Olaf Ludwig were in it, and so too were the classics specialists Edwig Van Hooydonck and Adri van der Poel. Then there was this other guy. He was wearing a white jersey with two horizontal stripes across the chest, a red one and a blue one. My mum explained that he was the British champion and that his name was Sean Yates. She also said he’d ridden for the Archer, just like me.

My mum still loved cycling. She’d met my dad through it and had never really stopped following it. In the past I’d never given the sport a second thought, but this all changed after that Paris–Roubaix. Back then Cycling Weekly used to put a poster on the back cover, and on 15 April 1993 it was of this guy Yates. He was rounding a corner, that beautiful jersey covered in dust. Unlike the rest of them he had no gloves and no helmet, and his shorts seemed to be shorter than anyone else’s. He was wearing an earring, and I thought that was impossibly cool. I cut the poster out and put it up on my bedroom wall.

It’s also true to say that I spent far more time than was probably healthy staring at it.

My guilty little secret?

Not really. Not at all, in fact.

Thing is, I just really, really wanted to be like Sean Yates.

Complete with earring and thinking that I’m Sean Yates, in 1994.

IN THE MID-NINETIES, top-end British road cyclists were few and far between on the international circuit. There were dozens of Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians and Spaniards, and quite a lot of Dutchmen and Germans. There were a few talented Swiss, some Colombian climbing specialists, and beyond that a bit of a mishmash. You had the odd American, Scandinavian and former Soviet, with a few stragglers from elsewhere thrown in here and there. The Brits were very much in the latter category, which was a bit of a double-edged sword. It meant that while the chances of one of them winning any given race were pretty slim, as a fan it wasn’t hard to choose your favourites.

Boardman was immense, but essentially a time-trial specialist. He and Graeme Obree were engaged in a titanic struggle for the Hour Record, but I wasn’t yet dialled into that, and Obree was a complete enigma. Chris was his total opposite, and I found him a bit methodical. Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate him, and there’s no question he was a phenomenal athlete. He’s gone on to become a really important advocate for cycling as a whole, but back then it was all a bit clinical for me. I was a romantic, idealistic teenager, and his approach seemed rather too scientific.

Robert Millar’s winning days were behind him, and beyond that there was hardly anybody. Harry Lodge was holding down a job with an Italian team, Malcolm Elliott had gone to race in America, and I seem to think that Brian Smith had a contract at Motorola. Max Sciandri had been born in Britain, and that would come in handy when the Olympics came around. In reality, though, he’d been raised in Tuscany, and to all intents and purposes he was Italian. I knew about Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche, but they were coming to the end by then. Of course, they are Irish, not British. It was not about nationality either – at 13 I admired them all the same.

Thank God, then, for Yates.

Hanging in there to win Stage 6 of the 1988 Tour de France – with a record average speed at the time.

1983 Four Days of Dunkirk leader’s jersey

1988 Paris–Nice leader’s jersey

1992 Leeds Classic, national champion’s jersey

1992 National Championship jersey

Britain was far from a ‘traditional’ cycling country – road racing had been outlawed here before the Second World War – but contrary to popular belief it wasn’t a complete desert as regards pro racing. The Milk Race was essentially for British domestic riders and foreign amateurs, but we had the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain to look forward to in August. That was followed two days later by the Leeds Classic, which had been founded by Alan Rushton in 1989. It was part of the new World Cup series, and all the big teams raced there.

The UCI were trying to globalise cycling, but the race was typically British in the sense that, with the best will in the world, there was no money in it. The first edition had been in Newcastle, then it had moved to Brighton, and now it was up in Yorkshire. Everyone said they loved racing it, and the crowds were great. In retrospect, though, Britain just didn’t have the critical mass for a race like that to succeed. The Leeds (or Rochester, or Wincanton …) would fold the following year, and Hamburg would take its place in the World Cup. That’s just the way it was, I’m afraid. The sporting landscape was different back then, totally dominated by football, cricket, rugby and golf. Oh, and snooker.

Whatever. First and foremost, the 1994 Tour de France was coming back to England. I say ‘coming back’, because I’d learned that there had been a stage in Plymouth twenty years earlier, though seemingly it had been a bit of a dog’s dinner. They hadn’t managed to get it televised live – I assume it would have interfered with the wrestling on World of Sport – but evidently that was no bad thing because the ‘racing’ had been hopeless. They’d literally just ridden up the new bypass to the roundabout, and then ridden back down it again. Thirty times.

This time there would be two real stages, on days four and five. Everybody at the club was talking about them, not least because Boardman might be in yellow. He was the best prologue rider in the world, and if he could get the jersey and survive the team time trial we’d have one of our own in the maillot jaune when the race crossed the Channel. I learned that no Brit had worn the yellow jersey since 1962, when a certain Tom Simpson had kept it for a single day.

Chris duly won the jersey but his team, GAN, couldn’t defend it in the time trial. Museeuw took it from him and wore it on the stage from Dover to Brighton, but the next day one of his team-mates, an Italian guy named Flavio Vanzella, got it in the break. He wore it into Portsmouth, and that was that for the British stages. As ever with the Tour, the fun seemed to be over before it had really begun. That’s the nature of cycling, I suppose, and I was starting to understand that part of its beauty is the fact that it’s so ephemeral, so fleeting.

Yates hadn’t particularly extended himself in the prologue. He’d shipped almost a minute because he wasn’t a GC rider, but also because he was a serious professional with a job to do. Motorola had made the team time trial one of their main objectives, and Sean would need to preserve every ounce of energy he could for that. Motorola also had the likes of Steve Bauer and Phil Anderson, really powerful rouleurs with big engines, but you’d be hard-pushed to find any team time triallists better than Yates over 65 kilometres. In the event they finished second in the TTT, but as a consequence Sean found himself in seventh place overall when they got back to France.

Yates wearing the maillot jaune in 1994 for a single day, before losing it to Museeuw on Stage 7.

The first French stage was Cherbourg to Rennes, 270 kilometres. A break went, Sean and one of his team-mates got in it, and then one of the escapees, Bortolami, jumped off the front. Now all hell broke loose because you had Bortolami trying to win both the stage and the jersey, Sean and co. desperately trying to bring him back, and Vanzella’s team turning themselves inside out to bring them back. There were effectively three races in one, which is typical of the frantic, dramatic, desperate stuff you often see during the opening week of the Tour. Bortolami held on for the stage, but Sean was a monster. When the dust settled he’d taken the jersey by a single second, with Bortolami second and Museeuw third.

Now it could be argued that he fell on his feet that day, because I am not sure that he’d set out with the objective of claiming the jersey. That wasn’t his job, but by the same token you don’t get to wear it by accident. That’s the key to it, because Sean’s day in yellow was fundamentally a consequence of both his physical strength and, paradoxically, his altruism. He’d shipped some time initially, and then buried himself for his team. That had left him there or thereabouts on GC, but not so close to the race leader that they weren’t prepared to cut him a little bit of slack. He grabbed it with both hands, and there was nobody better equipped to keep hold of it on that kind of terrain. It was his first yellow jersey in his 11th Tour de France, and nobody was ever more deserving. It was breathtaking, heroic stuff, the stuff of the Tour …

My prized possession – 1994 Tour de France maillot jaune

Meanwhile, back in down-at-heel Kilburn, I had no interest in anything but cycling. I was extremely ambitious, and my mind was set on winning Olympic gold on the track and wearing the yellow jersey on the road. Boardman had won the pursuit and now, in him and Sean, Britain had claimed two yellows in under a week! For me that was confirmation that it was possible, because I figured that if they could do it there was no reason why I couldn’t. My mind was made up, and by the end of 1995 I was up and running. I was winning quite often, and I too had a British champion’s jersey. It was only the junior points race, but it presaged another big moment in my cycling life.

There was a prize-giving dinner, and of course everyone who’d won a title was invited. Robert Millar was present because he’d won the road race championship, but I seem to recall that Boardman was absent because he’d had a big off at the Tour and was convalescing. Sean was presenting the prizes, though, and what with me being at the bottom of the undercard I was first up onto the stage. I asked him to autograph the programme, and suffice to say this was the highlight not only of my cycling year but also of my fledgling career.