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Winner of four Olympic gold medals and Tour de France sets off on road to retirement with last hurrah in mind, writes Owen Slot
Sir Bradley Wiggins will compete for one more year with Team Sky and retire from professional road racing next summer. Once he has quit road racing, his intention is to commit to two years back in the velodrome as a track cyclist, to win his place back in the Great Britain team pursuit squad, and then to go out in a blaze of glory, retiring with a fifth gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
This is the plan, as explained in detail to The Times. He will never win the Tour de France again; he has come to terms with that. He will never even try to. He will never again attempt to win the Giro d’Italia either.
Yet his Grand Tour days are not completely over. Before he is done, his heart is set on riding one last Tour de France next summer — and despite the now notorious froideur with Chris Froome, his sole intention is to ride to support his team-mate.
“I don’t mind admitting that Chris is probably a better Grand Tour rider than me,” Wiggins said. “He is a much better climber, he can time-trial well. He has age on his side, he has no kids. That’s fine.
“If Chris wants to, he could potentially win five Tours now. So if I want to win another Tour, I’d probably have to leave the team.” Would he leave? “No,” he said. “I love this team. This is my home. I’m not going to go, ‘I want to be the leader still, so I’m off.’ ”
However, his knee injury and recent disappointments have crystallised his thoughts. His disappointment at not riding in the Tour last month was countered by finding himself in the gym at the Manchester velodrome with Jason Kenny and others from his old cohort on the track. He will leave Team Sky, not for a rival road team, but to join the GB track team.
“I’m going to continue to the next Olympics and try for a fifth gold on the track. That’s the plan,” he said. “Having lost weight and muscle the last few years, I wouldn’t be able to walk back into that team pursuit squad, so I’m not taking it for granted, but I am working towards that. It would be nice to finish the career with another Olympic gold.”
Already, there is no turning back. What happens, for instance, if Froome were to get injured next season? Would that not open the door to him leading the team again? One last shot? He shakes his head. “Because of the work I am doing,” he said, “I am p****** on my chances for that.”
He explains. He has committed to changing his physique and he is already putting on weight to compete in the time-trial at the road World Championships in Florence next month. That process will continue next year so that he can reinvent himself. The skeletal General Classification (GC) rider will gradually metamorphose into a one-day specialist and time-trialler and then back to a trackie.
“I can’t put all this weight on and then suddenly lose muscle and do GC again,” he said. “Anyway, the next person in line, the natural successor, is Richie Porte. He really is the next one who could potentially win the Tour.”
Wiggins spoke of his plans in the back of the Team Sky bus on Friday, at a race in the Netherlands. The previous time we had spoken like this was in the same place, the back of the bus, five months beforehand, when his heart and conversation were entirely set upon victory in the Giro. Options and possibilities appeared to stretch out down the road before him.
It is peculiar, then, to hear this more modest version of the future, albeit that it is realistic and that circumstances have led him firmly to it.
While he says he would “love to go back to the Tour” next summer and “do a job as a super-domestique” and “maybe win a time-trial stage”, he also questions openly whether “there is a place for me on that team”. If he is carrying more weight, he will be less effective as a climber. Thus, he wonders, will he even be useful enough as a team-mate?
However, this at least tells us that, despite the public soap opera, Wiggins will readily — indeed, he is desperate to — ride for Froome.
It was only a few months ago that Wiggins was the champion, Froome the young pretender, and they were clashing over Wiggins’s repeated pronouncements that he had wanted to lead the Tour de France team. This is Wiggins’s version of a situation he says spilt “a lot of bad blood”.
He said: “At this team, everyone is encouraged to be as good as they can be. I felt, as the defending champion, I was quite entitled to put my hand up and say, ‘I would like to be considered for the leadership.’ But if someone is chosen over me, I am professional enough to do my job.
“I know that at the last press conference I gave before the Giro, saying that caused quite a stir from Chris’s camp. I remember at the start of the Giro, there was a lot of s***, and, to be honest, it affected me.”
However, the status quo changed fast. Wiggins limped out of the Giro, ill and injured. He was then not considered fit for selection for the Tour.
In late June, at a meeting with Sir Dave Brailsford, the team principal, and Shane Sutton, his former coach, he was presented with a new reality. “At that point it was clear,” he said. “We’ve got this 28-year-old guy [Froome] who looks like he can dominate for the next few years and they are going to back him. Then there’s me: 32, knocking on a bit. In a sense I kind of accept that.”
This complete reassessment — the blow to his ego, the recalibration of his identity as an athlete — cannot have been easy. “There was a lot of reflection,” he said. He describes himself as being “in an acceptance phase”. “A lot of it is just ego,” he said. He talked about “not letting your ego get carried away”.
He insists, too, that this is a tussle which he has won. “I was thinking: ‘You know what, I am quite happy with my lot. I’ve achieved everything I want to achieve. I am good at what I am good at; I am good at the odd time-trial. I’ve already won the Tour de France, no one can take that away from me.’ ”
As the 2013 Tour then ensued without him, Wiggins spent most of the three weeks training in Majorca. You imagine this would have been hard for him psychologically, but, he says, he would return from a long ride every day, catch up with the TV coverage and race news in his local restaurant, and “it made me appreciate how far I had come the year before”.
“You can look at it two ways. You can go: ‘F****** hell, he’s got my crown.’ Or, you can think: ‘You know what, this race is unbelievable. I did this last year. How did I do it?’
“A year ago, I took everything in my stride, but a year later, you are on the outside watching it and it is inspiring in some ways, watching the guys doing what they were doing. And in a way I was like: ‘I’m glad I’m not there because it looks bloody hard.’ ” He even suggests that missing the Tour “was probably the best thing ever”.
If it has indeed helped — if he can now appreciate his glorious past and come to terms with the present — then maybe it was. Yet the present is not the end. That much is now very clear.
On Chris Froome: ‘I don’t have his phone number’
Wiggins revealed why he did not congratulate Chris Froome for winning the Tour de France. “For a start, this is a pathetic excuse — and it’s not an excuse — but I don’t have his phone number,” he said.
“The second thing is, a lot of stuff happened with me and him and his girlfriend and it was left in a very bad way and rather than me send him some naff little text message, I would rather wait till I see him, genuinely put my hand out and say: ‘You know what, that was a f****** good ride.’ That is more genuine than one text message that might get lost in hundreds of others.
“Obviously once the press got hold of it, it got chewed up a bit and then it would have been really naff to have sent one. But I will see him at the World Championships where I will be riding to support him [in the road race]. So this was not me saying: ‘I’ll never ride for him again.’ ”
On post-2012 fame: ‘It was disruptive, but I enjoyed it’
“After the Olympics, I thought: ‘Right, I am going to enjoy it now, I’ve worked hard for this.’ Then it comes to November 1 and I’m like, ‘OK, I’m going to start training, I want all that to stop, I don’t want anyone to recognise me.’
“Then I crashed and I couldn’t even leave the hospital without being taken out through the kitchens, and when I went home there was paparazzi outside my house. And I did that to them [gave them the one-finger salute]. I can’t even crash my bike without creating hysteria.
“Now I keep thinking, it was a year ago we were at that Stone Roses thing. Or, a year ago I was in Majorca and I couldn’t go out. I look back to how different it is now. It carried on right up to Sports Personality. With hindsight you see how disruptive it was. It was enjoyable as well, I don’t want to complain; I had a great time, some incredible experiences.”
Golden years: the full story
2000 Sydney Olympics Wiggins, 20, the first British cyclist in history on lottery funding, starts to repay the investment by winning bronze in the team pursuit
2004 Athens Olympics Wiggins hits the big time with a full house of medals: gold in the individual pursuit, silver in the team pursuit, bronze in the Madison
2008 Beijing Olympics Wins two golds, in individual and team pursuit, but cannot sustain it for the Madison. Mark Cavendish, his team-mate, is not best pleased
2009 Tour de France Establishes his credentials as a potential winner. His fourth place is upgraded to third after Lance Armstrong is disqualified
2012 The annus mirabilis Becomes first British champion in the 109-year history of the Tour de France, and ten days later wins gold in the Olympic time-trial
2013 World Championships The next part of the plan to rescue a disappointing year with gold in the time-trial in Tuscany next month
- Words by Owen Slot
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