Bradley Wiggins is full of surprises. There I am thinking that our interview
has gone splendidly (apart from our brief discussion about his enthusiasm
for Lance Armstrong) when my mobile almost explodes with his irritated text:
“I hope the article portrays me as I really am and not just how you want it
to be.” Well, that’s that, I guess, the end of a beautiful friendship. An
article that portrays him as he really is? It would be easier to fix Wall
St.
WE MEET on a grey Tuesday afternoon at a book signing for his just-published
autobiography at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly, London, and within seconds of
shaking his hand I am already scratching my head. A week had passed since I
had left the messages (voice and text) on his mobile: “Brad, I would really
like to interview you about your book.” Six days had passed since the
publisher had set it up. Fifty minutes had passed since he had begun signing
the tome. “So,” he inquired, “what do you want to talk about?”
This projection of cool detachment is essential Wiggins and I began by
bouncing an observation I’d made during his first Tour de France in 2006:
Bradley Wiggins is not easy to love. He rarely responds to your text
messages. He rarely stops for a chat. Offer him a deal in February to write
for your newspaper and you can be sure that in March he will sign for
someone else. I don’t understand him. I can’t figure him out.
“Have you figured him out yet?” I ask.
“Brad Wiggins?” he replies. “Yeah.”
“Hmmm, difficult to say. People have different perceptions as to who I am . .
. I think I’m different to other athletes, the traits I have, the way I
approach things. Me and Chris Hoy are completely different people, and go
about things a different way, but ultimately we both have one thing that
drives us – sport and the Olympics.”
“Would you describe yourself as complex?”
“I think in a lot of areas in my life I am extremely easy-going and a good
laugh – none more so than when I have a drink – but in other areas I am
quite an individual. I enjoy my own company – I think it’s part of the
reason I excel at individual pursuiting – and I’ve got some complex things
in my life that I am quite obsessive about and I guess that goes into making
me a complex person.”
“What are the obsessions?”
“My obsession with winning is quite strong and quite difficult for people to
get their heads around at times; my need and hunger to be fit and at the top
all of the time drives my wife insane. Even now, four or five years from
retirement I’m thinking: ‘What the hell am I going to do when I stop
cycling? What am I going to do to keep this going?’ I don’t want to stop
training.”
His obsessions and complexities make his book – In Pursuit of Glory – an
absorbing read. He meets a girl in a Manchester bar – his first real
girlfriend – and within weeks asks her to marry him. He spends months
building a cellar of fine Belgian beers – Triple Moine, Ramee, Piraat, Pater
Lieven and St Bernardus – and a night drinking them. He achieves his life’s
ambition of an Olympic gold medal in Athens and becomes as depressed as if
he had failed.
“I was obsessed with winning the Olympics,” he explains. “It became more
important than anything else in my life to the point where I would say to
Cath (his wife): ‘What the f*** am I going to do if I don’t win the
Olympics?’ And she would say ‘Well, you’ve still got me.’ But I couldn’t see
that. I couldn’t see past this thing. It took so much out of me mentally and
became such a burden that when it was over I didn’t want to do anything
else. I just wanted to have a beer. ‘Give me a beer. Can I have a drink
please?’ It was like getting out of prison.”
HIS first six weeks as an Olympic champion – and the first Briton since Mary
Rand in 1964 to win three medals at the same Games – was a back-slapping
orgy of functions, dinners and engagements. And then the music stopped.
“It was like this period now,” he recalls. “A lot of parties had come and gone
but nobody had knocked the door down and said, ‘Brad, triple Olympic
medallist, we want to give you 300 grand to be our ambassador’. There were a
couple of small deals, a grand here or there, but people’s perception was
that we had become millionaires and I was starting to get a little depressed
by that.”
He started drinking and spending his days in the pub while his pregnant wife
was at work. “The worst day was . . . I had 12 or 13 pints and came back and
it was about five in the afternoon. I’d been in the pub for six hours and
thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll do some exercise’ so I changed into a tracksuit and
jogged three miles to a friend’s down the road. He hadn’t seen me since the
Olympics; we had a half-bottle of wine and he drove me back at about
half-six. Cath came back from work.
“I opened another bottle of wine with dinner but she was knackered and went to
bed and I just carried on drinking. There were a few days like that. She
would go off to work at half seven and I’d wait until 11 and drink until she
got home again.”
“Why?” I inquire.
“I don’t know really,” he replies. “I had nothing else to do with my life;
nothing that turned me on and it was . . . I don’t know, at the time it just
felt normal. I wasn’t going to be racing again until January and it didn’t
seem important.”
“Twelve pints a day is not normal,” I counter.
“Yeah, well, there was a point I got to in December, actually. . . I was
coming back from a training camp and I sat in the airport in Paris drinking,
and I didn’t even realise I was drinking. I ordered a Leffe blonde and drank
it; had two more and ordered some chips; and then had another two. I was
pretty hammered after five – especially after a week’s training – and
remember thinking, ‘You enjoy drinking too much! How long is this going to
go on for?’ I was drinking not for the pleasure of it but for the feeling of
being drunk and I kind of realised it then and became aware of it.”
There was another factor in the equation. The genes he had inherited from his
estranged father, Gary, once one of Australia’s most talented cyclists. Gary
was also an alcoholic. ‘What if I’m like him?’ Bradley wondered. ‘What if
I’ve inherited his wild drinking genes as well as his DNA?’
The pages devoted to their curious relationship are fascinating. Bradley was
two years old when Gary left his mother for another woman but grew up with
tales of his father’s legend. “At first it was just this thing in the
background that my father did and then I’d go to races and people would say,
‘I knew your father, a good rider’ and he became a kind of icon in my life.
My mother never spoke about things on a personal level but she would say
things about him as a bike rider and it became this thing of, ‘Oh, you might
be like him some day’.”
AND for 17 years that’s mostly how it was. Gary had returned to Australia,
married again (his third) and was scratching out a living as a removals man
near Melbourne. He never wrote or called. They thought he was dead. And
then, one afternoon, shortly after Bradley had captured the junior world
title, he left a number asking Bradley to call.
“I called him one day and we started talking about bike racing and he seemed
really pleasant. He said he was sorry for what he did. I said, ‘Okay, that’s
fine. I don’t know what you were going through at that stage but it’s done
now’. He was really interested in my bike racing so I rang him again and it
just went from there and we built a steady relationship. I knew it was never
going to be father/son-like but it was okay. And I felt he got a great deal
of pleasure from speaking to me.”
“What did it do for you?” I ask.
“Initially it was just odd more than anything. When you’re 17 you don’t quite
understand what’s going on.”
They met several times over the next five years but the more Bradley saw of
his father, the less he liked him. His third marriage had unravelled; he was
drinking heavily and struggling for work. In August 2004, he left a message
on Bradley’s phone, congratulating him on his first Olympic title. The call
was not returned.
ALMOST four years passed. Bradley abandoned the pubs, rekindled his love for
cycling and became the proud father of Ben and Isabella. He completed his
first Tour de France; Beijing was on the horizon; he resolved to do things
differently this time. His phone rang at 4am last January 26. Gary had been
beaten to a pulp in a small town north of Sydney. His father was dead.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” I ask.
“Probably in mid-to-late 2003 after the world championships – just a quick
phone call, but nothing really . . . Even post-Athens I never spoke to him;
I had pretty much done with him by then. The older I got, the more withdrawn
I became from him but when he died this year I thought, ‘Was it my fault?
Maybe if I had just called him and made peace with him’.”
“You thought that?”
“Initially, yeah, you do because it’s gone then – there’s no chance of ringing
him any more because he’s dead. But you can’t turn back the clock.”
“Does that mean you didn’t grieve for him?”
“I felt sad initially, because of the way he went. He’d had the s*** beaten
out of him and was found by the roadside. He had been there for 10 hours
unconscious and that wasn’t very nice to have gone that way. He had been
living in a flat . . . well, not even a flat, it was a unit near Newcastle,
north of Sydney. It was filthy. His sister had had to burn everything but
had also found these press cuttings of me and pictures of his kids, the
three of us, so he actually did care in a funny way.”
“Did you consider going to his funeral?”
“Yeah, his sister asked me to carry the coffin; I was ringing round for
flights and almost got in a taxi to go but I didn’t do it. I would have
liked to have gone to maybe just say goodbye but I wasn’t sure how I’d
react. Would I become emotional and stuff? So I thought, ‘Just leave it’.”
“Maybe that would have helped you,” I suggest.
“Yeah, but I didn’t think I needed help. I was Bradley Wiggins going for three
gold medals in Beijing. I had my own life, my own children to worry about. I
had the World Championship in Manchester in six weeks’ time – I didn’t need
this.”
“What did Cath think?” “She thought it might have done me good. She wanted to
come with me.”
“What about that line in the book where you are troubled after Athens, and
wondering if you’ve inherited his drinking genes? You didn’t really address
that? What if you have? What if it’s in you?”
“Well, it is. I do have an addictive nature and yeah, that’s one thing I have
definitely inherited from Gary but I also inherited character traits from my
mother, who doesn’t have those things.”
The six weeks since his return from Beijing have been hectic and enjoyable but
he has learnt his lesson and is ready to move on. “After Athens I tried to
live off the Olympics for too long; it was July before I woke up and I
missed selection for the Tour and that isn’t going to happen this time.
“We’ve got the [athletes’] parade next week but it’s another missed day so I’m
going to go training. I just want to try and forget about the Olympics. My
mind is firmly fixed on the Tour and on four years’ time in London.”
Bradley Wiggins: In Pursuit of Glory (Orion, £18.99) How my
family saved me from the demon drink
‘My all-day drinking sessions pretty much lasted all the way through to
Christmas 2004. I was depressed. The immediate months after winning an
Olympic gold are always going to be an anti-climax after the initial
partying and back-slapping, but this was deeper and more severe than I had
ever anticipated. I was 24 and had achieved my lifetime’s ambition. What on
earth comes next? I had absolutely no idea. Here I was, with potentially 10
years left as a professional, and I had already achieved what I set out to
do. The arrival of [my son] Ben in March 2005 was a huge jolt to the system
and sobered me up, literally and metaphorically, for the first time since
the Olympics.
Suddenly, apart from feeling extremely happy and proud, everything made sense.
Everything going forward had to be about [my wife] Cath and Ben, looking
after them and soldiering on, and doing the best job I could until I got a
break in my professional career’ From In Pursuit of Glory (Orion)
