For some time now, since the rumours about London began to circulate, it has been playing in his head like a favourite song. A thought with more pow than the 12-minute version of Machine Gun by Jimi Hendrix. A thought with more wow than Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. A thought so daring and thrilling and outrageous that if you handed him a razor and offered him a choice, he would almost shave his sideburns.

Every morning when he climbs out of bed, it ratchets up his heartbeat; every evening when he closes his eyes, it is pounding in his head. He tries to banish it by thinking about Cathy, his wife, and Ben, his son, and the dreams already fulfilled: the four Olympic medals, the world titles, the European titles, the Commonwealth titles, the OBE. Bradley Wiggins has been there, done that. But the thought quickly returns and unsettles him again.

What if all that was just a beginning? What if there was more? We join him, 10 days ago, in Westminster as details of the 2007 Tour de France are announced. Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, and Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour, are sitting centre stage. A giant street map highlights the route of the opening stage — an 8km time trial in central London.

“Eight kilometres.” His distance.

“Time trial.” His discipline.

“London.” His city.

Wiggins has been imagining how it will feel on the starting ramp: the thousands pressed against the barriers at Trafalgar Square; the adrenaline surging, his heart racing; his mouth dry with nerves. Filling up his lungs as the starter begins the countdown. This is it. Time to face the hangman. “Cinq . . . quatre . . . trois . . . deux . . . un.”

Kicking down the ramp and winding up the gear towards Westminster Abbey. Picking the shortest line around Parliament Square and into Victoria Street . . . gently on the brakes for the right-hand corner at Buckingham Gate . . . throttle open for the sprint up Constitution Hill . . . legs beginning to scream on the loop around Hyde Park . . . the finish line in sight now, one last push, body completely empty when he reaches the Mall.

Falling into the arms of the team physio, his head spinning, his lungs heaving, his face coated in snot. Has he done enough? Are the Londoners cheering? Will they applaud him as he receives the maillot jaune? For some time now, he has had this feeling they will.

Ask him to explain it and he struggles to find words. It is just a sense of things coming together, as if the gods were dealing him cards. First they award his native city an Olympic Games, then they give it Le Grand Départ of a Tour de France. He will be 27 for the Tour and 32 for the Olympics. In his prime! That can’t be just a coincidence! His mother lives in an apartment near Victoria. He rode his bike around Hyde Park a thousand times as a kid. What if it was all written down? What if it was all preordained? What if it was his destiny to win that yellow jersey and end his career with a final gold in 2012? Isn’t that a thought worth treasuring? Wouldn’t that be fabulous?


THE PRESS conference has ended and we are exploring the genesis of his thought, the root of his destiny. It begins in 1981 with a phone call at Christmas from a cycling track in Germany to an apartment in Ghent, Belgium, where a mother is nursing her infant son.

The Dortmund Six-Day race has just ended and Gary Wiggins, a talented professional cyclist from the Australian bush, has some exciting news for Linda, his English wife. He has found top form. He has had a great week. He has won Miss Dortmund. “I’ve met a new lady and I’m not coming back,” he informs his wife. And he doesn’t. So Linda packs a suitcase and returns with their son to London. Bradley is a year old.

His earliest sporting memory dates to 1989 and that dramatic night at Anfield when Arsenal beat Liverpool to clinch the championship in the final match of the season. Home was a small apartment on a council estate in Maida Vale and football was his boyhood passion. “It was all we ever talked about as kids,” he says. “I wanted to be a professional footballer — played before school, after school and under the nearest streetlight in winter. I was really in love with the game until I was 12 years old.”

That summer — 1992 — was spent at a West Ham soccer school. He would travel by train every morning with his friends and spend the evenings at home with his mum watching the Barcelona Olympics on television. An Englishman riding a very strange bike had reached the final of the individual pursuit race. Wiggins was absolutely mesmerised. He wanted to be Chris Boardman.

“Everyone was talking about it the next day on the train,” he says. “ ‘Did you see the guy last night on his bike?’ That was the start of it. I thought, ‘I’d love to do that’. My mum wrote to the British Cycling Federation and was told about these races on a local bypass that was closed. I went along and it was a completely different world.

“These cycling kids were from nice families and went to nice schools; I went to a school where teachers got stabbed and where it was cool to break into a car and nick a stereo. I had just reached that crossover point at 12 where kids go from thinking about nothing but playing football to worrying about the trainers they are wearing and smoking and stuff.

“But from the moment I started cycling I decided, ‘I’m not going to do that’. I won’t say I became a hermit, but I’d come home from school and jump on an exercise bike and pretend I was doing the Tour de France. I joined a club in west London, the Archer Road Club, and borrowed a bike so I could ride on the track.”

The Archer was no ordinary cycling club. It was here, almost 20 years before, that a raw, talented amateur from Australia called Gary Wiggins had first pitched his tent in England, and here, at the Archer track at Paddington, where Wiggins had first caught the eye of Bradley’s mother, who lived nearby.

“How did your mother feel about you joining the same club as your father and racing?” I ask.

“She had told me about him when I was a kid,” he says, “and there were photos and stuff of him racing at home, but I never spoke to her about him as a person. I’ve read about the relationship Lance Armstrong has with his mother (who brought up the seven-time Tour de France champion on her own) and ours is quite similar in many respects. She always took my side when I misbehaved at school and wanted to give me everything. It was as if bringing me up was her sole purpose in life.”

Propelled by racing genes — the only gift he ever had from his father — and assisted by a genial coach, Stan Knight, young Bradley was soon turning heads and fixed on where he was going. “From the moment I started cycling, I had this vision of what I wanted to do with my life.

“I remember my art teacher asking me at school once, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ I said, ‘I want to win the Olympics and become a professional cyclist’. And she said, ‘You can’t rely on that, come on, be realistic. How many people from London become pro cyclists?’ But there was never a doubt in my mind.

“I’d read the Cycling Weekly (magazine) and in the winter they would always visit a pro at home and interview him on how the season had gone. In December of 1992 they interviewed Miguel Indurain after he had won his second Tour, and there was this photo of him with his child, sat in front of an open fire with a woolly jumper on.

“It was an amazing picture of warmth and wealth and happiness and I thought, ‘I’d love to be like that one day, living in a big house, having won the Tour’. It was a strange image to have, I suppose, for a 12-year-old, but that was my goal.”

In 1997, five years after he had made the switch from football, Wiggins returned to London from Cuba as the world junior champion for the individual pursuit. It was a performance that made headlines in cycling journals around the globe and was noted with interest down under by a former champion who was earning a living as a removals man in Melbourne.

A few weeks later, Bradley’s grandmother paid him a visit one afternoon and presented him with a slip of paper. “Your father phoned this morning and left this number,” she announced.

“What did he say?” Bradley asked.

“He said, ‘Oh, I see Brad’s racing now. If he wants, he can give me a call’,” she replied.

He glanced at the number and thought about it.

Two years later they met when he travelled to Melbourne for a pre-Olympic training camp. “He was living in a caravan site,” Bradley recalls. “He’d been in prison a couple of times, had remarried and had another child and was trying to get his life on track again. We’d been in touch for about a year on the phone and arranged to meet in a cafe. I could see straight away that he was nervous. He sat across the table, playing with a knife and couldn’t look me in the eye.

“I think the fact that I wasn’t bitter in any way unsettled him. He had left us with nothing. My mother was jobless. We lived in a tiny apartment in London and I hadn’t had any contact with him — not even a birthday card — for 17 years. I think he expected me to be angry. I think he expected me to ask, ‘Why did you do that?’ But I just sat back, taking it all in.”

“Why did you agree to meet him?”

I ask.

“I was curious; it was something I had to do. I never saw him as my father and never had any intention of starting a relationship with him, but I think he did. We stayed in touch and met a couple of times over the next three years, but the more I saw of him, the less I liked him.

“He started trying to impose himself on me, saying, ‘You’ve turned out how you are because of me’, but I know that had he been around for my childhood, I would have never taken to cycling. His aggressive nature would have turned me away from it, he would have been too critical, so I’m almost . . . I was going to say thankful that I made my own mistakes.”

THERE haven’t been many mistakes over the past six years. In 2000 Wiggins made his first instalment on a Indurain lifestyle with a bronze medal in the team pursuit at the Sydney Olympics. “To represent your country at an Olympics and win a medal was an amazing feeling and the biggest thing in my life at that point,” he says. “But then I thought, ‘I want to be Olympic champion in an individual event. I don’t want to leave it to a team. I want full control ’.”

A professional career on the road seemed the next logical step. In January 2002 he joined the French team Française des Jeux and began a new life as a continental pro. The apprenticeship was brutal. “Three days before the Tour of Flanders we were told to do this 7 hour training ride. It was madness. I was in a box by the end of the classics (the leading one-day races of the European season) and spent the rest of the year just going from race to race.”

The Commonwealth Games in Manchester that year offered a chance to return to the spotlight. He cruised to the final of the individual pursuit against

the Australian Bradley McGee, and was sure he was going to win. “McGee had just ridden the Tour de France and I couldn’t see any way he could beat me,” Wiggins says, “but he caught me in front of my home crowd. It was humiliating. I wanted to hide. It was the lowest point in my cycling career.”

Not quite. Six weeks later he travelled to the world championships in Copenhagen and completely bombed.

The season had been a disaster. His new career on the road had blunted his edge on the track and he was caught at the crossroads. That winter he had a visit from Chris Boardman. The hero of 1992 had been retired for two years and was returning to the sport as a coach.

“He pulled me aside and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” Wiggins recalls.

“I said, ‘I want to be Olympic champion in two years’. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but you’re getting caught in the pro system. You need to set some objectives for yourself and manipulate the team to achieve them’.”

A year later Wiggins won his first world title in the individual pursuit in Stuttgart. He was 23, dating a girl he loved from Wigan and closing in on his life’s ambition — an Olympic gold medal. The preparation went like clockwork. He travelled to Athens in the form of his life, convinced that he would fulfil his destiny, and then, three days before the event, the most extraordinary thing happened.

“One of the things I had never done as a child, and right through my teenage years to my young adult life, was cry. I had never, ever cried. I can never recall crying as a child. I never had that emotion as a person to cry, but in the three days before the Olympics I’d just burst into tears every now and again. I’d have to have a cry in the bathroom.

“For months, all I had been thinking about was the Olympics. It was life or death for me. I had lost touch with reality.

“I couldn’t see how I would be able to cope if I lost at the Olympic Games and would have given up cycling if I’d finished second to McGee again. It was a horrible feeling.”

Wound like a spring, Wiggins smashed the Olympic record in the qualifying rides and secured his place in the final with McGee. The night before the final was the longest of his life. He was sharing a room with a teammate, Rob Hayles, who was racing next day for bronze. They listened to each other twist and turn and shuffle in bed for hours.

The morning brought little respite. He spent the day under the watchful supervision of Boardman until the moment arrived to leave for the track. “The two hours before it were the worst two hours of my life. It was like waiting to be hanged, I imagine. We were sitting in a cabin under the track. Chris was keeping the time.

“I never thought about McGee. I never thought, ‘What if I fail?’ All I thought was: ‘A to B as soon as possible. Just do it as you’ve done in training many times’. The pain is the hardest thing to accept: ‘How much is it going to hurt? How much pain?’ “Chris used to emphasise all the time, ‘This thing is going to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life, but it’s only going to last four minutes and then it’s over, so accept that; accept that it’s the hardest thing and accept that it’s going to hurt and accept that it’s going to be horrible’.

“And I did accept it. I thought, ‘Okay, I do feel like shit and I feel like I just want to run away, but I’m supposed to feel like that’.”

Wiggins had endured three minutes of pain when he realised he was going to win. “We were starting the fourth kilometre and I could see him (coming into the straight). I thought, ‘I’ve won this, it’s over’, but there were three laps to go and my concentration had gone and it suddenly began to hurt. I was hanging on then, but luckily I had enough.

“I finished and crossed the line and needed a few laps for myself. There was no punching the air. I just rolled around thinking, ‘Thank God it’s over’. And then I embraced McGee and went to Cath in the crowd. Two days before, she had told me in a panic that she was pregnant, and the first thing I said was, ‘That baby is never going to have to worry about money’.”

The next two days were the stuff of dreams. He followed his gold in the pursuit with a silver in the team pursuit and bronze in the Madison, becoming the first British athlete since Mary Rand in 1964 to win three medals at an Olympic Games.

“As soon as I got the bronze the press went crazy,” he recalls. “ ‘How does it feel to be an Olympic hero? Do you realise what you’ve done? How does it feel to be a candidate for Sports Personality of the Year?’ “But at that point I couldn’t take any of it in. I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. I don’t want all of this. I just want to go home and lead a normal life’.”

Home was a house shared with Cathy in Wigan. He finished the season in a daze and spent the winter wondering what would happen next. The Olympics had dominated his life for so long that he hadn’t considered other objectives. He signed a new contract with the French road team Crédit Agricole.

“They had this massive plan to turn me into a road rider. I said, ‘What about the Tour prologue? I’d love to win the Tour prologue. Can I prepare for it like it was a pursuit and try to wear the yellow jersey for a day or two?’ But it didn’t work with them and I just got lost in the pro system again with no clear objective.”

Fatherhood was another alien concept. Ben was born in March last year. For the first months of his life Bradley wondered if they would ever connect. “When he was born, I thought, ‘Great, I’ve got this thing’, but you don’t understand what it means.

“It wasn’t until the season had finished and I had three or four months of being at home with him every day that I realised how important he is and what my responsibilities are. And it’s fantastic having an influence on how he will turn out.

“The wheel has turned full circle in a way. Ben is the same age I was when my father left my mum. I’m in the position he was in — a professional cyclist, a man — but I could never take off like that. Even if I had problems with my wife, I could never envisage leaving my son and would always want to be in contact with him. I don’t understand why my father did that. It’s one of the reasons I don’t speak to him any more.”

As Ben approaches his first birthday, his father has been racing in the Tour of the Algarve with a new team, Cofidis. He hasn’t had a great week. He hasn’t won Miss Faro, but he’ll be home to his family today with a smile on his face.

“When I signed for Cofidis and they asked what I wanted to do, I handed them a sheet of paper: ‘These are my objectives for the next two years’. I don’t want to finish 10th in the Tour of the Algarve; I don’t want to be fifth in Etoile de Bessèges; I’m the type of rider who’s going to win eight races in his career, but those eight races will be big ones.

“I told them I wanted to win the Tour prologue in Strasbourg; I told them I wanted to win the Tour prologue in London; I told them I wanted to win the Olympics in Beijing. They said, ‘Right, go for it’.”

He will start his first Tour de France in Strasbourg this summer and has been given the green light to prepare for the prologue like he prepares for an Olympic pursuit. He has got Boardman in his corner and the yellow jersey in his sights. He is Bradley Wiggins. Watch him fly.