Being a Manxman, Mark knows a lot about motorbike racing. His home is famous for the Isle of Man TT races, which I’ve been commentating on for many years. Away from the pressures of our jobs, and stuck in a car for a few hours, we were able to shoot the breeze about motorbikes, Le Mans and fast cars. He was absolutely in his element. Mark is a petrolhead, with a collection of fast and powerful cars, including a McLaren with a unique Cavendish Green colour scheme and a Land Rover Desert Warrior with a 5.7-litre V10 Corvette engine. After the London Six Day, he was so hyped and driven by the adrenaline of racing that he spent the evening ferrying various people to the station, rumbling around in his 4 × 4, rattling all the windows of Stratford. Our children are of similar ages, which offers plenty of opportunity for non-cycling, no-pressure chats. It’s now become a golden rule between us that, when we find ourselves in each other’s company, however brief, we’ll steer clear of the shop talk. It’s nice, and a rare privilege, to get a window into the real Mark Cavendish.
To be the best, Mark Cavendish has had to be brutal and hide his kinder nature with an emotional suit of armour. He dons this before going into battle each day. What we see then is a precocious, at times demanding, egotistical and hugely ambitious Mark Cavendish. When the time inevitably comes for all the battles to have been fought and, for the most part, won, it will be a pleasure to see this approachable, considerate, polite and kind man emerge from the tumult.
Bradley Wiggins
Tour de France compère: ‘And now ladies and gentlemen, a word from the 2012 Tour de France Champion.’
Bradley Wiggins [tapping mike]: ‘Have you all got your raffle tickets ready?’
Wiggins is a quick-change artist of the highest order. He’s regularly altered his body shape to accommodate the disciplines he has mastered. He’s an Olympic Champion track racer, an hour record holder, a Tour de France winner, a Monuments man, and a Time Trial World Champion.
His assault on the hour record took place on 7 June 2015. Some 6,000 spectators are crammed into what was London’s Olympic Velodrome to experience a slice of cycling history as Bradley Wiggins limbers up in the track centre in preparation. Miguel Induráin, former record holder and Tour de France winner, is there as well as other sporting personalities you wouldn’t normally see at a cycling event, like Seb Coe and Martin Johnson, captain of England’s Rugby World Cup-winning team. I’m in the commentary box, working for Sky, who cheekily secured the broadcasting rights to the event. A series of build-up races have been keeping the public entertained and the clock ticks inexorably towards 6.30 p.m., the scheduled time for Bradley’s start. Dame Sarah Storey is track centre doing interviews and due to join me on comms. With four minutes to go, I’m cued in for an ad break before the start of this historic attempt. An official tells Brad, ‘Four minutes to go, Brad! OK?’ But this is Bradley Wiggins, remember? And he doesn’t always keep to the script. In the middle of the commercial break, which you can never cut away from, he decides that he’s ready right now, he’s reached the perfect place in his mind. He climbs on to his bike and, with no flowery build-up, nothing, bang! He’s off!
The whole scenario was classic Bradley Wiggins: a highly driven, intensely focused maverick who does things the way he wants to do them and the rest of the world will just have to put up with that. The Sky on-site producer Doug Ferguson was in shock: ‘Carlton – bin the intro, we are cutting live straight to you!’ Off the break, the TV audience were met with a tumult in the velodrome: a Mexican wave of sound was following Brad around the track as I screamed: ‘Bradley Wiggins waits for no man! He’s already off!!!’ Minutes later, Dame Sarah crashed into her position breathless after her dash from the infield. Chaos, Wiggo style, like it or lump it.
Bradley is an extraordinarily intense and quiet individual. He’s always seemed ill at ease with the press and often claims he has been misquoted. He also reacts strongly to any perceived criticism. While Cavendish often oozes confidence, Bradley sometimes shows fragility. Like many great riders he is full of contradictions: he has the ability to take immense pain and to mentally divorce himself from the punishing physical demands of professional cycling, yet he also seems vulnerable. To cope on a Grand Tour, Bradley set his horizon close. He took one day at a time, yet he’d harboured a dream of winning the Tour de France since he was a schoolboy. And he did it!
Bradley can seem a bit rudderless and chaotic, but he responded brilliantly to the day-to-day plans of the Sky team strategists. And when he had this forensic guidance he was unstoppable.
To fully understand Bradley and the apparent sadness you see in his eyes, I think we have from consider his upbringing and parentage. He was born in Ghent, Belgium, the heartland of European cycling where his father, an Australian named Gary Wiggins, was a star of the Six Day racing scene. Wiggins senior had fantastic physical abilities but became a heavy drinker and a drug user, often using amphetamines to get him through races. He was based in England for a while and paired up with pursuit World Champion Tony Doyle, with whom he had a fair bit of success. Tony has told me that Gary was regularly using amphetamines by this time, and these, unsurprisingly, had a terrible effect on his personality and character. One day he and Tony were in the centre of the track in their Six Day cabin when a soigneur brought them their breakfast: oatmeal for Tony and cornflakes for Gary. Gary put his spoon into the bowl of cornflakes, took