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Authors: Bradley Wiggins
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vitamins. British Cycling have always had a no-needle policy, it’s been a mainstay of theirs; so it was something I grew up with as a bike rider.
In British cycling culture, at the word ‘needle’ or the sight of one, you go ‘Oh shit’, it’s a complete taboo. When I was a kid we used to play around in a car park where there were always needles on the floor from heroin addicts who used to go and shoot up – orange needles – so from a young age my mother and others would tell us, ‘Stay away from those needles, don’t go near them, don’t touch them.’ In France you can buy them over the counter; it’s a different culture. Here you buy vitamin C effervescent from Boots, rather than getting it through a syringe. I’ve never had an injection, apart from I’ve had my vaccinations, and on occasion I’ve been put on a drip, when I’ve come down with diarrhoea or something or have been severely dehydrated.
Shane kept saying to me that this was all working in our favour. As long as they kept going in that direction, deterring the drug-users, that would be great. The needle ban was fantastic, although from our point of view at the Dauphiné there was no sign of it being policed. It would have been great if they had started raiding teams to see that people were toeing the line. Medical people in our team were adamant that riders were continuing to use syringes for recovery on the Dauphiné and other races even though the practice was banned. Guys with a history of this sort of stuff weren’t going to say, ‘Oh, it’s against the law now, we’ll stop doing it.’ The hardcore will continue to push the boundaries, and until someone gets banned for breaking the syringe rule I don’t think it’s really going to deter them. But all those developments contribute towards a team like ours, which is determined to race clean, coming away with something big at the Tour de France.
As the Tour drew near, I had dropped to my lightest climbing weight ever: 69 kilos. I’d taken it gradually down to 71.5 by the start of the 2009 Tour. That was 6.5 kilos lighter than I’d been when I rode in 2007. It takes a good deal of hard work to get it down there, but it’s the most effective way of improving your performance on the road: one kilogramme less of body weight means you gain about 25sec for a given power output on a thirty-minute climb. It’s not just about the climbs; every time you accelerate out of a corner or up a little hill you are hefting that extra weight. Over a three-week race those efforts add up to a huge amount of extra work. On the track you build up a lot of upper-body muscle simply due to the work on your arms and shoulders from the standing starts you do as a pursuiter. On the road it’s not useful and it took a good while to work it off after I quit the track post-Beijing; one thing I did initially was have regular checks with Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist at British Cycling, to make sure I was staying healthy. It was the biggest single change I’d made.
I’d won the time trial at the Bayern Rundfahrt, taking the scalp of Fabian Cancellara, who was the man to beat at that time. I’d won the Dauphiné, the biggest road victory of my entire career, and then I’d taken first place in the British national road race championships on a super-tough course in the north-east, where Sky had been dominant. I had been massively optimistic for the Tour when I had faced the press at Kew Gardens a couple of days before the British Road Race Championships. I told them that I’d relaunched my career and said I was ready to go. It was true: I was in a better position for the Tour than I had ever been. And I raced well to win that national title. But after that trip to the north-east I got ill: diarrhoea for two days. As a result, I couldn’t travel to the Tour until right up to the last minute. I think I got in on the Wednesday night, and then we were straight out, doing team time-trial training on the course
In British cycling culture, at the word ‘needle’ or the sight of one, you go ‘Oh shit’, it’s a complete taboo. When I was a kid we used to play around in a car park where there were always needles on the floor from heroin addicts who used to go and shoot up – orange needles – so from a young age my mother and others would tell us, ‘Stay away from those needles, don’t go near them, don’t touch them.’ In France you can buy them over the counter; it’s a different culture. Here you buy vitamin C effervescent from Boots, rather than getting it through a syringe. I’ve never had an injection, apart from I’ve had my vaccinations, and on occasion I’ve been put on a drip, when I’ve come down with diarrhoea or something or have been severely dehydrated.
Shane kept saying to me that this was all working in our favour. As long as they kept going in that direction, deterring the drug-users, that would be great. The needle ban was fantastic, although from our point of view at the Dauphiné there was no sign of it being policed. It would have been great if they had started raiding teams to see that people were toeing the line. Medical people in our team were adamant that riders were continuing to use syringes for recovery on the Dauphiné and other races even though the practice was banned. Guys with a history of this sort of stuff weren’t going to say, ‘Oh, it’s against the law now, we’ll stop doing it.’ The hardcore will continue to push the boundaries, and until someone gets banned for breaking the syringe rule I don’t think it’s really going to deter them. But all those developments contribute towards a team like ours, which is determined to race clean, coming away with something big at the Tour de France.
As the Tour drew near, I had dropped to my lightest climbing weight ever: 69 kilos. I’d taken it gradually down to 71.5 by the start of the 2009 Tour. That was 6.5 kilos lighter than I’d been when I rode in 2007. It takes a good deal of hard work to get it down there, but it’s the most effective way of improving your performance on the road: one kilogramme less of body weight means you gain about 25sec for a given power output on a thirty-minute climb. It’s not just about the climbs; every time you accelerate out of a corner or up a little hill you are hefting that extra weight. Over a three-week race those efforts add up to a huge amount of extra work. On the track you build up a lot of upper-body muscle simply due to the work on your arms and shoulders from the standing starts you do as a pursuiter. On the road it’s not useful and it took a good while to work it off after I quit the track post-Beijing; one thing I did initially was have regular checks with Nigel Mitchell, the nutritionist at British Cycling, to make sure I was staying healthy. It was the biggest single change I’d made.
I’d won the time trial at the Bayern Rundfahrt, taking the scalp of Fabian Cancellara, who was the man to beat at that time. I’d won the Dauphiné, the biggest road victory of my entire career, and then I’d taken first place in the British national road race championships on a super-tough course in the north-east, where Sky had been dominant. I had been massively optimistic for the Tour when I had faced the press at Kew Gardens a couple of days before the British Road Race Championships. I told them that I’d relaunched my career and said I was ready to go. It was true: I was in a better position for the Tour than I had ever been. And I raced well to win that national title. But after that trip to the north-east I got ill: diarrhoea for two days. As a result, I couldn’t travel to the Tour until right up to the last minute. I think I got in on the Wednesday night, and then we were straight out, doing team time-trial training on the course
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