Wiggins’ Sky blues

“Who’s Brian Tracy?”

“Isn’t he a Thunderbird?”

“I think he’s one of those ‘life’ coaches.” They Google him: Brian Tracy is chairman and chief executive of Brian Tracy International, a company specialising in the training and development of individuals and organisations.

“It says here that he has helped over five million people achieve their goals.”

“Only $197 for a set of CDs!”

“And what about his books: Change Your Thinking Change Your Life; Get Paid More and Promoted Faster; Getting Rich Your Own Way?”

“Yeah, that sounds like something Bradley would read.”

There's an old French expression of what a great racer needs: La tete et les jambes (The head and the legs). Wiggins has always had les jambes but for some time now, his tete has been a source of fascination.

The month is July 2009. He is speeding over the cobbles on the Champs Elysees and about to finish fourth in the Tour de France. Up front, his Garmin-Slipstream teammates are driving the peloton and preparing the final sprint for their specialist, Tyler Farrar.

Christian Vande Velde leads the line and then David Millar takes over, setting a furious pace until the final kilometre before handing the relay to Wiggins. But there’s a problem. Wiggins has gone missing and left the final lead-out man, Julian Dean, with too much to do to launch Farrar. Mark Cavendish wins for Columbia-HTC. Millar is furious.

In Racing Through The Dark, a brilliant and absorbing autobiography, Millar writes: “It was the one day Brad was asked to give something back to the team, after we’d given him everything for three weeks. Yet I felt he hadn’t even tried and had remained about 80 places back in the middle of the bunch, without even telling us he wasn’t going to help.”

The month is December 2009. Wiggins is standing in the centre of the Manchester Velodrome, talking to Richard Moore of The Guardian. For months now, since the Tour, he has been griping about speculation that he is to break his contract with Garmin and join Team Sky. “I’m staying with Garmin,” he tells Moore. “Once we’re into January, and it’s apparent I’m still with Garmin, everything will settle down. You’ll see.” Five days later, at a press conference, Wiggins is unveiled by his new team.

The month is June 2010. He is sitting in a room of an airport hotel on a Friday afternoon, talking to his wife on the phone. He has spent the week in the Alps and Pyrenees, reconnoitring the climbs and preparing for the Tour. Richard Stanton, a photographer from The Sunday Times, has been following him in a car for two days but needs a portrait shot before he can go home. “No problem,” Wiggins agrees, on Thursday morning.

But Friday has gone badly and now he’s in a mood. He deploys his coach, Rod Ellingworth, to relay the news. “He’s tired,” Ellingworth explains. “He says he’ll do it in the morning.” Stanton is up early the next morning and sets up his lights and cameras in a bedroom. “It will take five minutes,” he assures Ellingworth. “I’m just going to stand him against the wall and ask him to take off his shirt.”

But Wiggins has changed his mind. “He says he doesn’t want to do it,” Ellingworth explains. “He hasn’t shaved.” A year on, Stanton spits blood at the mention of Wiggins’ name.

So does Millar. On Tuesday, in an interview with The Guardian, he said: “We [the Garmin team] made him. We basically rode him into that fourth place finish in the Tour de France. It was not a one-man show. It was a team effort. He wouldn’t have hit the top 10 if he’d been on any other team so that’s why I was so p***** off with him. He never once gave us the respect we deserved. Mark Cavendish understands the game — Brad doesn’t. He’s a natural-born leader, Cav, whereas Brad has no leadership skills.”

Wiggins appeared to be hampered by odd tactics and poor preparation (Pete Goding)

Wiggins’ frailties at the helm of Team Sky were cruelly exposed twice last season: first, with a meltdown at Le Tour; then, more alarmingly, with a calamitous performance at the Tour of Britain in September. “Where did they get their tactics?” a rival team director asked. “Benny Hill?”

It was Wiggins’ last race of the season. He opted to skip the October world championships and was at home with his feet up when Millar — who had raced all three Grand Tours — finished second in Wiggins’ speciality, the time trial. That night he received a call from a furious David Brailsford, Team Sky’s principal. Three days later, he was summoned to Manchester. “I got a severe rollicking and I deserved it,” Wiggins says. “The way I was behaving after last year’s Tour de France, the way I was racing as a team leader, was just so far away from what it should have been it was unbelievable.” Question for Brailsford: Why was he indulged for so long?

Wiggins is high maintenance. Three weeks ago, after the time trial at the Criteriuim de Dauphine, he complained that none of the carers had waited at the finish. “You said you were going straight to the bus,” they replied.

He wants a bottle, then changes his mind. They fill it with X and he wants Y. Sean Yates, a former Tour de France yellow jersey, is a team director at Sky. “There’s never a dull moment with Brad,” he says. “You’re either laughing your head off or tearing your hair out. Or both at the same time.”

Shane Sutton, another Team Sky director, is his most trusted confidant. “He needs to be loved, bolstered, encouraged, rollicked. The key is understanding when to adopt each approach.” Wiggins insists he has changed. “Last year I had a long look in the mirror,” he said recently to the cycling journalist Lionel Birnie. “I wasn’t leading the team in any sense. I was quite withdrawn. You only have to look at the interviews at the Tour and post-Tour ... I wouldn’t say I was moody because that isn’t how I felt at the time, but I could come across as moody. I was a little bit defensive at times. I was at the centre of this team but I felt completely alone. That’s not a nice place to be.

“I had a long, hard look at myself and changed a lot of the things about myself that I felt I needed to change. I let people start to help me a bit more. It snowballed to the point where I feel confident to lead this team. I feel confident telling the guys what to do. I’d have loved to have done that last year but I just couldn’t.

“I remember at the [team] presentation in London, I asked to stand at the back. I didn’t want to stand at the front. I wanted to be presented in the mix and stand at the back of the photos. I said, ‘I don’t want the other guys thinking I’m the leader’. They said, ‘Well, you are the leader’.”

His performances this year — third in Paris-Nice, stage win at Bayern Rundfahrt, winner of the Dauphine, British road race champion — have been outstanding and he starts the Tour in the form of his life. He has les jambes to be top five.

Does he have la tete? The jury is out.

On Thursday at the Team Sky press conference, the new Bradley Wiggins sounded confident and assured until a question in the 14th minute. “What exactly have you changed in your training from last year to this year? And why now should the fans believe that a podium in Paris is possible?”

“I don’t think the fans should believe anything,” he replied. “I think they’re your expectations and goals, talking about podiums. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the podium once this season.” And suddenly you were reminded of the old Bradley Wiggins and a response he gave last week when asked the same question in London: “The top 10 seems more than achievable, but all of a sudden getting on the podium seems achievable.”

Tune in. The quest will be fascinating.