How Bradley Wiggins had to fight against the sport's drug demons in a race I still can't be certain is completely clean

In July 2006, a week after six of the sport’s biggest stars had been evicted from the Tour de France for doping, the American cycling magazine Velonews ran a poll on their website: Is this now a clean Tour de France?

Readers were invited to tick one of four boxes:

a) Yes, they’re too scared now.

b) It’s mostly clean.

c) No, they’re just careful.

d) Wait and see.

Bradley Wiggins was in Pau that afternoon when the results — (1) five per cent (2) 26 per cent (3) 50 per cent (4) 17 per cent — were published. The 26-year-old Londoner had just completed his first ever mountain stage in the Tour and the experience had almost broken him.



Street fighter: Bradley Wiggins passes the Arc de Triomphe

His face was a mask of dust and sweat; a reporter watched as a team helper wiped him down and handed him a recovery drink. He finished 152nd of the 168 starters and over 17 minutes behind the stage winner, Juan Miguel Mercado.

‘That first climb was just mind-blowing,’ he said. ‘There was one stage when I thought, “What am I doing here?” ’

But his Calvary was only just beginning.

The next stage was a blazing-hot ride across the storied peaks of the Tourmalet, the Aspin, the Peyresourde and the Portillon. A week later they had reached the Alps and three incredibly tough stages over Alpe d’Huez, La Toussuire and Morzine.



Wiggins dug deep and hung on to Paris. He had finished his first Tour in 124th place — three hours and 24 minutes behind the winner, Floyd Landis — and celebrated that evening with his wife, Cath, happy and proud to have survived.

But three days later, his joy was tarnished when it was announced that Landis had tested positive. In his autobiography, In Pursuit of Glory, Wiggins records the moment vividly:

‘I felt physically sick when I heard the news. My first reaction was purely selfish and related only to me. “You b****** Landis,” I thought. “You have completely ruined my own small achievement of getting around the Tour de France and being a small part of cycling history. You and guys like you are p***ing on my sport and my dreams. Why do guys like you keep cheating? How many of you are out there, taking the p*** and getting away with it? Sod you all. You are a bunch of cheating b******* and I hope one day they catch the lot of you and ban you all for life. You can keep doing it your way and I will keep doing it mine. You won’t ever change me, you sods. B******s to all of you. At least I can look myself in the mirror”.’

Cheat: Tour de France winner Floyd Llandis was guilty of using performance enhancing drugs

A year later, Wiggins began his second Tour de France in London with a brilliant fourth- place finish in the prologue time trial and continued to shine during the first two weeks with a heroic solo breakaway on the sixth stage to Bourg-en-Bresse and a fifth-place finish in the time trial to Albi.

But it was the scourge of doping that dominated the headlines: the race leader, Michael Rasmussen, and his aversion to random dope controls; the German, Patrik Sinkewitz, and his surfeit of testosterone; the Kazakh, Alexandre Vinokourov, and his lust for transfusing blood. Every day brought a new scandal and the race was in chaos when it reached the Pyrenees.

The final mountain stage was a 218km ride from Orthez to the summit of the Col d’Aubisque. It was a blisteringly hot day but Wiggins dug deep and came home in the final group after more than seven hours in the saddle. They were four days from Paris; he needed a nice cold sponge and some dry clothes but when he reached the team helper, he could tell something was wrong and within seconds they were engulfed by a swarm of excited reporters…

‘Bradley.’

‘Hey, Bradley.’

‘Bradley.’

…his Italian team-mate at Cofidis, Cristian Moreni, had tested positive.

Take him away, boys: Cristian Moreni also tested positive

The police were waiting when he got back to the team bus and they were escorted by outriders with sirens blazing, directly to the station in Pau. He remembers feeling angry (‘F*** cycling and f*** the Tour de France!’), and then scared as he was bundled into a police car and whisked to the team hotel. His room and possessions were searched.

A decision was made to withdraw the team from the race. He booked a flight for the following morning, caught a lift to the airport and dumped all of his racing kit in a waste bin in the departures lounge.

At a press conference in Manchester the next day, he hammered Rasmussen, called for a life ban for Vinokourov and was scathing about Italian Ivan Basso and the American Tyler Hamilton, who had recently returned after doping bans. No one was spared.

He lashed the world governing body for allowing the problem to grow, the team managers for rewarding the dopers with huge contracts and had some pertinent advice for the Tour de France organisers.

‘I think they have to take a strong look at who they invite to the race in the next few years; if there is one per cent suspicion or doubt that a team is involved in doping, or (are) working with certain doctors who are under suspicion of doping, then they shouldn’t be invited to the Tour de France, it’s as simple as that. They shouldn’t even be given a racing licence until they can prove that they are not involved in wrongdoing.’

When he had finished speaking there was almost a round of applause. Wiggins had just delivered one of the most impressive anti-doping speeches in the history of the sport. And then something quite curious happened.

Tour delight: Wiggins is held aloft

In 2008, sickened by the continuing scandals, Wiggins side-stepped the Tour to concentrate on the Beijing Olympics, before returning to the race the following season with a new American team, Garmin — widely acknowledged as the most ethical team in the peloton.

But the headlines that July were dominated by another returning star — the seven-time champion, Lance Armstrong.

In his book this is how Wiggins described what happened next…

‘To spend virtually three weeks alongside him, competing directly with him for a podium place, was not something I had ever envisaged in my career, especially after he retired in 2005. It was the stuff of dreams and we began to develop a decent rapport, enjoying a gossip early in the day before the racing kicked off properly.’

For those who had applauded Wiggins in Manchester, the love-bombing of the sport’s most controversial rider was puzzling.

Was it fair to suggest that there was ‘a one percent suspicion of doping’ on Armstrong’s teams?

Three of Wiggins’s team-mates at Garmin had witnessed it first-hand.

Had Armstrong ‘worked with certain doctors who were under suspicion of doping?’

Hey, even Lance didn’t deny it.

Where had the great anti-doping crusader gone? Was his fourth place in the Tour that year — an outstanding achievement — a sign the problem had been solved? And so it was for the three seasons that followed. The faster Bradley pedalled, the less we heard from the angry young man we loved.

Stop it: Wiggins baulked at comparisons between Team Sky and Lance Armstrong's US Postal team

To be fair, the sport is unquestionably cleaner now than at any other time in its past but it seems a strange irony that the only time Wiggins has looked under pressure in this Tour was when he was asked about doping.

That was the press conference after the eighth stage to Porrentruy, when he was asked about the comparisons being made on Twitter between the strength of Team Sky and Armstong’s all-conquering US Postal team.

‘I say they’re just f*****g w*****s,’ he replied. ‘I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of s**t, rather than get off their a***s in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s it ultimately, c***s.’

There were no follow-up questions. Wiggins dropped the mic and left.

Two days later, during the rest-day press conference, the team informed journalists that no questions on doping would be tolerated or answered.

But then, just as we began to wonder about transparency, Wiggins addressed the subject at length in a column for The Guardian, offering insight on his views on doping and the hard work to which he attributes his success.

‘I do believe the sport is changing,’ he wrote. ‘As that change has happened, my performances have gone up, and at the same time I’ve begun to work far harder than I did before.

‘I’m not claiming the sport is out of the woods but doping in the sport is less of a worry to me personally, it’s less at the forefront of my mind, because I’m no longer getting beaten by people who then go on and test positive or whatever. If there is a difference in my attitude now to back then, it’s that I’m more focused on what I am doing, I pay less attention to what’s going on outside my bubble because I’m not coming second to riders who dope.’

It was a fair point. And he made a lot of them. But there was one legitimate question he didn’t address.

Plan: Dave Brailsford and Team Sky wanted to win the Tour with a clean Brit within five years

In the autumn of 2009, three months before Team Sky was launched, I spent an interesting afternoon in Manchester in the company of the team’s general manager David Brailsford. We had been talking at length about the new team’s recruitment policy and his (in my view) surprising decision not to offer a contract to the reformed drugs cheat David Millar. He walked to a filing cabinet and handed me a copy of the team recruitment strategy.

It must have weighed half a ton. As you would expect from Brailsford, every i was dotted and every t was crossed.

Their goal was to win the Tour de France with a clean British rider in the next five years. To achieve that goal, the team would employ only British doctors who had never worked in cycling before.

The team would not employ anyone who had been associated with doping. The team would have a zero tolerance of doping. Staff would be ‘enthusiastic and positive, fit and healthy and willing to try new things’.

Three years later that goal has been achieved, but there is just one question: why did they hire Geert Leinders?

In the summer of 2007, when Wiggins was making his zero-tolerance speech in Manchester about doctors and teams, Geert Leinders was a member of the medical staff at Rabobank — Michael Rasmussen’s team. It was not a vintage year for the Dutchmen — Thomas Dekker, perhaps the nation’s brightest prospect, had tested positive for EPO and Rasmussen’s disgrace at the Tour was the final straw.

The team manager, Theo de Rooy, was sacked. In May of this year, De Rooy told a Dutch newspaper that doping was an accepted practice at Rabobank during his four years at the helm.

Triumph: Wiggins celebrates his win with wife Cath

A few days after the interview was published, Leinders’s name started trending on Twitter. The bone-idle w*****s were puzzled: ‘Was this the same Geert Leinders who had spent the last two years at Sky?’ The rumours continued to build. The team were questioned by several journalists but said nothing until the rest day of the 2012 Tour when Brailsford admitted to The Times that Leinders had been employed by the team since 2010.

‘I’ve nothing to hide,’ Brailsford said. ‘There is nothing I won’t talk about. We needed some experience. That’s why we decided to go and get him. Has he been a good doctor? Brilliant. The guy really understands it’s not about doping, it’s about genuine medical practice.’

He also announced that Sky were currently investigating Leinders’s past.

But how did we get here? What happened to that weighty tome in Brailsford’s office with all those lofty ambitions and goals? What happened to zero tolerance? What happened to openness and transparency? What happened to only hiring British doctors who had worked outside the sport? Was that really too much to ask?

Some 86 per cent of Tour de France winners since Tommy Simpson’s death have been tarnished or implicated by doping. There is nothing to suggest that Bradley Wiggins achieved yesterday’s historic victory through anything other than talent and hard work. But at this time of glory, why does Team Sky leave itself open to insinuation by employing Leinders?