Icons: My Inspiration. My Motivation. My Obsession.

It was a hell of a trip from Kilburn, and it wasn’t as if we had much. She was a single mum working as a receptionist at the local school, but I wasn’t interested in all that practical nonsense. Geoffrey Butler’s was probably the best bike shop in the south-east in those pre-internet days, and at that age you just want stuff. The stuff I wanted was cycling stuff, and so off we set.

Before we went I made it clear that I wasn’t mucking about, and that I absolutely needed a pair of proper cycling sunglasses in the first instance. Then there was the legwarmers issue, which I felt needed to be addressed urgently. Previously I’d worn a pair of mum’s tights, and she’d elasticated the bottoms to make them seem real. I’m sure it was well meaning and all, but I wasn’t prepared to put up with it any longer. As an Olympic gold medalist in the making I wasn’t prepared to compromise, and I couldn’t be held back by substandard equipment.

And besides, you wouldn’t have seen Franco Ballerini riding around in a pair of his mum’s tights …

I THINK ROOTING AROUND IN THE BARGAIN BIN AT BUTLER’S is one of my very best childhood memories. I got a pair of shorts, and I found a Carrera headband like the ones I’d seen on TV. Then a Motorola cap like Sean Yates’s, a Tulip winter rain hat, a pair of Bernard Hinault cycling shoes and some Look clipless pedals. I was like a kid in a sweet bike shop.

It seems crazy now, but it’s a classic cycling story. It’s rites-of-passage stuff, and I don’t suppose I was any different to thousands of other kids all over Europe. What was different was the fact that cycling was small-fry in Britain in just about every sense. Because there were so few shops you had to travel further to get kit, and I think that made it more of an event. There was a rarity value to the things you bought, and that was maybe because you had to do something and go somewhere to get them.

British cycling is unrecognisable these days from what it used to be. Back then it wasn’t in the least bit ‘aspirational’, but rather price-sensitive. You didn’t have the likes of Rapha with their huge marketing budgets, and the British cycling industry was strictly of the cottage variety. It was centred around functionality and economy as distinct from ‘design’ and fashion, and such marketing as existed was quite primitive. It amounted to photos of the champions on their bikes, whereas these days it’s infinitely more sophisticated. Apparently it works – and whichever way you swing it, the more people out riding the better.

None of this concerned my all-new teenage self. I was far too busy strutting around the flat and preening myself in my new headband, cycling shoes and cap. I was a racing cyclist, and by hook or by crook I was going to assert my new identity.

The place to do that was the Archer Road Club. At first I’d been suspicious, but I was starting to feel at home there now. We had something – cycling – in common, but the collateral effects were positive as well. I was much happier, and my general demeanour was much better. Even school, which had never particularly interested me, became less of a drag. The teachers would say to my mum, ‘His behaviour has improved no end. He’s much more polite …’

From an Archer R.C. programme. Finally kitted out and no longer wearing my mum’s tights.

I guess it was because I was going over to West London and riding with all these Oxford University types. They were all older than me, and they had ambitions to become doctors and academics, things like that. They weren’t ‘lads’, they weren’t always swearing and posturing, and they didn’t go around trying to intimidate people. I’d never really been exposed to people like them before, and they were nice.

Like any impressionable adolescent I looked up to the bigger kids in my social circle, and the only thing I had to prove to them was my ability to ride a bike. Everything fitted around that – I felt like I was part of a community of equals, and people were genuinely interested in me. We rode our bikes, talked about riding them, and when we weren’t talking about riding them we were talking about other people riding theirs. It was a bit geeky in some ways, but I liked that aspect because, put simply, so was I. Club nights were social events, and the thing that bound us together was our love of cycling. These weren’t the kind of people I’d generally run across on the estate, but I soon realised that there was nothing not to like. I’d like to pretend I made a conscious decision to change course, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. I knew right from wrong, but if I’m honest it was cycling that chose me, not vice versa. I guess that’s just the way of it when you fall in love, but the long and the short of it is that my football ‘career’ was over. As a matter of fact, so was everything else. Now it was just cycling, cycling and more cycling.

Probably just as well, because I was the beginnings of an adolescent. Everything was changing on the estate, and the innocent games of football we’d always played had started to mutate into something else. The lads I’d been knocking around with had started to ape their big brothers, which of course meant smoking, peering into car windows, that sort of thing. They were generally starting to get into a little bit of bother, and my mum could see where that might be headed. She encouraged my interest in cycling as much as possible, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Chris winning the 1993 Milk Race.

And so to the Milk Race. Obviously I hadn’t seen the Tour de France at this point, so this was the first time I’d been exposed to a stage race. For me the idea that there was a two-week Tour of Britain was wonderful, mystical even. In the 1950s it had been an amateur race, because there had been no British professional riders. Initially it had been sponsored by the Daily Express, but then the Milk Marketing Board stepped in. By now it was a bit of a hybrid – a pro-am whose peloton was made up of British domestic professionals and national amateur teams from around the world.

It started in Tunbridge Wells, and the opening stage was effectively a sort of Tour of Kent. They organised a junior criterium in Sevenoaks in advance of the race coming through, and I took part in it. After that I took my place on the side of the road with everyone else and waited for the peloton to arrive. It came through in a flash, and then we went home. That was it. Bike racing …

I remember very little – there was very little to remember! – but in my mind’s eye I have a picture of Tony Doyle. He was a big star in British cycling, because he’d won the World Pursuit Championship twice. He was off the back getting a bottle or some such, and my mum said, ‘That guy there used to race with your dad! You had your photograph taken with him when you were little. Do you remember?’

Sky Sports showed the highlights every night, and I spent hours studying the minutiae of the event. I was making it my business to know everything – and I mean everything – about the race itself, the riders and the gear they used. It was a useful geography lesson, but most of all it was a lesson in bikes, shoes, gloves, helmets, jerseys, glasses … One of the teams was called Banana Energy. They were British, they had a really cool jersey with a big banana on it. You could buy the jersey at Yellow Jersey Cycles in London, and I went and got one in much the same way that other kids bought Arsenal or Spurs tops. A guy named Chris Lillywhite clinched the GC for them up in Manchester, and I became a fan.

A quintessentially ‘English’ scene. Fording a stream in Westerdale, Yorkshire, during Stage 12 of the 1969 Milk Race.

Later that year I rode down to Crystal Palace to watch Lillywhite win the British Criterium Championship. That was my first real exposure to professional riding, because I saw the team cars, the presentations, all the stuff of bike racing. I also got to see professionals, albeit domestic ones, close up. They weren’t perhaps as good as the top continental riders, but at 13 I wasn’t making comparisons. Their kits were just as shiny, the cars just as colourful, and their bikes seemed just as beautiful.

Back then the Archer used to run the Grand Prix. It was one of the biggest races in the British calendar, and as a member you were expected to go and marshal. So each year I’d get my fluorescent bib and my flag, and watch the best of the Brits fly by.

Over time I became part of the furniture of the club, and ultimately of the national junior team. I’ll never forget the first time I spent time with that generation of riders, though. It was 1998, and I’d earned a place at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. I was on the track team, and Lillywhite and co. were in the next door apartment. I was only 18, and they all used to laugh at me because I was this oracle of cycling knowledge. One night at dinner one of them, Matt Illingworth, said, ‘Right, Bradley, tell Chris what shoes he was wearing when he won the 1993 Milk Race.’ Quick as a flash I said, ‘They were Carnac Podiums, and they were black and white!’

They were all dumbfounded – I probably knew more about their careers than they did themselves. I always did have an obsessive streak.

The upshot of all this is that when I set up Team Wiggins a few years back, Chris Lillywhite was the guy I wanted as sporting director. I was talking to him one day, explaining that I’d been a massive fan, and he said, ‘Stop winding me up!’ I think he assumed that, because I’ve been successful as a cyclist, I was being facetious, but he couldn’t have been further from the truth. I felt a little bit aggrieved, to be honest – regardless of my own career, the relationship you have with your heroes doesn’t tend to change. Guys like Chris don’t see themselves as stars, but for me in some way it’s still – and will forever remain – 1993. I’m still that 13-year-old kid, I’m still in awe of him and he’ll always be one of my all-time cycling champions.

And that’s why, for all the yellow jerseys, rainbow jerseys and champion’s jerseys, I was so thrilled when he finally gave me his leader’s jersey from the 1993 Milk Race.

Chris’s final yellow jersey as race winner of the 1993 Milk Race

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Miguel in cap and sunnies at the 1996 Tour de France; he was undoubtedly one of the best descenders of his generation.

There were always copies of Cycling Weekly around the house. I’d never bothered with them, but after having watched Roubaix I started to devour them. I found the 1992 Tour de France editions, and started to read about the winner, this giant Spanish guy …

Then in June a new magazine appeared. It was a monthly called Cycle Sport, much glossier than Cycling Weekly, and much slicker. It focused almost exclusively on continental pro racing, as distinct from boring time trials in some far-flung corner of the British Isles that I’d never heard of. There was more photography, more history, more colour and more glamour, and I thought it was fantastic. I’ve an idea that the first issue, or at least one of the first, was a Tour de France preview. I’d never watched the Tour before, but now I couldn’t wait.

If there’s anything you ever want to know about the summer of 1993, I’m probably not your man. If, however, there’s anything – and I mean anything – you want to know about the 1993 Tour de France, I’m categorically your man. I tuned in religiously, thought of nothing else, and obviously bought the compilation video when it came out. It was the first cycling film I owned, and I’m fairly sure I watched it every night that winter.

Those riders became my heroes, and to this day I can still reel them off. The sprinters were Nelissen, Cipollini, Ludwig, Moncassin and Abdoujaparov. In the GC group you had Rominger (second), Jaskuła (third), Álvaro Mejía (fourth, for Motorola). Chiappucci won a stage, Armstrong won a stage, Skibby and Bruyneel won stages. The teams had mysterious names, like Chazal, TVM, Ariostea and Telekom. I had no idea what they did or where they came from, but wherever it was I wanted to go there. Those three weeks in front of the TV were, and remain, one of the most immersive experiences of my life.

And then there was Miguel.

1994 Tour de France podium maillot jaune

CYCLING IS A VERY HARD SPORT. As often as not you’re operating right at the end-stops of your physical and psychological capabilities, so it can be extremely uncomfortable. You’re also competing against people whose job, essentially, is to destroy you. Any sign of weakness and they’re going to bury you, because that’s the business they’re in. The business of suffering, and of enduring.

When I visualise guys like Marco Pantani, Tom Simpson and Luis Ocaña, I see pain etched into their features. That’s maybe because they’re synonymous with tragedy, but not so Museeuw, Jan Ullrich, even Eddy Merckx. They wore their suffering as well, because in cycling nobody is immune. The great champions aren’t successful because they’re talented per se (though talented they clearly are), but because they have the ability to hurt themselves a lot. Whatever your physical gifts, you’re not going to complete the Tour, let alone win it, unless you’re prepared to go really, really deep. And that’s why we need to talk about Miguelon …

Miguel Induráin was the same, but completely different. He won five consecutive Tours de France because he was freakishly engineered, but also because he was a tremendous competitor. Where he was different, though, completely different, was in the way he won his Tours. While his opponents seemed to be wrecking themselves, he gave the impression of being out for a bike ride. They were the best climbers in the world, right at the top of their form, and yet he made beating them look easy. As a matter of fact it was anything but easy, and still less so given that he was much heavier than them. He was six foot three and 82 kilos, and there are mountains – big ones – to get over in France.

Imagine how soul-destroying it must have been. Whatever you tried, this great man was going to be completely unflappable. His facial expression was never going to alter for three weeks, but come what may he was going to beat you, and he was going to make beating you appear the easiest thing in the world. The horrific, brutal days in the Pyrenees were going to seem entirely routine for him, the heat and humidity only minor inconveniences. He’d hammer you in the time trial, maybe demoralise you in a couple of the mountain stages, and for the other 18 days just ride alongside you, seemingly without himself.

That sounds horrendous, but it’s also entirely the point. Miguel was much, much better than the rest, but the key to the five Tours he won is that there was nothing at all gratuitous about them, or him. Where guys like Merckx and Armstrong seemed to want to crush their opponents, he killed them softly. He didn’t do it painlessly – it’s the Tour de France after all – but wordlessly and, in some way, mercifully. People say he was machine-like, robotic, all that stuff, and watching him race they are easy conclusions to draw. For me, though, he was the opposite of these things.

Miguel made sure he beat the guys that mattered when it mattered, but he wasn’t interested in winning stages for the sake of it. In fact, he never won a single road stage in those five Tours, just time trials. That’s because he had no ego, and he was more than happy for everyone to have a share of the cake. Now it could be said that they were fighting over the crumbs, but he took pains to ensure that there were plenty to go round. It’s no coincidence that he always won by around five minutes, because he only ever took as much as he needed.

That, I think, is what makes him unique among the five-time Tour de France winners.

On his way to gold in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics time trial – his last big win.

The first of them, Jacques Anquetil, understood that he needed friends in the peloton. He had a caustic rivalry with Raymond Poulidor, and the notion that Poulidor might beat him at the Tour was unthinkable. He knew that he needed as many allies as possible in the peloton, so he made it his business to ensure that the rank and file were on his side. Bernard Hinault understood this as well, but his methods were different. He was a patriarch or, in cycling parlance, a ‘patron’. His reign was built around psychology and strategy, and at times it was quite feudal. It’s inarguable that his wins at the 1982 Giro and the 1985 Tour were achieved more with his head than his legs. Tommy Prim and Greg LeMond were each stronger than him, but each was brow-beaten into settling for second place. Everything Hinault did was calculated and calibrated, and nothing happened by accident.

Miguel was much less calculating than either Anquetil or Hinault, though contrary to popular misconception he was anything but naïve. He understood that it paid to have friends in high places, but he was the polar opposite of someone like Hinault. He raced hard, but he wasn’t one of those who turned into an animal when he pinned a number on. The context changed, but he didn’t, and his innate kindness didn’t ever desert him. He didn’t generally do many interviews, but when he did he was humble, respectful and courteous. The other riders liked him because it was impossible not to.

I don’t ever remember him punching the air or shaking his fists when he won the Tour. The one and only time I recall him being demonstrative was at a race he didn’t win, the 1995 World Championships in Colombia. He’d won the time trial, and now he was away on the final lap with the Italians, Pantani and Gianetti, and with Abraham Olano, the ‘Baby Induráin’. When Olano attacked, the Italians didn’t respond, so Miguel was able to sit on as his countryman disappeared up the road.

Olano subsequently punctured, but famously managed to roll over the line on his rim. That left Miguel contesting a sprint for second with the two Italians, and when he won he celebrated as if he’d won the rainbow jersey himself. Of course he hadn’t, but that’s entirely the point. He was delighted for Olano in the first instance, and for his country in the second. Spain had been failing to win the Worlds for 62 years, and finally his friend had achieved it.

The bike ridden by Induráin in the TT stage of the 1992 Tour of Romandie, his last race before winning his first Giro d’Italia

With the Pinarello bike at the Tour de France, where his time-trialling ability did much to secure him his five victories.

Stories about Miguel are legion, but I think his character is best summed up by a couple that Juan Antonio Flecha told me while we were training together. One of Miguel’s sponsors was Sidi, the Italian shoe manufacturer. They had a rider-liaison person there, and if the riders wanted something she was their point of contact. She told Flecha about her dealings with Induráin, and he passed the story on to me.

The first story goes that Miguel, who had won maybe four Tours de France by that point, would ring the girl and ask, extremely politely, whether it might be possible for him to have another pair of shoes, on account of the others being worn out, or broken, or whatever. The girl would say, ‘Well, yes! Of course it is! You can have as many as you like! You’re Miguel Induráin!,’ but she said she never really felt as if she’d convinced him. Very obviously he knew he was Miguel Induráin, but he seemed to not have the faintest idea of what that meant.

When he finished he rang the girl again. It was 1996, he’d finally lost the Tour, and then they’d pretty much obliged him to do the Vuelta. He really hadn’t wanted to do it, but in the end he’d succumbed to pressure from the Spanish public, the team and the sponsors. He’d only just turned 32, but he was spent psychologically as much as physically. Alex Zülle beat him in the time trial, then dropped him on Monte Naranco, and the following day Miguel famously climbed off on the road to Covadonga and walked into a bar. He said not a word to anyone, and in truth he didn’t need to. He didn’t want to be a cyclist anymore, so he stopped. (The extraordinary thing is that the other riders stopped as well, to see what was wrong. This was a guy who had been hammering them for five years, and yet they were worried about his well-being.) Anyway, that was that. Career over.