Jacky Durand had seen more or less everything a professional bike rider could possibly see by the time a callow young Englishman joined his Française des Jeux team ahead of the 2002 season, but he still didn’t know quite what to make of Bradley Wiggins.
“I remember that he was able to tell me the kind of shoes I’d been wearing when I won the Tour of Flanders in 1992,” Durand tells Cyclingnews. “I was a bit taken aback by that, to be honest.”
By the time Wiggins lined up for his first taste of the cobbles as a professional at Het Volk a few weeks later, the team had decided to place him under Durand’s wing, assigning the veteran to be his roommate. If Wiggins was hoping for some reassuring counsel on the eve of battle, however, he was to be disappointed.
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On turning in for an early night, he found that Durand was not, as he might have imagined, lying with his feet up with an eye to the following day’s race, but rather had absconded from the hotel in search of Ghent’s nightlife. According to Wiggins’ version of events, Durand didn’t return until 6am yet still mustered up the energy to infiltrate the early break at Het Volk.
“It’s possible, it’s possible,” Durand laughs, neither confirming nor denying Wiggins’ precise timeline. “But I also remember that Bradley abandoned that Het Volk early. It was a wet one, so that evening I said, ‘Ok young man, now you can go and clean my shoes for Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne tomorrow.’ And as far as I remember, he went and did it.”
A common interest in the state of Durand’s shoes was not the only way in which the ice was broken. “I liked good beers at the time and so did he, at least during the training camps at the start of the year. We also had to do a cyclo-cross training camp with Marc Madiot, which was something Bradley really didn’t like at all, but he still went and did it,” says Durand. (Now a commentator with Eurosport, Durand’s was the swiftest mea culpa when the French Senate report into doping was published two years ago. “Everyone from my generation was full of bullshit,” he said.)
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