This feature first appeared in Procycling magazine. To subscribe, click here.
Before he left Team Sky last spring and turned his focus back to the track, Bradley Wiggins tried to resolve one last piece of unfinished business on the road by having a crack at Paris-Roubaix, where he’d finished in the top 10 one year before. Procycling sent Barry Ryan along to observe Wiggins’ final few weeks as a WorldTour professional for the June edition of the magazine and as always with the former Tour winner the journey turned out to be far more interesting than the destination.
Bradley Wiggins may not have bowed out in the Team Sky jersey with a dream win in Roubaix, which he said at one point would be “bigger than the Tour”, but his six-week swansong between Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the Hell of the North gave ample opportunity to see the many sides of his persona and why he has become such a fan favourite.
You never quite know which Bradley Wiggins you’re going to get, partly because Bradley Wiggins is so many different things to so many different people. In France, he is ‘La Rock Star’, collector of guitars and devotee of Paul Weller. In Italy, he is ‘Il Baronetto’, knight of the realm and emblem of England and all things English. In his home country, he is simply ‘Wiggo’, an almost caricatured amalgam of sideburns and pithy humour.
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One constant, however, is capriciousness. When Wiggins was running over half an hour late for a roundtable interview on the eve of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in February, the formal beginning of his build-up to Paris-Roubaix, some of the reporters waiting in the cramped drawing room of Kortrijk’s Hotel Messeyne began to suspect that they might have to find different ways to fill column inches in the next morning’s newspapers. Others debated cutting their losses and making for the BMC press conference being held around the corner.
Wiggins sidled into the room moments later, bringing the hushed small talk to an end, and the reporters huddled around. Dressed in a Team Sky tracksuit, he betrayed a certain discomfort as he answered the first questions sitting upright, wringing his hands as he spoke, before gradually slumping into his chair and relaxing into his role as raconteur.
In Belgium, fortunately, Wiggins is his 14-year-old self, a cycling obsessive, and he obliged by jumping through the usual hoops, showing off his encyclopaedic knowledge of Paris-Roubaix finales past and sharing anecdotes from his early brushes with the cobbles as a young professional. The short conference ended with Wiggins breaking into a soliloquy on different sprint tactics in the Roubaix velodrome, comparing and contrasting Steve Bauer’s 1990 defeat to Eddy Planckaert with Magnus Backstedt’s 2004 victory in minute detail. “I’ve got a photographic memory for sh*t, so I do remember odd stuff like that,” Wiggins told a charmed local reporter.
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