Bradley Wiggins Read Online Free PDF

making the world’s most effective racing bike. Lotus had then built it out of carbon fibre for Boardman, and as a result the country found itself cooing over a bicycle that, to them, looked
more at home on board the USS
Enterprise
than underneath a district nurse.
    On a hot August evening in Catalonia, Chris Boardman saddled up against the reigning World Champion Jens Lehmann of Germany. He may have shared a name with his countryman and latterly madcap
Arsenal goalkeeper, but there was nothing inconsistent about this German: he was the real deal. Could the boy from Hoylake on the Wirral overthrow him at this, the pinnacle of sporting goals, the
Olympics?
    Nobody was watching more intently than a fascinated twelve-year-old boy in Paddington. Glued to the telly with his mum, Bradley Wiggins couldn’t believe his eyes. The skinsuit, the aero
helmet, but most of all, that amazing bike. He wanted one. He wanted to be that man in that helmet on that bike.
    Brad sat rapt as the commentator explained the intricacies of the pursuit. The two men would start on opposite sides of the track then head off, each on their own 4km time trial. At the line,
the faster man would be the gold medallist, except in the unlikely event that one rider caught the other, then the race would be over. Nobody ever caught each other at this sort of level though;
they were all simply too good for that.
    Boardman caught Lehmann. It was extraordinary. A country rejoiced, a nation had its gold medal, and one tall skinny twelve-year-old in West London had a dream – to be an Olympic gold
medal-winning cyclist.
    Sally Gunnell, Linford Christie, Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent all paraded across the same television screen in the coming days. By the time the closing ceremony lit up the Catalonian sky,
Bradley was mesmerised. Hooked for good. Dreams of playing in goal for Arsenal disappeared into the ether due, ironically, to the defeat of Jens Lehmann in Barcelona.
    To this day, Brad is unsure whether Linda simply supported her boy’s new-found enthusiasm for the sport, or whether she cunningly led him down the path before he’d even known he was
walking upon it. She’d called him in to watch that broadcast of Boardman from his kickabout downstairs. She organised a trip out to the Hayes Bypass, a curious bit of new road that was being
extended into Middlesex where, until it was completed, local cyclists would charge up and down in organised races. On his old Halfords bike and a ridiculously old-fashioned helmet of his
dad’s discovered in granddad’s shed, the eager teen rode his first event. In the second one he came third.
    Linda ran into a familiar face one week: Stuart Benstead, the local man who had introduced Garry to the London bike scene when he had arrived from Australia. Now Brad had somebody who could help
him make sense of the arcane mysteries of bike racing, and Stuart had a prodigious young talent to nurture. It was a good match for both of them. Brad joined the local club, the Archer Road Club,
and began to ride on the old track at Herne Hill.
    His first proper racing bike, a Ribble from Lancashire, was purchased but only with the compensation money that came about after his first proper accident. Brad was expecting a strong lesson
from Linda, but his mum instead turned her wrath upon the woman who had carelessly knocked him off on the way to club night.
    Bike events were a strange world in those days, full of dispassionate men who were passionate about bike racing. There were more bobbly old tracksuit tops and clipboards than you could shake a
pump at. Brad worked his way steadily up through the ranks of the various events and age groups, trying most track disciplines and getting some good road rides in, heading out of the city with the
club to the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. He went to his first National Championships in Manchester aged fifteen and came home as National Schoolboy Points Champion, an event