Bradley Wiggins Read Free Page B

be talking about.
    Linda was a seventeen-year-old local girl with a love of bike racing when she met Garry Wiggins near her home in West London. She was a regular at the local track and her pretty blonde looks and
independent nature soon brought her to the attention of the attractively cavalier Australian rider who was one of the more impressive guys to be seen on the Paddington track. He hit on her, she hit
on him back and she found herself with a rather exciting and rakish boyfriend five years her senior.
    Garry had arrived from provincial Victoria with a bike, a few Aussie dollars, and a burning ambition to make a name for himself in European cycling. He bullied his way on to what was then a
thriving track scene, using his skill, his power and his fists when necessary.
    In 1979, Linda married Garry and they decided to set up home in Belgium to further Garry’s racing career. His plans lay not on the road but on the lucrative six-day circuit. The six-day is
a popular niche event in some areas today, but it was big news in the 1970s and 1980s. A circus of riders would move from town to town and set up shop in an arena for a week where they would ride
either on the boards of a permanent track or one constructed for the occasion. There was an annual event at Wembley Arena, or Empire Pool as it was then known, called the Skol Six. The gloriously
named event brings back images of cheap beer sloshing around in plastic glasses and men hurling encouragement and abuse at sportsmen while scarcely noticing what is going on. A bit like Saturday
afternoon in the Tavern at the Lord’s Test.
    The riders would perform in pairs over six nights of racing, riding a form of tag-team racing called the madison after Madison Square Garden in New York, where the discipline had developed.
Effectively, only one of the pair is racing. The other tends to roll around the top of the banking out of the way. When his teammate is flagging, he hurls his fresher partner into the action with a
handsling. One of cycling’s more dangerous stunts, the handsling, along with the harem-scarem nature of the random tags going on at any moment, makes the madison extremely exciting to watch,
but hard to follow. Hence the booze and the hollering hordes.
    Garry Wiggins was pretty good at it. From the Wiggins’s little apartment in Ghent he would race most days in the summer, competing in the small circuit races known as
kermesses
that each small town staged on its local roads. Then in the winter it would be on to the tracks of the six-day ring in Belgium, Holland, Germany and Switzerland, and a chance to earn some proper
money.
    It was into this strange world that Bradley Marc Wiggins arrived on 28 April 1980. Unlike anything that happens at Team Sky these days, in 1980, Bradley was very much Not Part Of The Plan. Garry
had already managed to leave one family behind in his life – a wife and daughter from a teenage marriage in Australia – and now the second one was coming under some pressure.
Amphetamine use was rife in those long days and nights of sustained racing and the lack of proper doping controls meant that riders were often looking for the other type of speed to get them
through their working weeks. Garry filled that need for himself and plenty of others by being the go-to man in Ghent if you needed a helping hand with what cyclists have always euphemistically
termed medication. According to Brad himself, writing in his excellent 2009 autobiography
In Pursuit of Glory,
after a family visit to Australia, Garry smuggled back a whole bunch of
amphetamines in his baby’s nappy. That must make Brad the youngest drug offender on the cycling circuit by some distance.
    Amphetamines, booze, a hard man’s nature and a temper. It must have been pretty tough for Linda, struggling to look after a baby at her young age in a small apartment in a foreign country.
People are often mistaken that being in Belgium, a dual-language country, means that people