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was going to get this kind of criticism. He stopped checking Twitter, tried to put it out of his mind, but it lay there, in a quiet corner, waiting to be roused.
    So the question comes at him like a grenade. He catches, pulls the pin, and flings it back into the crowd.
    ‘I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing
anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work
hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. Cunts.’
    To get ‘fucking’, ‘wankers’, ‘shit’, ‘arses’ and ‘cunts’ in one answer must be a record, possibly even more rare than winning
Paris–Nice, Tour de Romandie, Dauphiné Libéré, Tour de France, and an Olympic gold medal in the same season, as Wiggins did. You could rightly argue about how he
expressed his frustration, but if he was clean, as he insisted he was, then it was easy to understand what drove him to say exactly what was on his mind, and in exactly the way he wanted to say
it.
    Back at BSkyB’s headquarters, the corporate bosses may have empathised with the sentiments but they wouldn’t have liked the expletives. Wiggins’s targets could have been Sky
subscribers! Chris Haynes was on the next plane to France. Wiggins once said, ‘I’m not a well-trained corporate dream.’ That much was apparent when he made the air turn blue in
the small Swiss town of Porrentruy.
    Haynes, though, is a paragon of reasonableness and it is difficult not to agree with most of what he says. Before he took his place in the front line at Team Sky there had been accusations of
Team Sky trying to influence what was asked at press conferences. They’d ask journalists not to ask about such-and-such doping case because there was always the fear that Wiggins or Cavendish
might react badly.
    That desire to control the agenda irritated journalists and offered another reason to any journalist inclined to dislike the team. Of which there were plenty.
    Haynes came with a more grown-up attitude, extolling the virtues of openness and encouraging the riders to see doping questions as inevitable and understandable. He reminded Wiggins that his
knowledge of, and appreciation for, cycling’s history was something that would endear him to fans of the sport, especially to continental Europeans. By the end Wiggins was in his element
speaking with reporters, eloquent and utterly engaging, maybe even almost a ‘well-trained corporate dream’.
    The improvement changed Haynes’s life, as he was seconded from BSkyB to Team Sky and he now divides his time between both. We ran together one morning during the Giro d’Italia, up a
hill from our Italian hotel, round a few corners, then down a long straight road and past an unmanned border crossing and into Slovenia. Alas, we didn’t have the stamina to reach Marko
Dzalo’s home town.
    That morning Chris spoke a lot about his son who was about to go to his first Tottenham Hotspur game without an adult and Chris was both excited and nervous about this rite of passage
experience. A few days before he had been speaking about his family and told me that although the boy was from his partner’s previous relationship, he loved him as if he was his own son.
    ‘Chris,’ I said, ‘what you mean is that you love him as
a son
, no qualification.’
    A couple of days later we were talking again and he said there was something he wanted to say to me. ‘You know what you said to me the other day?’ I knew. ‘That meant a lot to
me. Thank you.’
    Such sensibility hardly goes with the media manager’s job but Haynes isn’t your common-or-garden PR operator.
    And when he came out of the Golfe Hotel in Porto-Vecchio, it was good to see him. We chatted for a bit; he then