Wiggins - Bradley Wiggins: my hour

Acknowledgements

Id like to thank Cath, Ben, Bella, Heiko, Shane, Ernie, Debs, Emma, Smeggers, Dunne, McQuaid, Joe, Robbie, Helen, Robert, Julian, Simon Fuller, Juan, Tolo, Pedro, Sally, Greg, Raibin, Chris Boardman, Carsten, Fausto, Luciano, Martin in Majorca, Terry Dolan, Dave Brailsford, Team Ski, Andy, Viv, Dirty Barry, Fish, Amanda, Bastos, Rogers, Ste and Tiff, Ruth, Neil, Luke, Angela and William Fotheringham.

Id also like to thank all those who supported the event including Sky, Vitality, Rapha, Pinarello, Jaguar, Vittoria, Speedplay, Fizik, Giro, SiS, SRM, Strava, Muc-Off, British Cycling, EIS, Lee Valley VeloPark, Sweetspot, UCI, XIX Entertainment as well as Matt, Frances, Bethan, Phil, David, and everyone else at Yellow Jersey Press and Two Associates.

The Lee Valley VeloPark. The Olympic stadium was built on the site of the old Eastway Cycle Circuit that I used to ride on when I was in my teens

Numbers ending in 7 stick in my head, so when I went through the longest 60 minutes of my life in the London Olympic velodrome, these were the points on the clock that ended up as staging posts along the way: 7 minutes, 17, 27 up to the moment of relief where I had been riding for 57 minutes and I knew the pain was about to end.

Numbers help me get through any event Im competing in: an Olympic pursuit, a time trial or a mountain stage in the Tour de France. Platforms of hope, thats what I call them. They are part of the mental game I use to push myself on. I never think, God, this is hard, I cant do it any more. Instead, I cast my mind ahead and try to imagine how Ill feel when Im a little bit further on. Ive always done this. It helps to keep my spirits up. In 2012, when I was climbing through the Alps and the Pyrenees on my way to winning the Tour, on those massive mountain passes I would be thinking, Two kilometres from now youre only going to have one kilometre left and how are you going to feel then? Youll have done it. It was the same in the Olympic time trial at Hampton Court: Five kilometres from now youll have another five to go, and you can do that easily. Its almost like cutting a corner in your head.

Finding those staging posts matters as much in the Hour Record as it does in the Tour de France; those 60 minutes are much more demanding mentally than physically. Of course, riding as far as I could in an hour was hard on my body given the conditions and so on, but it was no tougher than riding up Mont Ventoux in 2009 knowing that fourth place overall in my breakthrough Tour de France was on the line, or finishing empty in a long time trial, like I did at Chartres when I won the 2012 Tour. What blows your mind as you ride the Hour is watching the time tick away, minute after minute, looking at the computer screen held by up your coach every 16 seconds. Every one of those 218 laps.

Spectators start to arrive. The venue sold out its 6,000 capacity in just 7 minutes following tickets going on sale

You cant escape that countdown. It takes over everything for that Hour. And that is what made it a harder challenge mentally. That, put together with the fact that I had known for the previous six months that I was going for the Hour on 7 June 2015 in front of a sell-out crowd of 6,000 in the London Olympic velodrome, live on TV with over a million people watching, with absolutely nowhere to hide. It would be just me in that velodrome, with no one else on the track to draw the attention away if I put a foot wrong. You play all that down beforehand oh yeah, Im going to thrive off it on the day. When its done you look back and think, God, I was under a lot of pressure there. Thats why you need every mind game you can come up with.

The organisers had asked me what music I wanted them to put on the PA as I entered the track centre, and what I wanted to hear while I waited for the starters gun. I asked for the Prodigys Firestarter for when I was in the gate from my youth, quite pumped up, a bit punky. For my entrance into the velodrome I asked for Stone Love by the Supremes, purely because when the Stone Roses did their comeback tour in 2012 they always used to come onstage to that. I dont actually know if they played them or not, because the noise was so deafening on the day: the crowd drowned it all out. It was bizarre coming up into the track and finding a full house. For seven weeks Id been training in empty velodromes around Europe, and now this.

So here I am, sitting on the start line, desperate to get on with it, wanting to get going. Im not really aware what time it is I know the attempt is meant to be at 6.30 p.m. It feels as if I finished my warm-up long ago the usual British Cycling warmup, 15 to 20 minutes and Ive got that sense that if I wait any longer now Ill need to do it all over again. Ive done my couple of laps of the track, the bikes already in the gate: lets do this, lets go, I want to get on with this. Its only afterwards I learn that I got out of the start gate during an ad break, so live television missed the moment.

This has been on my mind since January. The date has been set in stone since then. There has been so much expectation, so much hype, but it has been a lonely existence for the last 24 hours. Its dawned on me already and Im thinking it now: no one can help any more. There is no one else to rely on, no one to do it for me. Its just me and the clock. All the training has been done and now everyone has come to watch me. It feels a bit like going to the gallows. I want to get on with it. I dont want to sit here any longer. I dont want to go through another few minutes thinking about it. Im just ready to go.

It took seven weeks to get to that start line in London I rode my last race for Team Sky, ParisRoubaix, on 12 April but my personal history with the Hour goes back a lot further than that. Throughout my teens and just beyond there was a spate of attempts as one star after another took up the challenge. It began at Easter in 1993 when I was nearly 13 and watched Graeme Obree going for the British record at Herne Hill, and after that there were at least half a dozen attempts by the likes of Chris Boardman, Miguel Indurain and Tony Rominger, so I soon got to know what the record was all about.

Like all British cyclists, I was blown away when Graeme smashed Francesco Mosers Hour in Norway in July 1993. And a few weeks later Boardman was on my television screen after hed broken the record in Bordeaux. Hed done it on the day the Tour came to town and so was standing on the podium alongside Indurain, who was wearing the yellow jersey that day. That week my copy of Cycling Weekly came with a free poster of Chris on the Bordeaux velodrome going for the record in his North Wirral Velo-Kodak kit.