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      Chris winning the 1993 Milk Race.

      And so to the Milk Race. Obviously I hadn’t seen the Tour de France at this point, so this was the first time I’d been exposed to a stage race. For me the idea that there was a two-week Tour of Britain was wonderful, mystical even. In the 1950s it had been an amateur race, because there had been no British professional riders. Initially it had been sponsored by the Daily Express, but then the Milk Marketing Board stepped in. By now it was a bit of a hybrid – a pro-am whose peloton was made up of British domestic professionals and national amateur teams from around the world.

      It started in Tunbridge Wells, and the opening stage was effectively a sort of Tour of Kent. They organised a junior criterium in Sevenoaks in advance of the race coming through, and I took part in it. After that I took my place on the side of the road with everyone else and waited for the peloton to arrive. It came through in a flash, and then we went home. That was it. Bike racing …

      I remember very little – there was very little to remember! – but in my mind’s eye I have a picture of Tony Doyle. He was a big star in British cycling, because he’d won the World Pursuit Championship twice. He was off the back getting a bottle or some such, and my mum said, ‘That guy there used to race with your dad! You had your photograph taken with him when you were little. Do you remember?’

      Sky Sports showed the highlights every night, and I spent hours studying the minutiae of the event. I was making it my business to know everything – and I mean everything – about the race itself, the riders and the gear they used. It was a useful geography lesson, but most of all it was a lesson in bikes, shoes, gloves, helmets, jerseys, glasses … One of the teams was called Banana Energy. They were British, they had a really cool jersey with a big banana on it. You could buy the jersey at Yellow Jersey Cycles in London, and I went and got one in much the same way that other kids bought Arsenal or Spurs tops. A guy named Chris Lillywhite clinched the GC for them up in Manchester, and I became a fan.

      A quintessentially ‘English’ scene. Fording a stream in Westerdale, Yorkshire, during Stage 12 of the 1969 Milk Race.

      Later that year I rode down to Crystal Palace to watch Lillywhite win the British Criterium Championship. That was my first real exposure to professional riding, because I saw the team cars, the presentations, all the stuff of bike racing. I also got to see professionals, albeit domestic ones, close up. They weren’t perhaps as good as the top continental riders, but at 13 I wasn’t making comparisons. Their kits were just as shiny, the cars just as colourful, and their bikes seemed just as beautiful.

      Back then the Archer used to run the Grand Prix. It was one of the biggest races in the British calendar, and as a member you were expected to go and marshal. So each year I’d get my fluorescent bib and my flag, and watch the best of the Brits fly by.

      Over time I became part of the furniture of the club, and ultimately of the national junior team. I’ll never forget the first time I spent time with that generation of riders, though. It was 1998, and I’d earned a place at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. I was on the track team, and Lillywhite and co. were in the next door apartment. I was only 18, and they all used to laugh at me because I was this oracle of cycling knowledge. One night at dinner one of them, Matt Illingworth, said, ‘Right, Bradley, tell Chris what shoes he was wearing when he won the 1993 Milk Race.’ Quick as a flash I said, ‘They were Carnac Podiums, and they were black and white!’

      They were all dumbfounded – I probably knew more about their careers than they did themselves. I always did have an obsessive streak.

      The upshot of all this is that when I set up Team Wiggins a few years back, Chris Lillywhite was the guy I wanted as sporting director. I was talking to him one day, explaining that I’d been a massive fan, and he said, ‘Stop winding me up!’ I think he assumed that, because I’ve been successful as a cyclist, I was being facetious, but he couldn’t have been further from the truth. I felt a little bit aggrieved, to be honest – regardless of my own career, the relationship you have with your heroes doesn’t tend to change. Guys like Chris don’t see themselves as stars, but for me in some way it’s still – and will forever remain – 1993. I’m still that 13-year-old kid, I’m still in awe of him and he’ll always be one of my all-time cycling champions.

      And that’s why, for all the yellow jerseys, rainbow jerseys and champion’s jerseys, I was so thrilled when he finally gave me his leader’s jersey from the 1993 Milk Race.

      Chris’s final yellow jersey as race winner of the 1993 Milk Race

      

      Miguel in cap and sunnies at the 1996 Tour de France; he was undoubtedly one of the best descenders of his generation.

      There were always copies of Cycling Weekly around the house. I’d never bothered with them, but after having watched Roubaix I started to devour them. I found the 1992 Tour de France editions, and started to read about the winner, this giant Spanish guy …

      Then in June a new magazine appeared. It was a monthly called Cycle Sport, much glossier than Cycling Weekly, and much slicker. It focused almost exclusively on continental pro racing, as distinct from boring time trials in some far-flung corner of the British Isles that I’d never heard of. There was more photography, more history, more colour and more glamour, and I thought it was fantastic. I’ve an idea that the first issue, or at least one of the first, was a Tour de France preview. I’d never watched

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