I have developed a man-crush on Bradley Wiggins.
It's not that the leader of the Tour de France is remotely physically attractive - bushy sideburns don't do it for me (how did bewhiskered Victorian men ever get beyond first base?) - but Wiggins is everything a Beta Male could conceivably want in a sporting hero. He looks slightly weird. He has terrible facial hair. He is a funny shape. He is clever. He is funny. He is what I might have been like if I had been cleverer and funnier. And better at riding a bike.
Specifically, he is not one of those handsome, athletic and aggressive goons who always got the girls when I was young. If Mark Cavendish, acting selflessly as one of Wiggins' super-domestiques in Team Sky, was at the front, I would still want him to win; but Cavendish is a Jock, as the Americans say, whereas Bradley looks like a misfit loser who writes maudlin ballads at the piano in his spare time.
Except that he has won several Olympic medals, and it now looks as if he might just win the Tour.
The foreign press have been reporting and fostering rumours that Bradley is cheating. This is the kind of thing guaranteed to rile a red-blooded Englishman, until this one reflects that our previous best rider, Tom Simpson (no relation) died on the Tour in the 60s with a cocktail of amphetamines in his bloodstream. Historically, cheating has been rife, and only this week one of the Schleck brothers briefly became another Famous Belgian by being kicked out for having a banned diuretic in his bloodstream (diuretics are popular with cheats because they flush other banned substances quickly out of the system). Actually I believe the Schlecks are from Luxembourg, but never mind. Several riders in the current Tour have been banned previously for doping, receiving bans for eighteen months or two years - little more than a slap on the wrist and an invitation to come back the year after next.
The Tour is probably cleaner than it was, because testing regimes are better than they were, but nevertheless cheating has always been part of cycling culture, and that raises the question of whether cheating's really cheating at all if everyone is doing it.
Now clearly taking performance enhancing drugs is breaking the rules. But that's not the same as cheating. Cheating is behaviour outwith that tolerated by your peers. If most of your peers are taking drugs, you might well do it yourself without feeling too bad about it. After all, rules are made by old men in blazers who used to be good at your sport thirty years ago.
(There is a striking parallel here with the Barclays bankers who manipulated the Libor rate - it was seen as normal by their peers. So what if it was against the rules?)
This argument works until you consider that the people who are really being cheated are the public. If everyone took whatever drugs they liked, we would applaud the winner's effort knowing that there was a level playing field. But the presence of even one clean rider amidst a field all of whom protest their abstinence means a) we don't know which one he is, and b) whether he would have beaten the others without their pharmaceutical props.
To be honest, we don't know whether Wiggins is a cheat or not. And that uncertainty has been placed in our minds by all the others - Simpson, Schleck, Floyd Landis, Alberto Contador to name but four - who got caught; now, perhaps, inevitably, the finger is at last being pointed at Lance Armstrong, the greatest Tour cyclist of all. At the moment.
But that won't stop me rooting for Wiggins, a man who lambasted British culture for being "built on people being famous for not achieving anything"; who slowed the peloton down when his closest rival Cadel Evans had a puncture to allow Evans to catch up; and who, in response to a question about how his dead father would have responded to his success, replied, "It depends if he was sober".
Go Bradley go!
