by John Deering
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The route from Visé to Tournai is a flat rush over 200-odd kilometres of bleak Flanders lowland. The day will be characterised by the non-sprinters trying to escape the bunch and the sprinters’ teams trying to pull them back and set up a sprint. Therefore, there are two guarantees about today’s racing: it will be really fast, and it will be dangerous.
Team Sky will want to win today. Mark Cavendish will really want to win. This is the sort of day that will probably be known by future generations as a Cav Day, a day where it feels that whatever anyone does, there is only going to be one winner. Flat sprint stages often have this feel of inevitability after they’ve finished, but in the heat of battle it’s clear that, in truth, anything can and probably will happen.
The teams that have come to this race with hopes of a sprint victory are:
Orica-GreenEDGE. The newly formed Australian team is built on the Team Sky blueprint, using a well-established national track programme as a springboard for road success. For now, though, they lack a leader to challenge for the overall prize. They are here to look for opportunistic stage wins through the likes of adventurers like Simon Gerrans, old stager Stuart O’Grady, and their most successful rider of the spring, Michael Albasini. But they also have a tasty fast man: Matt Goss. No, not that guy out of Bros, the one who has been leading out Cav at HTC for a couple of years.
Lotto Belisol. The Belgian-based classics team have Mark Cavendish’s greatest rival in their sprint plans, the speedy German André Greipel. No love is lost between these two, with Greipel having to play second fiddle to Cavendish at various team incarnations for much of his early career. The German believes that he can beat Cavendish, that he can beat the World Champion in a straight mano-a-mano battle and, sometimes, he can. But not often.
Liquigas-Cannondale. The Italians have discovered a rare talent in yesterday’s stage winner and early wearer of the green jersey for most consistent finisher, Peter Sagan. Though Cavendish has greater pure speed than the Slovakian arriviste, Sagan’s ability to score on all sorts of terrain makes him a formidable obstacle if the green jersey is to go back to the Isle of Man like last year.
Lampre-ISD. Alessandro Petacchi used to be really fast, one of the few men to give Mario Cipollini a regular hiding when the Lion King was at his peak. The key phrase here is ‘used to be’. One wonders why they bother with all the chasing and the leading out when Petacchi is clearly devoid of the oomph he once displayed on a daily basis.
Garmin-Sharp. Despite contesting Tour de France sprint finishes for many years, Tyler Farrar boasts a grand total of one stage win versus his contemporary Cavendish’s twenty. Still, Garmin-Sharp gamely do their bit and lead him out every time, surely more in hope than expectation.
These are the main players in the last 20km of a flat stage, as they fight to keep the race together and position their designated strikers for the final dash to the line.
Today, everybody from Team Sky remains upright, the best feeling of all for Dave Brailsford, who knows that for all his talk of attention to detail and marginal gains, no amount of preparation can fix a problem like last year’s withdrawal of their leader after kissing the tarmac at high speed.
Into the last 20km and Edvald Boasson Hagen and Mark Cavendish are in the mix for Team Sky, but there is no sign of a long train of teammates leading out the Manx Missile as would have been expected if this were 2011 and he was wearing the white jersey of HTC. Instead, the two Team Sky riders wearing white jerseys – Cav’s with the rainbow bands of World Champion and Boasson Hagen’s with the Norwegian flag as national title-holder – are fighting for themselves to hold their places near the front of the breathtakingly fast peloton as it snakes towards Tournai across the battlefields of the Great War. Team Sky have revived a long-forgotten Tour tradition denoting the leading team on overall classification by donning yellow headwear. Evoking memories of Anquetil or Merckx and their teammates in yellow cotton caps, the Team Sky riders are wearing helmets in the same colour as Cancellara’s leader’s jersey. It is an unfamiliar look, but it makes it easier to pick out Boasson Hagen and Cav as they jockey in the speeding pack.
Lotto Belisol are dominant, a full train of riders pumping their legs in harmony like the Mallard hauling an express train at record speed. Greipel is in pole position as they head under the red kite that signifies the last kilometre. Sagan is crouching his big frame to stay on the German’s wheel, hoping to be able to blast away from him like Chris Hoy on the track when they approach the line. Cav is further back, without conspicuous teammates, but following the experienced Óscar Freire. ‘I knew that there was some headwind and it was clear to me that I could also have a chance if I started from a bit further back,’ explained Cavendish regarding his positioning. ‘I knew Freire always goes up in the last kilometre so I stayed with him.’
Greipel explodes off his teammate Greg Henderson’s wheel with 200m remaining and Sagan has no reply to the acceleration. However, there’s somebody else bearing down on the German – his nemesis, the World Champion. Greipel has his wish, a head-to-head battle to prove who is the fastest man in this race, a chance for one or other to prove his credentials as cycling’s Usain Bolt.
Only the first part of Greipel’s dream comes true. Cavendish’s front wheel breaks the finish line a fraction of a second before his, and sprinting is not a game for celebrating second place.
Bradley Wiggins, Fabian Cancellara and all the main rivals are home safely, so Brad still sits quietly in second place, seven seconds separating him from the Swiss leader. All is going to plan.
Mark Cavendish has won 21 stages of the greatest race on Earth, and win number 21 came without the assistance of his team. Does this prove that there is harmony within the Team Sky household as they try to win on two fronts? We probably won’t know the answer to that until one of their twin objectives becomes thwarted. What if there is a sprint stage and Cavendish gets beaten? What if Wiggins gets caught out because his teammates are concentrating on earning Cavendish a stage win? At present, the latter scenario looks highly unlikely, as the overall objective remains crystal clear. What is more probable is that there will be a chance to see if the Manx rider can keep his famously fiery disposition in check if things don’t go his way.
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Wiggins and Cavendish go back – a long way back. They have roomed together for years on national duty at Olympics and World Championships, and nearly ended up as professional teammates at T-Mobile back when the latter was first scaring the established order of sprinters and the former was being groomed as a rouleur to add horsepower on the flat and lead out the fast men. It is perhaps surprising then, that it wasn’t until Brad was in his thirties that they actually joined each other on a professional team, and by then one of them was champion of the world and the other one was a genuine Tour de France contender. Their separate goals don’t seem to have separated them. Based on huge mutual appreciation for their differing strengths, their comradeship is natural and without hierarchy. Wiggins famously does impressions of his brasher teammate to entertain the others, while Cavendish pretends to ridicule Wiggins’s guitar skills. The trick for the Team Sky backroom is to ensure that this goodwill continues. The management would surely be the first department to feel any anger from either party if things don’t work out: they like each other too much to blame each other for a falling out.
THE BARCELONA OLYMPICS UNDERSTANDABLY didn’t grip the country in quite the same way that London 2012 held our attention, but they were a major occasion nonetheless. For the best part of a week, we gasped at the opulence of the opening ceremony, sighed at the dramatic backdrop of the beautiful city behind the high dive board and listened to Freddie Mercury and Dame Montserrat Caballé blasting out the theme tune.
But we craved a gold medal.
The athletics hadn’t started yet, so we were still waiting for Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell to take the stage. The so-called ‘minor sports’ had held sway for the opening few days and the country deve
loped a passionate interest in sailing, archery and rowing. It was very exciting, but what we needed was a hero. We found him in an unlikely shape.
Chris Boardman was known as The Professor. The studious approach he had developed alongside his coach and mentor, Peter Keen, became synonymous with his name throughout his cycling career, but the first time he entered the general public consciousness was here in Barcelona. Their Teutonic application to the 4,000 metre individual pursuit had left no stone unturned in the hunt for perfection and victory, least of all the bike he would ride.
A slightly more British character was Mike Burrows, the archetypal mad inventor. Despite looking more like a member of Pink Floyd than Dr Snuggles, Burrows had turned his formidable mind to making the world’s most effective racing bike. Lotus had then built it out of carbon fibre for Boardman, and as a result the country found itself cooing over a bicycle that, to them, looked more at home on board the USS Enterprise than underneath a district nurse.
On a hot August evening in Catalonia, Chris Boardman saddled up against the reigning World Champion Jens Lehmann of Germany. He may have shared a name with his countryman and latterly madcap Arsenal goalkeeper, but there was nothing inconsistent about this German: he was the real deal. Could the boy from Hoylake on the Wirral overthrow him at this, the pinnacle of sporting goals, the Olympics?
Nobody was watching more intently than a fascinated twelve-year-old boy in Paddington. Glued to the telly with his mum, Bradley Wiggins couldn’t believe his eyes. The skinsuit, the aero helmet, but most of all, that amazing bike. He wanted one. He wanted to be that man in that helmet on that bike.
Brad sat rapt as the commentator explained the intricacies of the pursuit. The two men would start on opposite sides of the track then head off, each on their own 4km time trial. At the line, the faster man would be the gold medallist, except in the unlikely event that one rider caught the other, then the race would be over. Nobody ever caught each other at this sort of level though; they were all simply too good for that.
Boardman caught Lehmann. It was extraordinary. A country rejoiced, a nation had its gold medal, and one tall skinny twelve-year-old in West London had a dream – to be an Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist.
Sally Gunnell, Linford Christie, Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent all paraded across the same television screen in the coming days. By the time the closing ceremony lit up the Catalonian sky, Bradley was mesmerised. Hooked for good. Dreams of playing in goal for Arsenal disappeared into the ether due, ironically, to the defeat of Jens Lehmann in Barcelona.
To this day, Brad is unsure whether Linda simply supported her boy’s new-found enthusiasm for the sport, or whether she cunningly led him down the path before he’d even known he was walking upon it. She’d called him in to watch that broadcast of Boardman from his kickabout downstairs. She organised a trip out to the Hayes Bypass, a curious bit of new road that was being extended into Middlesex where, until it was completed, local cyclists would charge up and down in organised races. On his old Halfords bike and a ridiculously old-fashioned helmet of his dad’s discovered in granddad’s shed, the eager teen rode his first event. In the second one he came third.
Linda ran into a familiar face one week: Stuart Benstead, the local man who had introduced Garry to the London bike scene when he had arrived from Australia. Now Brad had somebody who could help him make sense of the arcane mysteries of bike racing, and Stuart had a prodigious young talent to nurture. It was a good match for both of them. Brad joined the local club, the Archer Road Club, and began to ride on the old track at Herne Hill.
His first proper racing bike, a Ribble from Lancashire, was purchased but only with the compensation money that came about after his first proper accident. Brad was expecting a strong lesson from Linda, but his mum instead turned her wrath upon the woman who had carelessly knocked him off on the way to club night.
Bike events were a strange world in those days, full of dispassionate men who were passionate about bike racing. There were more bobbly old tracksuit tops and clipboards than you could shake a pump at. Brad worked his way steadily up through the ranks of the various events and age groups, trying most track disciplines and getting some good road rides in, heading out of the city with the club to the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire. He went to his first National Championships in Manchester aged fifteen and came home as National Schoolboy Points Champion, an event he hadn’t regarded as his forte. By then he was convinced that his future lay in professional cycling, and that’s what he was going to do. He loved riding his bike, but he wanted to make money out of it, too, not play at it. He saw it as his best chance of making a good life for himself. He got himself on to the national junior squad with another good run of performances at the following year’s championships and was now on track to be a cyclist.
Which was lucky, because he’d completely lost interest in education. School had fizzled out and a lacklustre enrolment on a business studies course ended prematurely after racing got in the way of lectures.
It looked like Bradley Wiggins had no choice. He would have to be a bike racer.
STAGE 3:
Orchies–Boulogne-sur-Mer, 197km
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Second place in the prologue and second place overall for Bradley Wiggins mean Team Sky have had a relatively relaxed first couple of days on the Tour de France. It has fallen upon the leader Fabian Cancellara’s RadioShack-Nissan team to do all the hard yards at the front of the race to ensure their man stays in yellow for as long as possible. As they are well aware that Cancellara’s leadership of the race is certain to end in the mountains, it’s the perfect arrangement as far as Team Sky are concerned. What’s more, their prolific stage winner, Mark Cavendish, has already given them a victory, and they didn’t even have to do anything to help him. It all adds up to a dream start.
Today will be a wake-up call.
Kanstantsin Siutsou is not one of the most prominent members of this squad. If people were likely to say ‘Who?’ about anybody when the team revealed their nine men for the Tour de France, it would have been about the Belarusian. For heaven’s sake, we weren’t even sure how to write his name: he was often Constantine Sivtsov in race results and remained Kanstantsin Sivtsov at his previous team, HTC.
When the Team Sky hierarchy sat down to figure out the final line-up for Liège, most of the names picked themselves. They weren’t going to go without Wiggins, Froome, Porte or Rogers; they were the men who would form the mountain commando unit charged with bringing home yellow. They would surely take Edvald Boasson Hagen. The Norwegian’s all-round power would be enough to make him leader of many rival teams. They hadn’t spent that money on Mark Cavendish to leave the rainbow jersey hanging in a cupboard in Douglas. The seventh spot would go to Cavendish’s lieutenant, Bernie Eisel, brought from HTC with his boss for this exact purpose. There would have to be a rouleur that could be relied upon to do the donkey work, day in day out, especially if everything went to plan and the team found themselves defending the yellow jersey for many days. The team was spoilt for choice in this department, with Ian Stannard and Matt Hayman fancied by many outside the team, but the metronomic Christian Knees got the nod from those in the know. Who would be the last member? Geraint Thomas had been a revelation in last year’s race, taking the fight to the opposition after Wiggins had been dumped out of the contest. He had also been indefatigable in the classics, where his efforts in the jersey of GB Champion were appreciated by Boasson Hagen and Juan Antonio Flecha. Rigoberto Urán Urán was surely worth a spot for his glorious name alone, never mind his sterling efforts for the team in just about every performance he had made over the last two years. In the end, the Olympic team pursuit squad would be Thomas’s goal, and Urán Urán would ride both the Giro and the Vuelta so a third grand tour was out of the question for the young Colombian.
To see why Siutsou got the call, we need to go back to the Critérium du Dauphiné of 2011. An important goal in itself, June’s Da
uphiné has long been the destination of Tour de France hopefuls fine-tuning their form. Previously known as the Dauphiné Libéré, it was here in the south of France and the Alps that Miguel Indurain used to test himself against his rivals a month before the battle proper. Bradley Wiggins won the prestigious event in 2011, beating eventual Tour winner Cadel Evans in the process. Not without a scare, however.
Stage 11 of this Tour de France will not be the first time Brad has battled the Alpine giant of La Toussuire. While wearing the leader’s jersey on these slopes in the 2011 Dauphiné, Brad was subjected to a brutal attack by Joaquin Rodriguez and Cadel Evans that put his lead at severe risk. Wiggins, like Evans, prefers to use his remarkable engine to control his speed on the slopes of big climbs; neither of them enjoys the jerkier stop-start attacks of pure climbers like Rodriguez, known as Il Puro for his cigar-like shape. Brad prefers to let moves go and grind out the yards separating him from his tormentor until he drags himself back into contention. This attack, however, was the real deal. A real gap had opened up and the jersey was sliding off his shoulders. Ever calm, he set about the task of nullifying the move, but he needed some help.
It came in the unlikely shape of Kanstantsin Siutsou. The HTC man had first hit the headlines in 2004 when he delighted all of Belarus by taking the World Under-23 Road Championship. Since then, he had carved out a decent, if unspectacular career for himself, winning his national jersey and stages in races like the Giro d’Italia. Looking back, though, it was his strong showing in the overall classification of big races that really demonstrated the sort of rider he had become: winning the Tour de Georgia and cementing top twenty finishes at both the Tour de France and the Giro. He was a rouleur with a big engine who could lay it down in the mountains, and that’s what he did right there and then on Toussuire.