by John Deering
Edvald Boasson Hagen has rarely been out of the action in the first week. When one meets the Norwegian, it is like being introduced to a friendly, polite schoolboy. Fresh-faced, always smiling and gracious, he is very popular with the other riders and especially the team staff who always feel appreciated by him. It comes as something of a shock then to see him about his business at the front of a race, his broad shoulders seemingly transforming him from skinny boy to rugby wing. His personal targets were concentrated in the first week of the Tour, and the two stages he had picked out as possible glory points had seen him thwarted by a younger, stronger version of himself, the prodigious Peter Sagan. Still, a quick prologue, two second places and a huge job of teamwork in putting Wiggins in yellow all indicate a decent spell since the start.
Now, though, he will become Team Sky’s go-to guy for the rest of the week. Need an extra injection of pace? Edvald’s your man. Time to set a tempo on the mountain slopes? Start with Edvald. Does that break need to be reeled in now? Ask Edvald. Versatility is his strength.
There are no less than seven classified climbs to cover today. With only ten seconds separating Bradley Wiggins on the Classement Général from his nearest rival, the defending champion Cadel Evans, Team Sky will need all of their men to perform their duties with diligence and skill to avoid his stay in yellow being an extremely short one.
The first hour is crazy. With the German veteran Jens Voigt leading the way, riders are constantly shooting up the road. It’s a fluid situation, with groups forming, splintering and being caught, and then new groups forming immediately. The first climb, a small one by the name of the Côte de Bondeval, comes after only 20km and has the immediate effect of causing a number of difficulties for those at the back. The outrageous pace at the other end of the peloton is taking its toll and it looks like the sprinters’ grupetto of dropped riders will form very early indeed today. They will ride to assist each other, carefully calculating how fast they need to ride to stay within the time limit and avoid elimination. Greipel is there virtually from the off, and it’s not long before his burgeoning group swallows up Cavendish and Eisel, the Team Sky riders finding the uphill pace way too hot.
Robert Gesink is also struggling. The Dutch climber, much fancied for great things in this race, is clearly bereft of his best form. One for Wiggins to write off, perhaps. One less danger to worry about.
There are problems of a different kind for Samuel Sanchez. It looks highly unlikely that the Olympic Champion will be able to defend the title he proudly won under the Great Wall of China, as he touches wheels with Alejandro Valverde and lands awkwardly right on the point of his collarbone, which unsurprisingly breaks. Hard lines for the popular Spaniard. The attritional nature of racing continues.
Wiggins and Yates had both stressed the importance of allowing the ‘right’ group to go. Team Sky’s vigilance and high tempo stretches into the second hour of the race as they fight to contain the attacks, and we are halfway through this shorter stage before the race shape is settled. Voigt’s group pushes for stage glory, while Team Sky attempt to keep the lid on everyone else.
As the race heads over the border into Switzerland, the lurid jerseys of Liquigas-Cannondale are prominent at the head of the peloton. Despite there being a dozen or so riders a couple of minutes further up the road, the real race is here. It’s clear that Vincenzo Nibali and his team intend to test Wiggins and put him under a bit of pressure. Though the race has seven climbs, there is a drop of 10km from the top of the last one to the finish in Porrentruy, so it’s not as dangerous as it could be for Wiggins. He can afford to lose a second or two to an attack at the top of the final climb, the first category Col de la Croix, in the knowledge that he’ll have ample opportunity to bring the race back together, rather than the all-or-nothing nature of yesterday’s finish.
One man with a point to prove and desperate to claw back some losses from yesterday is Jurgen Van Den Broeck. It is the Belgian who forces the issue on the Col de la Croix, and suddenly there is a group of less than a dozen riders with daylight on the main peloton. Van Den Broeck leads Nibali, Cadel Evans, Frank Schleck, Denis Menchov and the Team Sky pairing of Froome and Wiggins. Over the top of the climb, this select group are travelling at such intense speed they’ve swallowed up all of the riders who had been in front of them at the bottom. All that is except Thibaut Pinot, the youngest man in the race. If he can hold them off it will be the first French stage victory in their own race, and on a Sunday too, with millions lining the roads and watching on TV. But it looks very unlikely given the all-out combat behind him.
Van Den Broeck, Nibali and Evans all try to force the issue on the run down to the finish, but Wiggins is calm, unflustered, confidence bolstered by having a teammate alongside him in the shape of the climbing genius, Froome.
Up ahead, Marc Madiot, former French favourite himself but now Pinot’s DS at the Française des Jeux squad, is hanging out of the rear window of the team car and having what appears to be some kind of seizure. He is screaming at the youngster and hammering on the side of his car like Animal out of The Muppets shorn of his drumsticks. Thibaut Pinot responds and it becomes clear that he can hold on to his lead over the favourites for a famous victory.
Behind, Evans launches a move that can be described as surprise, shock or desperate depending on your point of view, but when you’re only ten seconds off yellow in the rankings, nobody can deny that anything is worth a shot. Wiggins covers it smoothly and rolls over the finish line glued to the BMC team leader’s wheel for the second day in succession, with Chris Froome in close attendance.
Pinot is already at the finish, being embraced by the man who has practically blown him home from his following car.
‘It was a fantastic ride. It was a tough day and to do that last 10–15km into a headwind just showed how good he is,’ says Bradley Wiggins of Pinot afterwards. The yellow jersey is still his, the ten-second lead over Evans painstakingly preserved by a big joint effort from Team Sky. He is typically phlegmatic when asked if the Australian’s attempts to unseat him on a downhill and flat finish came as a surprise: ‘I’m not surprised by anything in this Tour. You expect everything and then nothing comes as a surprise.’
Tomorrow is the second big staging post in this year’s Tour de France: the first time trial. Just over 41km into Besançon in the Alpine foothills, it promises to really set the field out.
Sean Yates, a former Tour de France time trial winner, becomes positively Zen-like when describing his approach to the next day’s stage: ‘It’s the race of truth and the truth shall be told.’
UK CYCLING COMMENTATOR ANTHONY McCrossan has been in and around the heart of the sport for years, from local races to national races, from the classics to the one-week stage races, all the way to the Tour de France.
The pleasure of listening to Anthony is that you never forget that he is, first and foremost, a fan. His enthusiasm undimmed after all the ups and downs he has seen unfold, it’s at a zenith with the irresistible rise of a man he has watched develop from a skinny boy in Thames Valley road races into the yellow jersey of the Tour de France.
Asking Anthony to sum up his feelings about Bradley Wiggins with a few choice moments is like asking a child to choose their favourite bedtime story from a huge compendium. There are just too many good ones to choose from.
‘Some moments are inspiring, some are frustrating, some are moments in time that make you proud and stick indelibly in your head. The thing about Brad is that, like me, like you, he’s a fan. A bike fan turned champion. I marvel at him when he recounts which shoes certain riders in the 1980s and 1990s were wearing in a particular race. How he knows who won the Kellogg’s Tour stage in Dundee 1988. He has lived and breathed cycling for so long, and he gets it.’
He winces when he thinks about the times he has been on the receiving end of Brad’s mischievous London humour. ‘There is no doubt that when interviewing Brad you need to think carefully about your questions. You need to think abou
t what sort of response you might get, while considering the audience you have in front of you. On TV you can edit. In a live environment, what is said is what is remembered and you’re at the mercy of your interviewee.
‘Take my on-stage interview at the Braveheart charity dinner in Scotland in 2009. I knew Brad was in off-season mode; more fun and less inclined to give the pat answers you can sometimes get after a Tour stage, but also a bit more combustible. I thought long and hard about my opening question to him so as to get off to a good start.
‘I decided to start off with, “I interviewed Alberto Contador in London a few weeks ago and he was complimentary about your fourth place in the Tour de France. What do you think to that?” Brad looked me in the eye and spoke confidently into the microphone I was holding under his nose: “He doesn’t really think that, he thinks we are all cunts.”’
In his earlier days as a pro, Anthony says that the World Champion pursuiter was unsurprisingly more in his element in the velodrome than out on the road. ‘I remember Brad at the Ghent Six-Day, riding with a young Mark Cavendish. I went to their little cabin in the track centre and it struck me then that this is where Brad was at home. He knew the track, the boards, the racing. It was his domain. The crowd loved him. Now, of course, the British public consider him one of theirs, but then he was a Flemish Londoner to me.’
Anthony was sure that Bradley Wiggins could make a career on the road but, like most of us, saw him as a useful rouleur rather than a grand tour winner. ‘For some reason, whenever I think about Brad’s early road career I think about him in Cofidis kit. It must be that long lone breakaway in the Tour de France at Bourg-en-Bresse in 2007, 190km out front on his own. It was the fortieth anniversary of Tom Simpson’s death and he decided to go out and ride alone all day, getting caught near the finish. It says everything about him to me: an individual with a strong sense of history of the sport and an incredible athlete who can ride for hours at a tempo to match the world’s best.’
Anthony has watched a big sea-change in Brad since he joined Team Sky. Stories abound from that first season about his taciturn nature and unwillingness to give any more than was absolutely necessary of himself to press, media, fans or sponsors alike. Sometimes he gave less than was absolutely necessary. ‘The press conference to announce him was, to be fair, a letdown. It seemed that Brad and Dave Brailsford didn’t really know how to announce the biggest signing for Team Sky.’ There was so much hype around the deal, which had been trailed for months, that it seemed there was little left to say when the move finally came off, and the protagonists were uncomfortable in that particular spotlight. There was more in the same vein to come at that first Sky Tour de France.
‘Brad’s efforts at the Tour in his first year at Sky left me frustrated. I wanted him to do what he’d done in the Tour the year before. But even as I stood at the team presentation at the start of the race, I already felt that his head wasn’t right. During the race, he wouldn’t talk to the press. He rode off quickly when approached, whereas all the other GC contenders stopped and gave you a few minutes of their time, even though they would probably rather be elsewhere. His aloof approach did him no favours.’
Anthony believes the aftermath of the failure to make an impact on the 2010 Tour de France was the turning point in Bradley discovering the lugubrious, relaxed character that has made him so popular today.
‘I commentated on him winning the Dauphiné in 2011. He was incredible. I felt so good about his performance that I immediately put a bet on him to win the Tour de France. At the Tour presentation in the Vendée, I saw a different rider to 2010. He seemed assured, confident and this time he talked to the press in the engaging and humorous way that I remembered from earlier days. It made me confident that he had done his homework and was truly ready to be a champion. I looked forward to a return on my £5!’
It wasn’t to be, of course, and Ladbrokes made a profit on Anthony’s stake. ‘We all know what happened and I was gutted, not just to lose a bet, but to see a rider in the jersey of National Champion of Great Britain crash and lose his dream. Or, at least, have to deal with the concept of paradise postponed.’
A conversation some time ago comes back to Anthony now and shines a little light on Wiggins’s new-found ability to be himself and be a champion at the same time. ‘It was at the Tour of Murcia. He gave me a bit of an insight into his psychology. He had got rid of his long hair, pretty much shaving his head. I commented on it and he replied, “You know me, Anthony, split personality. The one that enjoys life and the one, like now, that is in race mode.” It seems to me that, three years on from that conversation, he has now dealt with that need to be two things and now grows his hair and the trademark sideburns. He knows who he is.’
When you’ve known somebody a long time, you don’t necessarily want to talk about bike riding non-stop, even if it is at the heart of each of your professions. In spite of his love of the history of the sport, Brad in particular is well known for his interests outside bike racing. ‘When I talk to Brad it’s usually about scooters, his family, watches, old bike races . . .’ observes Anthony. ‘He can be great fun on a night out. He is an incredible impressionist. After Cav’s win at the World Championships in Copenhagen, we sat outside a bar and Brad pulled off a few incredible impressions of people; so good that he could have been them.’
STAGE 9:
Arc-et-Senans–Besançon, Time Trial, 41.5km
Monday, 9 July 2012
As mentioned earlier, there are three prerequisites for any Tour de France winner: climbing prowess, time trial ability and the strength to perform for three weeks without faltering.
When Bradley Wiggins first became a professional cyclist, only one of those attributes was apparent. His background in track pursuiting was a typical grounding for a rouleur, the type of rider who can do a great job for a team, grinding out miles at an uncomfortably high speed and pulling a race along. They also make great time triallists.
The young professional’s role models were two other members of that select band: Englishmen who had worn the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. Sean Yates, the great rouleur who went on to become Bradley’s DS at Team Sky, and Chris Boardman, the über-technician who lifted science in cycling to an art form. Like Brad, both were Olympic pursuiters: Yates in the four-man team pursuit in Moscow as a twenty-year-old in 1980, Boardman the toast of the nation after his dismantling of Jens Lehmann in Barcelona in 1992. Brad first became an Olympic pursuiter in Sydney, winning a bronze medal as part of the team pursuit quartet.
The careers of Yates and Boardman took vastly differing routes to success.
Yates’s path was the more traditional. Like the other precious few Brits who ‘made it’ in European cycling in the 1980s, he followed the path of earlier British pioneers like Brian Robinson and Tom Simpson in packing a bag and heading off to ride for a French amateur team in return for little more than a bed and a baguette a day. His appetite for work was soon recognised and he found himself turning professional in the iconic chequered jerseys of the venerable Peugeot team.
Chris Boardman was always a bit different; a bit special, you might say. He dominated British amateur cycling in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unbeatable in time trials and winning a lot of the road races he liked to enter occasionally. Along with his coach, Peter Keen, he revolutionised the slapdash approach to cycling that had prevailed until then. His stunning victory in Barcelona was achieved on a carbon monocoque bike designed by the errant genius, Mike Burrows, that paradoxically took something away from his athletic prowess, as Joe Public seemed to think the bike could have ridden itself to a gold medal. If they had been followers of Boardman’s progress over preceding seasons, they would have reasoned that he would have taken the Olympic pursuit title on a Raleigh Chopper. Keen went on to become the trailblazing performance director for British Cycling, a role to be expanded and refined by his successor Dave Brailsford, now Wiggins’s paymaster at Team Sky.
Boardman and Keen carefu
lly stage-managed an attempt on cycling’s Blue Riband, the World Hour Record. Taking to the wooden track in Bordeaux at the same time as the Tour de France was passing through the city, Boardman beat the record with a ride that catapulted him into the broader cycling world’s public consciousness. Combined with his stellar amateur experience, the hour record enabled Boardman to pull off the unprecedented feat of turning professional as a team leader. He turned up at his first Tour de France in 1994 and won the prologue in the fastest time ever recorded for any stage in the famous old race.
It is unsurprising then that Wiggins’s pedigree marked him out as a natural rouleur and ‘tester’, as British cyclists unerringly call time trial specialists. His long-limbed ranginess and smooth pedalling style, honed over many years on the track, were ideally suited to riding against the clock. He confirmed this as long ago as 2003, when he won the individual time trial in the Tour de l’Avenir, literally the Tour of the Future, the under-23 Tour de France.
His five previous Tour appearances had featured some notable time trial efforts, none more so than the near miss at the prologue in London in 2007, but no name-in-lights rides. But, of course, he had never ridden a time trial in the yellow jersey before.
Cadel Evans’s 2011 Tour de France victory was founded on his time trialling prowess. Gutsily trading blows with the Schlecks, Contador et al in the mountains, it was the penultimate day’s time trial that saw the BMC man shoulder his way past the younger Schleck and into yellow, the last time the jersey would change hands in that compelling race. Just ten seconds behind Wiggins on this Monday morning, Evans too could be forgiven for dreaming of wearing yellow again.
When our old friend Fabian Cancellara, serial World Time Trial Champion cruises through the finish line in Besançon, it is with the air of a professional confident about a job well done. Though he has dropped well out of contention for the overall victory after two days in the moyenne montagnes, he is still very much the main man in the time trial. This is his last chance to gauge his form before his next time trial, his defence of the Olympic title in London on the first day of next month. The Swiss Olympic team have even decided to take up residence in the Mitre Hotel for London 2012, situated on the race’s start line at Hampton Court, such is their confidence in their leader.