by John Deering
Two months later, Bradley dedicated his gold medal at the World Championship when partnering Mark Cavendish in the madison to his late father. For all his faults and all the pain he had been through and caused, Brad remembered that Garry had been a bloody good bike rider. There had been few better madison riders in his day. It seemed a fitting tribute to a man who had meant so little, yet strangely so much, to the new World Champion.
STAGE 11:
Albertville–La Toussuire, 148km
Thursday, 12 July 2012
Back in the mists of time, way back as far as the 1990s and even the 1980s, the cycling season went like this: spring classics, Vuelta, Giro, Tour, autumn classics, World Championships, Tour of Lombardy. That was it. No Tour Down Under. No Tour of California. None of that stuff. What’s more, races used to be run in a logical start-slow-get-faster sort of way. When the Tour went through a French rider’s home town, he had time to hop off and share a glass of bubbly at un picnic en famille before lolloping back up to join the leisurely peloton.
Then things began to change. People started putting up a bit more money for folks to win their bike race, or even just for them to come and ride it, especially if it was in some far flung place. The decidedly two-bit Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia, for instance, became the fourth richest race in the world for teams prepared to spend two weeks in February riding through a jungle. Now, the Tour of Qatar and the Tour of Turkey attract squads chasing early season euros and UCI points.
Ah, yes, UCI points. Points dished out for results at races, weighted according to the seriousness of the event. It’s all a bit chicken-and-egg, but people started chasing UCI points around the same time as races got richer and quicker. A rider with points against his name can secure a team entry to the races they want to ride. It’s made racing more competitive but flawed: Saxo Bank team manager Bjarne Riis recently pointed out that it’s not easy to get a domestique to sacrifice his own ambitions for a team leader and then be told at the end of the year that he hasn’t earned a contract for the following year because he hasn’t accrued enough UCI points.
All these things meant that the traditional way of racing was impossible to sustain over the course of a season. It was just too hard to ride all of the races, especially to ride hard in all of the races. Something had to give.
The first thing to give was the Vuelta a España. Rooted to its spot in the annual calendar at the beginning of May, immediately after the cessation of the spring classics, the Tour of Spain suffered horribly through the new regime of hard riding for ten months of the year. Nobody was turning up. It was fast becoming a domestic race, and even the brightest Spanish stars were finding it hard to find room in their year to ride the Vuelta. Even the legends Pedro Delgado and Miguel Indurain began to duck it in order to better prepare for the Tour de France.
The solution was to fan the three grand tours out. The Giro d’Italia would be the first one of the year now, moving from its customary appointment in June to May. The Vuelta would be pushed back to September with the World Championships even later than that to bookend the season.
To start with, the move benefited the Giro and the Tour, not that the Tour needed any help, as it had long been becoming a gargantuan monolith that dominated the calendar more and more with every passing year. The Giro now became the place to be seen for the Tour riders in need of a hard race before July.
The Vuelta was quickly cast as the whipping boy of the whole arrangement, and the new arrangement didn’t do the World Championships any favours either, pushing it to such a late point that many likely contenders had simply had enough racing by then and stayed at home.
Faced with this alarming erosion of the world’s third biggest bike race, the organisers of the Vuelta hatched a cunning plan. They reasoned that what the cycling public wanted to see were mountain top finishes and plenty of them. They wanted to see the favourites scrapping with each other day in, day out. And they wanted the drama to go the distance of a three-week race.
So, they made some key changes. Out went super-long stages – the TV viewers only switch on for the last hour, anyway. In came short, sharp exciting parcours that invariably finished on top of a big hill, giving the attacking riders more chance of hurting the competition. They also introduced time bonuses for those finishes, giving an extra incentive for attacking your rivals at the end of each day. And out went long time trials, a move that had two benefits. Firstly, it tended to prolong the race’s action right up to the final weekend as there were less long settled time gaps between the top riders on GC. Secondly, lots of time trialling kilometres in a race tended to promote and favour a more defensive style: build up your lead in the time trial then protect it in the mountains. (This final point was a theme that 2012 Tour de France viewers were beginning to suspect awaited them.)
As a result, their race was revitalised. Nobody was ever certain of victory until they’d breathed a huge sigh of relief in Madrid. Time bonuses and big climbs kept everybody guessing from the first stage until the last, and the lack of monster stages made it infinitely more attractive for riders to come and give it a nudge.
Lance Armstrong was one of the first to enjoy the new format. His 1998 appearance was the springboard for his comeback after testicular cancer and his fourth place was a major plank in convincing him that Tour de France glory was a possibility.
The Tour de France has belatedly begun to look at the Vuelta’s advances. The Tour remains steeped in tradition, however, the numerous doping scandals that have battered the race’s reputation for many years could not continue to be ignored. In the same year that Armstrong was reinventing himself in Spain, the race was brought to its knees by the revelation that a Festina team car carrying illicit supplies for its riders had been rumbled by French police. Expulsion, police raids and even jail for the many miscreants threatened the very fabric of the great event. Drug taking appeared to have reached its dark zenith, with many privately claiming that the race could not be completed without chemical assistance. Yet two years later, the Tour was still staging back-to-back Alpine stages containing 425km and seven enormous passes in an eye-watering display of endurance for the riders. The stages were won by Santiago Botero and Marco Pantani respectively, both riders with histories of drug abuse. The image of a shell-shocked and demoralised David Millar after these tortures was the first that sprang to this writer’s mind when the British star confessed to taking illegal stimulants four years later.
Things are a little different in 2012. Not revolutionarily different, but a lesson has been learned from the Vuelta. This 148km stage to the ski-station at La Toussuire is the étape reine of this year’s procession through the Alps. In the last century, this may have meant anything up to eight hours in the saddle, scaling any number of high passes. Claudio Chiappucci’s legendary win over Miguel Indurain at Sestriere in 1992 took nearly eight hours – a lot longer for those in l’autobus – and went over five huge passes to cover a total of 254km. The day before was even longer, and the day after finished on Alpe d’Huez.
Today, the riders will head over the massive Col de Madeleine virtually from the start, then the graveyard of ambition that is the Col de la Croix de Fer, before tackling the brutish slopes to the finish at La Toussuire.
Last year, the Tour de France’s most exciting stage was an eyebrow-raising dash of just 109km, over the Tour’s favourite giant, the Col du Galibier, then finishing on top of Alpe d’Huez. Alberto Contador and Pierre Rolland traded blows all the way up the Alpe, while behind them Andy Schleck launched the sort of gut-wrenching attack that gets fans out of their seats and Cadel Evans’s fatigue-busting pursuit ultimately won him the race.
Shorter stages suit the fans and riders alike. But will they suit Bradley Wiggins and his defence of the maillot jaune? On the one hand, he should be fresher and less susceptible to the attritional problems such long mountain stages bring, but attacks are all the more likely. Evans, Nibali, Van Den Broeck, Frank Schleck and Menchov are waiting like vultures for the fir
st sign of weakness. Will Team Sky be able to fend them all off?
*
Albertville, host of the 1992 Winter Olympics. Not to be confused with Alphaville, shoulder-padded purveyors of the 1980s ‘classic’ ‘Big In Japan’. I remember it well as the singer had acne scars of Steve Cram proportions, a horrendous quiff, make-up befitting a deluded transvestite and, unfortunately, looked like me, according to my schoolfriends.
How to put this? It’s not a place I’d want to be stuck in, falling as it does into that category of Alpine towns most often described as ‘unloved’. Apparently, the more colloquial ‘shithole’ is frowned upon.
Brad and his band of merry men don’t get to see much of it. Within a few minutes they’re already setting a frantic tempo on the Col de la Madeleine in an attempt to contain a furious breakaway group intent on landing a stage win. The relatively short distance of 148km leaves no room for pleasantries and the explosive attacks cause instant panic at the back of the bunch as the sprinters and rouleurs try to organise themselves to ensure they will finish within the time limit and not be eliminated. This is a job they wouldn’t have expected to contemplate until much later in the day.
Twenty-eight riders is a big breakaway group, even if it doesn’t include any obvious contenders for Wiggins’s throne, and Team Sky send the Norwegian battering ram Edvald Boasson Hagen up to the nose of the peloton to control things. Incredibly, the one-man team rides on the front of the race pretty much without assistance for the thick end of 80km. It’s not until the upper slopes of the Col du Glandon are reached that his teammates Mick Rogers and Richie Porte take up the reins.
The Col du Glandon is not an easy climb, but it is largely a white-lines-down-the-middle kind of road. Today, we’re not going to take the Tour organisers’ favourite route of going over the Glandon and down to Le Bourg-d’Oisans before a sharp left up Alpe d’Huez. Instead, on top of the Col, we’re going to swing left up the steeper and narrower Col de Croix de Fer. Perhaps it is the knowledge that this harder part is coming, perhaps he is nervous, or perhaps he just feels good. Whatever the reason, Cadel Evans’s attack on the Glandon comes as a surprise. We’re only halfway through the stage and Team Sky’s Aussie duo are going pretty hard, but the defending champion shoots upwards from the group in search of the seconds he has ceded to Bradley Wiggins. He joins his young BMC comrade Tejay van Garderen and they push on hard, causing consternation behind.
Rogers puts his head down in inimitable style and cranks out a fearsome rhythm, taking Porte, Wiggins and Froome back up to the BMC pairing. The acceleration has served to kick the pain further down the mountain. Now it is the riders trying to hold on to the Team Sky quartet who are troubled.
The stage is set for a proper gunfight on La Toussuire. The remainder of the breakaway is now unlikely to be reeled in by the Tour grandees, but this is where the real race is, a minute or two behind the lone figure of Pierre Rolland as he battles towards yet another French stage win this week.
Richie Porte is the man charged by Sean Yates to set the tempo on the last climb of the day. The finish line is situated right at the top of the mountain, so Porte knows there will be no opportunity to pull back an attack on the descent: he must bury himself to ensure attacking is impossible.
Janez Brajkovič of Astana is the first to test Team Sky. He’s joined in short order by Thibaut Pinot and the dangerous Belgian, Jurgen Van Den Broeck. Porte stays calm and pulls away on the front of the rapidly diminishing yellow jersey group, but when Vincenzo Nibali moves to join the attackers, it is clear that something must be done.
For the first time since the weekend, Team Sky’s full armoury is called upon. Chris Froome, hunched over his handlebars like he’s trying to pull his bike apart, shreds the group to nullify Nibali and Van Den Broeck. There are around 5km left to the top and the Tour de France could be won and lost in those precious minutes. Unfortunately for Australian fans, it looks like the man who will lose it today will be their hero, Cadel Evans. Froome’s pace is just too much for the champion and he agonisingly loses contact with Wiggins and the race lead. For once not left totally exposed by his inadequate BMC team – supposedly the richest squad in cycling – he is forced to rely on his foot soldier van Garderen. Proudly clad in the white jersey that denotes the race’s best-placed young rider, the American paces the distraught Evans to the finish. He will concede a minute and a half to those ahead, surely an insurmountable loss when added to his existing deficit.
As Froome nears Nibali’s back wheel, the intense effort catches up with him and Wiggins pushes through to complete the recapture of the Italian himself. As the attack is finally snuffed out, the race eases imperceptibly, allowing Froome to regain the group.
Knowing that Evans is struggling behind, the group look to extend their advantage over him and the attacks keep coming. It is when countering one of these moves that Chris Froome kicks over the can of worms that will come to dominate the rest of this race. He shoots clear of his companions with a breathtaking kick that hurts everybody, his leader Wiggins included. He has covered no more than 100m more when he is seen talking into the mic attached to his jersey and sitting up, looking behind. He is clearly in touch with Sean Yates in the following car, and though the wording of the message he has received remains between them, the sentiment from Yates is clear: Don’t you dare. Wait.
The loyal Froome does exactly that, rejoined by the yellow jersey seconds later. There’s no question that it has been an uncomfortable moment for Wiggins. Was he attacked by his teammate? Was Froome just forcing the pace to increase the pressure on Nibali and Van Den Broeck? Was Froome just maximising the distance to Evans?
With only Rolland from the day’s break ahead of them, the yellow jersey group at the finish consists of just Pinot, Froome, Van Den Broeck, Nibali and Wiggins.
Team Sky now hold first and second place overall, Froome having clambered over Evans in the standings. The Australian is now a distant fourth behind Vincenzo Nibali, 3’19” behind Bradley Wiggins.
The outcome could scarcely be better for Team Sky, but all the talk at La Toussuire is about Froome’s ‘attack’ and a possible rivalry between the first- and second- placed teammates.
Amid the frantic speculation, cyclingnews.com’s Peter Cossins summed up the situation calmly and accurately: ‘There is no avoiding the conclusion that the rider most capable of toppling Wiggins is riding in the same team.’
BRADLEY WIGGINS HAD HIGH hopes for 2009. He managed to steady himself after the Beijing Olympics – he still enjoyed his fair share of parties, nights out and invitations to functions, but he was back in training a few months earlier than after his post-Athens blitz.
He was talking to the Garmin-Slipstream team about 2009. They were keen for him to express himself as a rider and properly fulfil his potential on the road, which they felt was something he was a long way off doing so far. The road was to be Brad’s objective, for now at least, and further thoughts of Olympic glory on the track would be shelved until preparations for London 2012 needed discussing. The main topic of discussion was weight. The ideal weight for a track rider was generally slightly heavier than that of a roadman. While track performance was largely governed by power output, the key factor in road success was the ratio of power to weight. A ten-stone rider will need less power to get over a hill than a twelve-stone rider, goes the equation. Brad and his new Garmin-Slipstream team thought that he could lose the best part of a stone, as long as it was done carefully. Of course, he wasn’t exactly overweight, so the careful part of that equation was crucial. It would need to be done with a careful mix of diet and training to avoid power and endurance ebbing away with that weight.
The season started with a very encouraging second to an unstoppable Alberto Contador in the Paris–Nice prologue, followed by good rides at Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. Cav won in San Remo, still his best ride outside the Tour de France and World Championships, and Brad took top 30 placings in both of the hard northe
rn classics he was beginning to really enjoy riding. His third visit to the Giro d’Italia was something of a revelation, climbing being a much more comfortable experience for the slimmed-down 2009 version Wiggo. He was tempted to open the throttle out and cane it on many occasions, but continually reminded himself that the battlefield of the Tour de France would be the decisive point of his year, and held back accordingly. On the final day into Rome, with the family watching, he rode the perfect time trial and was surely destined for his greatest win as a professional until the weather intervened. Heavy rain meant a whole bunch of treacherous cobbled corners in the final kilometres and he forced himself to back off the gas with the bigger prizes looming on the horizon. A crash now simply wouldn’t do. Brad was second to the Lithuanian Ignatas Konovalovas, who had finished before the rain came down.
That disappointment aside, the Briton was flying and champing at the bit to start his third Tour de France.
The prologue was in Monaco and featured a tough climb and tricky descent. Wiggins put his money on Cancellara and Contador and wasn’t about to lose the bet. What was a bigger surprise to the field was the identity of the rider in third place on the evening of the first Saturday in July: Bradley Wiggins. Some believed that he was only a prologue specialist fulfilling his brief, but others sensed a new Wiggins. He looked thinner for starters, his gaunt face beginning to resemble a bird of prey, accentuating his roman nose into more of a beak in profile. The new Wiggins was perhaps more of a raptor.
Garmin-Slipstream were very strong in the time trial, an event which the organisers had strategically placed in Stage 4 of that year’s Tour. With his high GC place from the prologue, a stage-winning ride in the time trial from Garmin-Slipstream could conceivably put Brad in the lead. The yellow jersey! It seemed inconceivable, and would surely be a temporary tenure until Alberto, Andy and Lance started slugging it out in the Pyrenees, but still . . .