Bradley Wiggins

by John Deering

  It wasn’t to be. On that infamous third stage to La Grand Motte, Bradley was one of the field that got caught on the wrong side of the split when HTC forced the pace into the crosswinds and the resulting lost seconds cost them the chance of a shot at yellow.

  Garmin-Slipstream shrugged the disappointment aside and turned their attentions to that team time trial. With Brad, David Millar, Dave Zabriskie and Christian Vande Velde in their lineup, they had an incredible array of testers. The trick would be coaxing the other riders through, or, at least one of them: in the team time trial, the time is taken on the fifth man to cross the line. They were down to five early on after going out all guns blazing. The TV commentators thought they’d blown it, but the tactic was actually part of a plan, albeit a risky one. If that fifth rider, future Giro winner Ryder Hesjedal, or one of the four main men were to drop off, all their effort would be wasted. In the end, they were only bested by the Astana unit of Contador and Armstrong, who batted all the way down to nine in this discipline and brought the whole team home eighteen seconds ahead of Garmin-Slipstream. Four stages had gone, and Bradley was in sixth spot on the GC.

  It was expected that Brad would begin a long descent down the rankings the next day, when the Tour took in its first big mountain top finish, the long, long drag up to Arcalis in Andorra used by Jan Ullrich to forge his sole Tour de France victory in 1997. But Bradley confounded the doubters by riding comfortably in the group of GC contenders all the way up the mountain, rubbing shoulders with Armstrong and the Schlecks. Those commentators had failed to take in the nature of that climb: it’s long, all right, but without a proliferation of hairpins or steep ramps to break the rhythm. If ever a big mountain climb could be said to suit Bradley Wiggins, it would be Arcalis. Only at the top, when Alberto Contador sprang away unchallenged to put some time into his rivals did Brad lose sight of any of his opponents, but he wasn’t alone. Contador was clearly head and shoulders above the rest of this race, regardless of any mind-games his teammate Armstrong might try. Brad was in the company of royalty, and people were beginning to notice.

  A few days later, Alberto Contador was even paying him the compliment of telling the press that he would have to put time into Brad to avoid him being a danger to his yellow jersey in the late time trial in Annecy.

  Bradley Wiggins found himself riding into the Alps as a genuine podium contender. The first day was a yomp up to Verbier in Switzerland, with Contador and Schleck going head to head and dropping the field before the classy Spaniard asserted himself upon the Luxembourger. Astonishingly, the new confident Bradley Wiggins took fifth place on the mountain, just over a minute behind the imperious race leader. He was in third overall, a place behind a man who had finished 25 seconds after him at Verbier, a chap by the name of Lance Armstrong.

  Suddenly, the cycling press weren’t asking when Wiggins would crack, but if he would at all. Contador, the consummate stage racer, wouldn’t be expected to lose his 1’46” lead to Wiggins in the Annecy time trial, but it was not beyond the realms of possibility. Suddenly, the London track specialist was being spoken of as a potential Tour winner. It wasn’t a cert, but it was definitely a possibility. They would have to shift him.

  They had a damned good try at it on the next stage over the twin peaks of Grand and Petit Saint Bernard, when Andy Schleck shredded the field with a powerful attack. Only six men could stay with the pace, but one of those was Bradley Wiggins. He stayed third in Bourg-Saint-Maurice at 1’46”.

  The next day was another trial. There were only two opportunities for the climbers in the Tour de France to force their way into the reckoning: this stage to Le Grand-Bornan, and Saturday’s sprawling epic to the summit of the Giant of Provence, Mont Ventoux. The Schlecks worked in tandem quite brilliantly, spread-eagling the entire field, with the notable exception of the simply brilliant Contador, who matched them the whole way. In the end, it suited all three of them to some extent: Frank Schleck won the stage, Contador retained the jersey, and all three of them saw Armstrong and Wiggins get bounced to give them sole occupancy of the podium places. Brad had slipped to sixth behind Contador, Andy, Frank, Lance and Andreas Klöden. It wasn’t his best day, but he was proud of a stunning rearguard action that still left him in with a shout at a good finish. Coming into this race, his team had hopes of a top twenty finish for Brad, but also thought highly of Zabriskie, Vande Velde and Millar’s chances. Now their weight was all behind Wiggins and he was still comfortably outstripping expectations in a dazzling sixth place overall.

  Despite Mont Ventoux looming on the distant horizon, Brad was quietly confident of improving his position. He was loving every minute of being a player on the big stage and the fatigue was losing out to the excitement. He was strongly backing himself to bounce back in the time trial, feeling that he had ridden pretty well to Le Grand-Bornan and only been beaten by men he would always expect to lose time to in the circumstances. He was going to control the controllables and concentrate on the time trial, his domain.

  Garmin had reconnoitred the time trial course on the rest day and discovered it to be a bit harder than the race manual suggested. The hill was longer and steeper, not ideal for Brad, but he would tackle it better prepared. A wind blew up during the course of the race, favouring the earlier starters. That meant a chance to shine for the time trial specialists who were low down on GC and thus starting well before the hitters. Fabian Cancellara fell into this category, as did David Millar, and they were among the top five. Only one of the overall contenders was able to pierce this block of testers: the man who would now certainly be crowned in Paris, the unsurpassable Alberto Contador. He was fastest of all, glorying in a stage win in the yellow jersey and proving beyond doubt that he was the strongest rider in this race. Nearest to him of his rivals was indeed the confident resurgent Wiggins, sixth at 42 seconds, inside the times of everybody in front of him on the overall standings save Contador. Klöden, Armstrong and both Schlecks all gave way to Garmin’s Londoner who went to bed in fourth spot that night with only Mont Ventoux standing in his way.

  The Tour de France organisers had played a blinder in keeping the podium places in question right up to the final weekend, and Bradley Wiggins was still a key player. What a Tour, what a rider.

  STAGE 12:

  Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne–Annonay Davézieux, 226km

  Friday, 13 July 2012

  The history of cycling is littered with lurid stories of teammates in rivalry.

  The uniqueness of cycling lies in it being a team sport with individual winners. There are plenty of sports where a band of brothers join together in an all-for-one-one-for-all blood pact to overcome the obstacles placed in front of them, but those all end up with a team name engraved on the plinth around the base of a cup of some description; a City, a United, a Giants, a Lakers. Cycling is the only sport that demands that a team of professionals perform at the very peak of their ability with no hope of receiving eternal fame except to bask in the distant reflected glow of one of their number. It’s his name that the engraver etches into the silverware, not the team’s.

  This is the fertile breeding ground that jealousy and self-belief thrive in. Why him? Why not me?

  In 1985, Bernard Hinault won his record-equalling fifth Tour de France, thanks in no little part to the sterling work of his youthful American teammate, Greg LeMond. At his victory parade on the Champs-Élysées, incidentally the last by a French rider, Hinault promised to return the favour the following year. Horror and confusion could be seen on the guileless LeMond’s face as his trusted mentor attacked him in the Pyrenees. With the La Vie Claire team split asunder, the English-speakers refusing to speak to the French-speakers and vice versa, open warfare raged between the two all the way to Alpe d’Huez where the older man fought in vain to distance the pretender. The rest of the field was blown away, left far back down the hairpins towards Le Bourg-d’Oisans, as the pair rode the mountain as if tied together by a short bootlace. All the way to the top, where Le Blaireau final
ly accepted it wasn’t going to happen and crossed the line hand in hand with his comrade/enemy. Hinault was to claim that it was only correct that he challenge LeMond as the only other rider in the race capable of rendering the arriviste’s victory valid. Then he promptly retired.

  The leader of the Carrera squadra for the 1987 Giro d’Italia was the pin-up of Italian cycling, Roberto Visentini. Some deft manoeuvring in the first week saw him take up ownership of the leader’s pink jersey with the firm intention of carrying it all the way to Milan. That he wasn’t able to do so was almost entirely down to the aggression of his Irish lieutenant Stephen Roche who rode himself into the lead, firmly believing that his was the better claim to greatness and Visentini would only lose the race for Carrera if left to carry on unmolested. The tifosi were outraged, lining the Dolomites to aim punches at the usurper, protected only by his one loyal teammate, the Belgian Eddy Schepers and a man who was supposedly his rival, the Scottish climber on the Panasonic team, Robert Millar. Millar was to some extent driven by hubris having previously been robbed of overall victory at the Vuelta on the penultimate day by a cabal of Spaniards unwilling to see an Anglo take their race away. The promise of rides for both men on the superteam Roche was building for the following season also helped. As if to make his point, Roche went on to win the Tour and the World Championships that year as well, only the second man since the great Merckx himself to pull off that feat. It broke him though, and his annus mirabilis never came remotely close to being repeated.

  As recently as 2009 Bradley Wiggins had watched from inside the yellow jersey group as Alberto Contador and Lance Armstrong kicked lumps out of each other for a couple of weeks before Armstrong accepted the inevitable and gave ground to the younger man. It was scarcely believable that they both wore the name of Astana across their jerseys such was their obvious rivalry and antipathy.

  So what of Wiggins and Froome? The party line was clear: Froome’s time will come, the 2012 Tour de France is all about Bradley Wiggins as far as Team Sky are concerned.

  The riders all smiled and hugged back at the team bus last night, delighted that the outcome of the day couldn’t have been better for Team Sky. The top two riders in the Tour were Team Sky men. Nibali had been neutralised, Evans distanced. This race was past its halfway point with many big mountains encountered and handled. The Tour de France was Team Sky’s to lose.

  However, somebody had forgotten to inform the twittering classes.

  ‘Oh SNAP!’ tweeted David Millar through virtually audible fits of giggles. ‘Sky have WAG WAR on twitter. This shit just got real.’

  You’d think that somebody would have had a word with the Team Sky wives-and-girlfriends after Mark Cavendish’s girlfriend Peta Todd stirred up the gossipers earlier in the race when she accused his team of not supporting her man. But she isn’t the only Team Sky WAG with a Twitter account.

  Immediately after yesterday’s stage and his apparent reining in by the team, Chris Froome’s girlfriend, the South African sports photographer Michelle Cound, tweeted ‘Beyond disappointed. I know what happened just then.’

  Still fuming later on and presumably pondering her man’s chance of winning the Tour de France being refused him, she added: ‘If you want loyalty, get a Froome dog . . . a quality I value . . . although being taken advantage of by others!’

  Anybody who has had the good fortune to encounter Cath Wiggins will know that the leader’s wife is a big character not afraid to show her feelings. She’s articulate and insightful. That means there can be little chance that her pointed omission of Froome’s name when she listed her husband’s helpers at La Toussuire was accidental, especially when it hit the tweetdeck shortly after Cound’s outspoken remarks. Mrs Wiggins wrote: ‘See Mick Rogers and Richie Porte for examples of genuine, selfless effort and true professionalism.’

  That would have been a PR disaster enough for Team Sky, but it was about to get worse. In no doubt that this was a slight on her earlier complaint, Michelle Cound chose to retweet Cath Wiggins’s ‘loyalty’ pronouncement, preceding it with just one word: ‘Typical!’

  David Millar, having a good laugh over at the Garmin-Sharp hotel, wasn’t the only one. As the likeable Simon MacMichael wrote on road.cc, ‘On Twitter everybody can hear you scream.’

  Wiggins himself was inevitably drawn into the exchanges, although he was more careful than the respective spouses to stay on message: ‘Great day today for Team Sky, boys rode incredible today and Chris Froome super strong, big day behind us.’

  The best tweet on the whole matter came yet again from the writer and different kind of wag, Richard Moore: ‘Just trying to imagine the Kathy LeMond/Martine Hinault exchange had twitter been around during @1986Tour.’

  *

  The mountains have exacted a heavy toll on the race and no team suffered more than Rabobank. The Dutch superteam have lost three riders overnight when we roll out of the valley town of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne this morning. Serial minor-placing sprinter Mark Renshaw hasn’t made it and neither has his Dutch teammate Bauke Mollema. But by far the biggest blow is the loss of their star, the leader Robert Gesink. The skinny climber’s chances have been talked up year on year for a while as he developed out of a mercurial prodigious grimpeur into someone who can supposedly challenge the best in a three-week tour. His fans are left waiting another year to see the hoped-for metamorphosis that we’ve all heard so much about. Meanwhile, Dutch bookies are laughing all the way to the bank.

  Another little problem no longer troubling Bradley Wiggins this morning is his minor spat with Vincenzo Nibali. It appears to be over after the leader showed the grace of the patrons of old by reaching out in a gesture of camaraderie and congratulations to his Italian rival as they crossed the finish line on La Toussuire yesterday afternoon. He may have felt that he had a little ground to make up after inadvertently ‘disrespecting’ Nibali the day before. If so, the pat on the shoulder seems to have done the trick. It seems Wiggins had sought out Nibali earlier in the day to explain that he meant no ill. ‘That’s the beauty of cycling right there,’ said a happier Nibali. ‘We can talk calmly and clear things up amongst ourselves. Wiggins has been a great rival. And he has a great teammate in Froome.’

  Brad and Team Sky, especially the pacemakers of Christian Knees, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Mick Rogers and Richie Porte, have their fingers crossed that Stage 12 will be the ‘day off’ they’ve been hoping for. The stage profile – two big Alpine passes followed by a long float down into the Ardèche – is made for the long breakaway. ‘It’s going to be a hard first hour while everybody tries to get away, but then we might get things a bit easier now the race has settled down,’ predicts Sean Yates.

  He’s almost note-perfect. The daily morning attacks fly, frantic enough for experienced Frenchman David Moncoutié to crash on the descent of the first mountain, the Col du Grand Cucheron, while trying to bridge to the front of the race. He writes himself out of any further participation in this race.

  The only part not foreseen by the Team Sky DS was that Peter Sagan would get himself into one of the moves. He has his eyes on the green jersey points on offer at the day’s intermediate sprint. It all gets a little bit quick for half an hour on the front as Team Sky are joined by Orica-GreenEDGE who are keen to bring the Slovak back. Their man Matt Goss is a challenger for that green jersey and they don’t want to give Sagan an easy ride. Once the move is reeled in and the sprinters fight over those scraps, the race rolls on at a more sedate pace, up to twelve minutes behind a group of stage-hunters.

  These are the days that Tour riders love. The mountains behind them for the moment, the transitional stages are a chance to roll their legs over and regain some strength after a horrible few days. They even get a chance to talk to each other.

  Of the men up the road, the best known is Brad’s old oppo and teammate, David Millar. This kind of day is the type that the Brit would have had a long hard look at when the Tour route was announced before Christmas. He would have calculated that
the peloton would not be so interested in racing hard, and that he himself would be trailing the leader by some significant time after passing though the Alps. He was correct: he’s in 93rd spot now, nearly an hour and a half behind Wiggins and no danger to the top ten. He’s won on days like this before, knowledge safely in the locker if it should come down to a sprint from a small group.

  The trick in these situations is to keep the group together as long as possible so that they have the best chance of staying away. This is best done by getting the composition of the breakaway correct – everybody should feel that they can win, nobody should have a teammate with them, there should be no big names well placed on GC. Millar has managed to surround himself with Jean-Christophe Péraud, Egoi Martínez, Cyril Gautier and Robert Kišerlovski. Textbook.

  The quintet manage to get to within 4km of the line before they begin to look nervously at each other. The fact that they are still seven minutes ahead of the main event doesn’t help, as they are under no pressure to hurry. Kišerlovski’s nerve breaks first and he goes for the long one, possibly just hoping to shed one or two others to make the odds better for the sprint. He is recaptured and Martínez gives it a go. It’s Péraud’s move that cracks them, however. He goes clear, as the remaining four will each other to lead the chase.

  David Millar expertly delays his pursuit for a moment to give the Frenchman an opportunity to establish a gap, then deftly covers it while the others squabble over the responsibility of chasing.

  The newly formed duo share the effort of making good their escape, no mean feat after five and a half hours of bike riding. They stay equal until there are barely 500m left to the finish line, where Jean-Christophe Péraud plays his card. He refuses to pass, forcing the Garmin-Sharp rider to lead out the sprint, intending no doubt to pop over him in the last few yards like Chris Hoy.