Bradley Wiggins (18 page)

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
finally 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.

You’ll be lucky, son. David Millar has won three stages of this race over the years, and riders from Britain have already won three of this year’s edition. His nous has only grown
over the years since his last win here, back in 2003, and his speed has hardly diminished. Millar stays glued to the crowd barriers on his left and looks over his right shoulder, leaving no room
for a surprise attack from his rival. Péraud makes his move with just 200m remaining, an all-out 100% commitment to reach the line first. The man coming off the wheel of the leader always
has an advantage, though this decreases at lower speeds, as they both have to jump. For fans watching in Britain on TV there is a heart-in-mouth moment as Péraud goes round their man, but it
is only a second before Millar’s long legs get on top of the gear, and from that point there can be only one winner.

The fourth British winner at this Tour de France, and this on the anniversary of the original British yellow jersey hope’s death on the brutal flanks of Mont Ventoux 45 years ago. Tom
Simpson’s ghost must be looking down on this race with a proud smile.

MONT VENTOUX HAS A
special place in the history of cycling, and British cycling in particular. It’s not the highest of mountains, but it sits in
its own glorious isolation high above Avignon and the surrounding Provençale countryside, unencumbered by the range of brothers, sisters and cousins that make views of, say, Mont Blanc
awkward to obtain. On a clear day Mont Ventoux is visible from every direction from many miles.

The weather is more likely to be clear here than in the less predictable Alps or Pyrenees, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a pleasant place to be. When riders ascend from the village
of Bédoin, they are protected by a canopy of trees up to the heights of Chalet Reynard, then it is an exposed crawl across the barren white shoulder of rock all the way to the blasted
outcrop on which sits the red-and-white-striped tower of the observatory that marks the summit. Exposure is the name of the game, and the mountain can be blazingly hot or perishingly cold, even in
July. Not for nothing does its name loosely translate as the windy mountain. When Armstrong and Pantani rode to this summit in the 2000 Tour de France, the press were forced to decamp to the foot
of the climb as it was too windy to erect the mobile
salle du presse.
It must have been the shortest podium ceremony in cycling history, Armstrong stiffly waving his golden stuffed lion in
a pair of thermal tights then racing out of the freezing gale to the comfort of his motor home.