Sir Bradley Wiggins is rarely lost for words.
Sir Bradley Wiggins after winning the 2012 Tour de France. Chris Froome, left, the runner-up, won the Tour last year. Photo: AP Photo / Jerome Prevost
Whether it’s the one-liners that accompany his major successes, or the nuanced explanations that fill most of his interviews, but when it comes to the nearly impossible position that he was left in last year, having won the 2012 Tour de France but almost immediately been ousted as Sky’s Tour leader by his younger, stronger team-mate Chris Froome, he struggles.
That’s hardly surprising, when you bear in mind that the Tour was Wiggins’s focus from the moment he resumed training after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
He describes “having a monkey on my back for four years about winning the Tour – we’d sit here saying ‘can you win the Tour this year?’; ‘are you ever going to win the Tour?’; ‘is this your last opportunity to win the Tour?’; ‘the Tour looks made for you this year …’ And then I did it, and it never felt about going back and winning a second Tour.
“There was so much emphasis on winning the first one (by a Briton) and then you’ve got a guy in the team who’s five years younger than me, who finished second and has then gone on to win it who potentially could dominate the Tour for five or six years…” And here he flounders, which is pretty much what he did on his bike in the early part of 2013.
At least Wiggins may be going back to the Tour this July, assuming he finds the form he needs.
He believes he will have to be capable of getting on to the podium or near it to earn his place alongside Froome in Sky’s squad.
That looked remote last June, when he told the Guardian that he was having serious doubts about whether he would ever find the mental strength to make the sacrifices he needed to in order to return to France. That followed a spring of speculation about who would lead Sky.
“From the moment I won the Tour in 2012 it was always (seen as) inevitable – ‘when are you going to start the preparations to defend it next year?’. People would ask that but in my head I’d be thinking, hold on a minute, I’ve only just come to terms with this one. There came a point where it was fight, flight or freeze, so my initial thoughts were, I don’t want to ride next year, I need a year off.”
“A couple of weeks after that I got my knee sorted, came out to Mallorca, started training… going up all the climbs I’d been doing in training (in 2012). I realised when I was out here again that I loved training and that I loved the sport. When I watched bits of the Tour (I realised) that I missed it and that I wanted to go back. I’m not done yet.” – The Guardian
