Wiggins and team-mates on top of their game, says coach Salzwedel
Great Britain’s endurance trainer is sleeping easy, thanks to his in-form track riders, says Tom Cary
There has been a lot of talk this week about skinsuits worth an extra three seconds, and bikes that fly, but Heiko Salzwedel, the men’s endurance coach, insists the biggest advantage that Team GB will enjoy when the track competition gets going this week is the riders themselves, with Sir Bradley Wiggins in particular going so well that Salzwedel could conceivably see him going on to Tokyo in 2020.
“Why not?” Salzwedel replied when asked by The Sunday Telegraph whether he could see Wiggins committing to another cycle. “Jason Queally did it at 40 at the European Championships [in 2010]. The key is if he’s having fun and enjoying himself. If he is then why not? Brad is going better now than he ever has.”
That is clearly the case. And it was Wiggins himself who raised the prospect of another four years at his pre-Games press conference, albeit half-jokingly. “This retirement thing… the way I feel, I could go on to Tokyo,” he said, laughing. “The last 12 months have been the most enjoyable for me in a long, long time, probably since the year I spent at Garmin in 2009 when I came fourth in the Tour out of the blue.
“The improvements I’ve made: I’m TP-ing better than I was eight, 10, 12 years ago, I’ve really stepped up my own individual performance to doing 2½ lap turns at 3 min 49 sec pace off Man 4. Back in Sydney we were doing 4 min 01 sec pace and I was doing lap turns from Man 4.
“I’m a better athlete than I was 16 years ago or even eight years ago. Since Beijing [2008], that line of progression has continued, really. Touch wood, I’ve been fortunate in that I don’t really suffer with bad knees or a bad back, like Chris Hoy was struggling with going into London, so I almost think I could go on for another four years physically. Whether I will or not is another thing, but I just want to leave it.”
Wiggins’s positivity has only been boosted by the fact that his teammates Ed Clancy, Owain Doull and Steven Burke are all flying too. The fact that they are breaking the world record in training – as confirmed by Salzwedel this week – is perhaps no great surprise.
It would be a bigger surprise, in fact, if Australia and New Zealand were not also breaking the world record in their training sessions.
But Wiggins – whether to outpsyche the opposition or to rev up his own team – is showing supreme confidence all the same. “Anything less than a gold will be a huge disappointment, the way we’re going at the moment,” he said this week. “Something will have to go seriously wrong for us to lose.”
Salzwedel was a bit more circumspect when asked about his team’s prospects, although he did allow that “every rider is on top of his game” and that he was “sleeping well at night”.
Salzwedel, the former East German track coach whose return for a third spell at British Cycling was instrumental in tempting Wiggins back for a crack at gold this time around, added that he felt that the group had now found the right balance in terms of how to attack the 4km race.
There has been much talk during this cycle about the most efficient way of riding. In theory, the fewer changes the riders make, the less time they lose as the front rider drops to the back, but riders can only manage two laps at most before they hit their threshold and start to hold the team up. And once the momentum has been lost, it is very difficult to regain.
“Of course everybody has his own strengths and path to peak performance, so you won’t see all four guys doing two-lap turns,” Salzwedel said.
“It’s a consideration to reduce the amount of changes, but I think we have found the right balance now.”
That balance is unlikely to include Mark Cavendish at any stage of proceedings. The Manxman, who is riding in the omnium and has been mooted as a potential substitute for the second round of the team pursuit, in which Britain simply have to win rather than set a super-quick time, is certainly riding well enough. He is fresh from those four extraordinary stage wins at the Tour de France. But it is thought that the first choice would be to stick with the same four riders for all three rounds, which are spread over two days.
Salzwedel would not comment on that, but he did say that Cavendish had brought “very good energy” with him back from the Tour. “That’s for sure,” he said. “We have one of our genuine superstars back representing Great Britain and that is really exciting. Don’t get me wrong, they all have their moments. But I have to say, this last training camp was a real pleasure working with all the riders.”