VICTORY TOUR!
It feels like I’ve won it now, says Wiggins
THE Tour de France is won. Barring an accident or a chronic loss of the imperious form he has demonstrated all season, Bradley Wiggins will ride into Paris on Sunday as the first British cyclist ever to win the most famous bike race in the world.
He knew as much two miles from the line in Peyragudes, the ski resort where sequences of the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies were filmed, bizarrely to represent scenes in Afghanistan.
His lone remaining rival, Vincenzo Nibali, was tailing off and thoughts of his family, of the sacrifices he has made, of the hours of lone riding in a Lancastrian winter flooded into Wiggins’s mind. He lost concentration and his rhythm.
In front of him, Team Sky teammate Chris Froome sensed the opportunity to sprint ahead on the final uphill drag to the line to chase down Spain’s Alejandro Valverde and claim his second stage victory of the Tour. He opened up a gap on Wiggins. Then his radio crackled into life with instructions to wait for his team leader, the wearer of the yellow jersey, and guide him to the line.
Froome obeyed but not before dropping his right hand down by his side, cupping it and, turning his gaze to Wiggins toiling behind, ushering his team leader forward in a gesture which said, ‘Come on, keep up’, much as a parent would make to a child.
It was an unnecessary, ambiguous gesture which hinted at the frustration Froome may feel that he has been stronger on the mountain climbs than Wiggins this Tour and could, with Sky’s permission, have tussled with his team-mate for overall victory.
After today’s jaunt through the vineyards of the Lot valley, Froome will go into tomorrow’s final time trial in Chartres trailing Wiggins by two minutes, five seconds. All but 40 seconds of that can be attributed to a puncture in Liege on the first road stage of the Tour.
The rest is down to Wiggins’s superior time-trialling ability — a fact he may reinforce tomorrow when each man will possess a driving motivation to claim victory in Chartres to justify their performances over the past three weeks.
Wiggins feels slighted that his impending triumph will carry a caveat in the eyes of some because of the absence of Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck — the two dominant riders of recent years — from this Tour.
He said: ‘I don’t think all the people who came out from the UK to stand on the climbs for the last couple of weeks give a monkey’s about who is not here. You can only beat who turns up. My name will always be on the list. For me, that’s all that matters.
‘The moment we crossed the Peyresourde (the penultimate climb), I allowed myself to drift. That was the first time I thought, “Maybe I’ve won the Tour today”. Everything went out of the window because you lose concentration, you know. It’s an incredible feeling.
‘All the way up that last climb my concentration had gone. Chris was egging me on to take more time but the fight had gone from me at that point. I was in another world.’
As for Froome, he may well be regretting turning down an offer in the winter to ride as team leader for Garmin- Sharp this season instead of accepting a higher salary at Sky to work for team leader Wiggins. By doing so, he forfeited the right to dispute the yellow jersey.
With the Olympic road race now just eight days away, there was a scare for Mark Cavendish on the final climb. The world champion tweeted: ‘Thanks to the d***head who crashed me at 3km to go today by waving his flag so it wrapped round my handlebars. Bike’s broke. Leg’s swollen.’
It was the second tumble of the day for Cavendish in what has been, for him, that kind of Tour.