Has Wiggins Blinked?

It was always going to be a showdown not to be missed. Two superbly matched rivals, competing at the top of their game. Bradley Wiggins and Cadel Evans, vying for the Tour de France crown.

But with the first week of the Tour de France behind us, it begs the question: has Wiggins blinked already? In the silent psychological battle raging between the Briton and the Australian, has Wiggins inadvertently lost the advantage to the defending champion?

It began on Stage 1. As the teams raced towards the finish and the dangerous last few kilometres of the stage, Team Sky was nowhere to be seen, leaving Wiggins to fend for himself in the peloton and try and stay out of trouble. Wiggins was seriously displeased with his team’s lack of support and had words with them at the end of the day, causing them to be far more attentive on Stage 2. Already the team was in the black books.

It got worse on Stage 3. A crash took out Wiggins’ Sky teammate, Kanstantin Sivtsov, and suddenly Sky was one rider down with a team of eight – the first team to lose a man. It hasn’t helped that the World Champion, Manxman Mark Cavendish, is now racing for Team Sky and has been pressuring the team for more and more support in his quest for stage victories. Even Norwegian champion Edvald Boasson Hagen was too busy sprinting for stage placings or leading out Cavendish to look out for Wiggins. The team is slowly fracturing between the individual goals of its members. The line-up that was initially the most formidable in the Tour de France is now looking like Wiggins’ biggest weakness.

A touch-and-go team is one thing, but Wiggins himself seems to know that he’s already on the back foot strategically as well. On Stage 3 Wiggins employed a rather reprehensible tactic saved only for the desperate. He maintained his position in the GC that day after all time gaps in the front half of the peloton were neutralised due to a crash in the last few hundred metres of the stage. But here’s the kicker: Wiggins had nothing to do with the crash.

Wiggins was riding a fair way down the peloton and was going to lose time on rival Cadel Evans, who was racing for a placing behind Peter Sagan. So when a Vacansoleil rider crashed over to Wiggins’ left, instead of veering right to go around it, Wiggins turned his bike left into teammate Michael Rogers and forced both of them to stop behind the crash. It wasn’t an accident. Wiggins’s intention was clear. The road in front of him is open, but instead he leans left into Rogers, slows and puts his foot on the ground. The tactic worked. Commissaires deemed Wiggins and Rogers impeded by the crash and awarded them the same time as Evans.

Leaving aside the moral implications of such a strategy, the real question is: why was it necessary? To put it simply, they made a mistake. Wiggins and Team Sky slipped up. Sky should have done what BMC did and moved Wiggins up to the front of the peloton, clear of crashes and time losses. Sky’s failure meant that Wiggins had to get creative in order to ensure he stayed in competition and didn’t surrender any advantage to Evans.

Small potatoes, perhaps, but this year’s Tour de France was always going to be about the small stuff. Consider Cadel Evans’ Tour de France so far: he’s raced the perfect opening week, remains as calm as the proverbial eye of the storm, and in general is looking just like the Cadel Evans we remember from last year – the Cadel who won the Tour de France. It’s true that Wiggins is making up for missed time in the second week of the Tour, dominating in the Stage 9 individual time trial and gaining precious seconds over Evans. That doesn’t change the fact that Wiggins’ opening week doesn’t look nearly as sparkly, and it’s worth asking the question – has Wiggins already made a critical mistake?

Stage 3: Orchies – Boulognes-sur-Mer

It was a stage of drama this time.  Stage 3 of the Tour, from Orchies to Boulognes-sur-Mer, had all the pains and troubles of the past few days but without the redeeming features.  Crashes, abandons, myriad punctures and some rainclouds lent a distinctly gloomy air to the day’s racing which stayed right up to the tense finish.

Ironically, it wasn’t until this fourth day of racing that the Tour de France finally reached France.  Unlike yesterday, the riders were eager to get away today, the successful breakaway forming just four or five kilometres in.  The apparent breakaway specialist of the 2012 Tour, Saxobank-Tinkoff Bank’s Michael Morkov, was quick to jump on the escape attempt of Ruben Perez Moreno (Euskaltel-Euskadi), along with AG2R La Mondiale’s Sebastien Minard, Europcar’s Giovanni Bernardeau and Andriy Grivko of Astana.  Some fast riding saw the quintet reach a maximum gap of 5’40” after half an hour, before settling into the three-minute lead it would remain for much of the stage.

In the unfortunate characteristic of the stage, the next decisive event was a crash.  Janez Brajkovic of Astana was the biggest name sitting on the road, thankfully needing no more than a flying visit to the race doctor’s car for a leg wound to continue on.  Going through the feed zone, the tense peloton began to calm down again, gradually directing its energies towards the next event – the intermediate sprint point.

Suddenly the GreenEDGE express appeared at the front of the peloton, intimidating in their determination to put sprinter Matt Goss over the line first.  The sprint train which the Australians had been practising was working like a charm, pulling the peloton along like a cat on a ball of string, until a slower turn by one of the riders allowed Lotto Belisol to sprint up alongside and the train fell apart.  All turned to chaos as other sprinters saw their chance and bolted for the sprint line, Kenny van Hummel (Vacansoleil-DCM) controversially swerving to block Mark Cavendish (Sky Procycling) as they went for the line.  Cavendish wasn’t too adversely affected, leading van Hummel, Peter Sagan (Liquigas-Cannondale), Brett Lancaster (Orica-GreenEDGE) and Yauheni Hutarovich (FDJ-Bigmat) over the line to fill the top 10 places.

Sprint over, the peloton began to relax again, while out the front the breakaway was approaching the first climb of the day, the Category 4 Côte l’Éperche with one point on offer, which Morkov was eager to claim in defence of his polka-dot jersey.  A few minutes behind, the peloton had followed the five riders over the climb before disaster struck again.  A second crash with 54 kilometres to go left more riders on the ground, one of Bradley Wiggins’ Sky teammates quickly attracting attention.  Hurt and struggling, Kanstantin Sivtsov was forced to abandon the Tour on just the 3^rd stage, leaving Wiggins and Team Sky already one man short.

Oblivious to the carnage behind, the breakaway began the next climb of the day, Grivko upping the pace just enough that Bernardeau, riding his first Tour de France, couldn’t follow and fell off the back of the group.  Morkov led the remaining three escapees over the Category 3 to bolster his lead in the King of the Mountains classification, but back in the peloton the carnage just kept coming.  Yet another crash left Orica-GreenEDGE stage hopeful Simon Gerrans brushing off his knicks after a cannonball into a barbed-wire fence, while Movistar sprinter José Joaquín Rojas became the second abandon of the Tour.  Meanwhile the crash at the peloton’s rear had fractured the peloton into several groups on the road, with Gerrans and BMC stage favourite Philippe Gilbert trapped in the group almost a minute behind the rest of the bunch.

Up the front Grivko and Morkov had left their companions for dead on the next Category 4 climb, racing each other to the top for the KOM points, again added to Morkov’s burgeoning total.  The pair continued to go it alone as the shrunken peloton behind them swallowed first Bernardeau and then Minard and Perez Moreno, reducing the gap to less than a minute.  The leading duo made it over the fourth climb of the day, Morkov collecting the point again and earning himself the Fighting Spirit award for his tenacity, before Grivko dropped him on the second-last climb and went it alone, leaving Morkov to the mercy of the peloton.

But the peloton could smell a chance at the stage now, hunting down Grivko to have its own shot at stage win glory.  Ivan Basso (Liquigas-Cannondale) and Tony Gallopin (Radioshack-Nissan-Trek) led the select group of riders over the penultimate climb, before French time trial champion Sylvain Chavanel of Omega Pharma – Quickstep shot off the front of the group and began a solo ride to the finish.  A skilled descender, Chavanel built up a small lead, but the peloton weren’t giving away the victory that easily, hauling him back just a kilometre from the finish.

Despite the crashes of earlier in the day, not all riders were paying attention on the sweep into the finish, heading straight into the fence as they missed a corner or crashing on the final uphill approach to the finish.  Amongst the chaos Peter Sagan brought his newfound uphill sprinting abilities into play, making another unique salute as he rolled across the line for another stage victory.  The 22-year-old Slovak tightened his lead on the green jersey, now 42 points ahead of nearest challenger, yellow jersey wearer Fabian Cancellara (Radioshack-Nissan-Trek).  In a nice twist, 7^th place on the stage went to AG2R La Mondiale’s Nicolas Roche, a good present for the Irishman, who turns 28 today.

Stage 4 is another flat stage for the sprinters which could turn out to be yet another Sagan Playground or could instead bring Mark Cavendish out to play.  Here’s to hoping the course profile belies the mood of the day and we have an ‘up’ day instead of a flat one.