Briton found Tour de France too difficult to watch, was off-form on day one of Tour de Pologne
Speaking for the first time after this year’s Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins has implied that Chris Froome would have been the better rider even if he had started the race in peak shape.
Wiggins has been off form all season, being a shadow of the rider who dominated last year’s calendar. He dropped out of the Giro d’Italia after losing time in falls and being dropped on climbs, and then scratched from doing the Tour due to what his team said was a knee problem.
Silent throughout the Tour, he has now spoken about that event and said that Froome was always the likely winner.
“It was a great team performance, a great individual performance and they deserved everything they got,” he said, according to the BBC. “Chris’s performance was dominant. I’ve said before, he’s probably the best climber in the world.
“I’ve never been that good a climber. I can climb but my speciality is the time trial and working back from that. A Tour like this year, Chris is the stronger rider.”
Murmurs that Wiggins was fired by missing the Tour seemed off the mark yesterday when he finished far off the pace on the opening stage of the Tour de Pologne. He crossed the line nine minutes and thirteen seconds behind the winner Diego Ulissi, losing out on any chance of winning his comeback race.
Speaking afterwards, he confirmed that he will miss the Vuelta a España and will take an alternative course in his preparations for the world time trial championships in September.
Froome said after the Tour that he hadn’t heard from Wiggins. The two have a difficult relationship and last year’s winner didn’t congratulate his Sky team-mate. He said yesterday that he hardly watched any of the event, with his disappointment at missing the race making it very difficult.
“I didn’t watch, I couldn’t watch. I would have loved to have been there,” he said. “I watched the end of the first stage when I heard the bus knocked the finish down, but otherwise I just followed what the guys did from afar.”
He added that he “focused on the positives rather than sitting watching the telly depressed.”
He indicated prior to the Tour that he was unlikely to ever target the event again. It was a statement which disappointed his fans, but he said that family life was too important to sacrifice in spending long periods of time away from home.