Briton feeling confident after dominant performance in Romandie
Clocking up two stage wins plus the overall classification in last week’s Tour of Romandie, Britain’s Bradley Wiggins has spoken with confidence about his current condition and also about his Sky team.
“After last week’s win at the Tour of Romandie, all I can say is that everything is going to plan,” he wrote in the Guardian. “I’ve had seven wins this year, and I’ve been winning races off the back of whatever I’ve had when I started; it’s good to have that level of consistency, which I’ve shown for nearly 12 months now.
“I knew that the numbers suggested no one would be able to touch me in the time trial on Sunday, so I always thought I would have a chance of winning, but the biggest thing this week was the team.”
Wiggins praises the performance of those who supported him, regarding their combined ride as the best-every by Sky Procycling. He names Richie Porte, Michael Rogers, prologue winner Geraint Thomas and world road race champion Mark Cavendish as having all played key roles.
Although Wiggins’ victory in the final time trial was predicted by many, what was far less expected was his sprint victory on stage one. He sat third in line inside the final kilometre, then gunned it with 400 metres to go and held off all those trying to pass him from behind.
It was the first time in his career that he had taken a victory in that manner, but he said that he wasn’t altogether surprised.
“There have been a couple of occasions this season when I’ve been up there in a sprint and I’ve thought I could have won it, but what’s always been in my mind in the run-in is to stay out of trouble and avoid a split in the bunch,” he said. “I led out Rigoberto Urán in one stage of the Tour of Catalonia, a few guys came past me and I ended up 16th; since then I’ve been thinking I should have just gone for it.”
While Wiggins is not training to become a bunch sprinter, what he has been trying to do is to encourage his body to be able to cope with explosive efforts in the mountains. The time trial specialist previously raced like a diesel; he was able to ride at a high pace for a long time, but lacked the punch needed when up against the pure climbers.
“Explosive power is one of the biggest things we’ve been working on over the winter, because it’s been about my only weakness, going with the moves at the moment when the climbers put the hammer down,” he stated. “I’ve always been fast on the track – I’ve won madisons and so on – but I haven’t worked on it since my track days. So I knew I had the length for it – it was about a 20sec effort, and in training we do up to a minute in those efforts.”
As much as it was about the training he had done, he also states that he now has a winning mentality, and that this is what kicked in towards the end.
Wiggins knows that the worst thing he could do is to win plenty during the spring, then run out of gas before the Tour itself. However he said that he and the team have been very cautious, holding him back from racing so that he is mentally fresh each time he lines out. Romandie was his fourth event of the year.
In between those races, he’s going away and training hard. He prepared for Romandie with a training camp in Tenerife, carrying out some very specific work. “I just did climbing, a minimum of 3,000 metres a day, all at around threshold, about five to six hours in the saddle a day, making efforts at altitudes up to about 2,000m,” he wrote.
Wiggins added that he plans to cover about 100,000 metres of climbing by June; he’s currently up to 60,000 metres, and has a training camp plus the Criterium du Dauphiné to help himself get ready.
All in all, he appears convinced that he is on track for his best-ever Tour. “I’m pretty much there, it’s just a matter of finding the last one or two per cent which is what will make the difference,” he stated.