I was fortunate enough to speak to Bradley Wiggins on Friday morning, the day before the Vuelta team time trial. Here's the transcript, courtesy of my friend Luke McLaughlin. You can here the whole interview unedited on the Real Peloton podcast no. 46.
Since crashing in Tour
"I think from the moment I crashed and I was sat in the ambulance I was looking pretty positively on the whole thing, I was already thinking about the end of the season and the opportunity to be even better for the World Time Trial Championship which has always been my goal this year, if slightly compromised by the Tour de France in that you finish a good Tour and then it's so difficult to get your head around the next 10 weeks staying fit, staying on form for the end of the season. The minute it happened, I saw it as a fantastic opportunity to be even better for the World Time Trial Championship and competing in the Vuelta which I've never been able to do before and something I've always wanted to do. I went home, I had four days off, I had the operation, and was literally back on the bike within four days, watching what I eat and starting to work on other areas that I thought we could make improvements on so it's been a really good six weeks and everything now, all my data, all the SRM data, my weight is slightly lower than it was, so everything is pointing at that I'm in slightly better shape now than I was going into the Tour de France. I'm certainly fresher mentally because it was quite a busy period looking back, winning theDauphine, winning the National Road Race and then the Tour de France so it was quite a hectic couple of weeks really. And I think from now I've just been sort of under the radar the last five weeks and training really good every day and I feel in a better place now than I was at the start of the Tour. I was very lucky - I came out of it only with a broken collarbone but a very simple broken collarbone that was healable."
Aims for Vuelta
"It would be all too easy to kind of just say: "OK, I'm just here to ride the race, try and win a stage somewhere." To go to the Worlds, have a fantastic World Championship but not really get any information from it as to what I'm capable of doing next year. I think I'm capable of something special here on GC so why miss that opportunity? I think there's 10 days between this and the World Championships. You look at the Tour de France, Cadel [Evans] did the time trial of his life after three weeks of bike racing, that is the best preparation for a time trial and if I'm ever going to do the Tour and Olympic double next year, that is the only way to find out how you're going to back up on it, and that's to do the actual thing. So to do three weeks 100 per cent for the GC here, then go home, stay focused, and then do the time trial of your life, that's the dress rehearsal really. So that's what we're going to do and that is with one eye on next year certainly ... I'd be crazy not to take this opportunity now with the form and the condition I have and carry on where we left off at the Tour de France really. The whole team are here, the whole team are expecting me to do something ... I don't think I'd be satisfied just sitting up every day and going in the gruppetto. Come what may, I may have a bad day but there are certainly going to be some great days for me. That time trial on day 10 is certainly going to be one of the great days for me. I'm just looking forward to the next five or six weeks really. It almost feels like the start of a new season because it seems like I've been away for such a long time. The whole process for next year's Tour de France starts now."
Cav
"At this stage that's all speculation really. I don't know. I see Cav coming here as a really positive thing for me because we really work well together, we're very respectful of each other and each other's goals and talents, and I think we can have both, I honestly do. The riders that Cav will have at his disposal in the Tour de France are not going to be the same riders he had at his disposal in HTC - the likes of Eisel if he comes with Cav - we've already got Edvald [Boasson-Hagen] here, Geraint, Swifty. We've got the type of riders that he had there, who are doing the Tour de France anyway, and as long as I've got three or four mountain climber blokes that's all I really need. I think we can do both, other teams have done both in the past, and actually looking at how this year's race was, and that is a sign that the next few years is going to be, then you know, who are the one team who are on the front in the first week out of trouble? You know, that's Cav's boys. And if I was sat one rider in front of Cav for the first week that's ... that'll do me sitting there while all the crashes are going on behind. So actually I see it as a really positive thing, I hope he does come, I think we'll have a formidable team next year, and as I say, we'll work fantastically together ... he personally asked me if I'd ride the World Championships with him this year, and I agreed to do that, it would be an absolute honour to do it for him. We're great friends, you know, I've said it before that he's like a little brother to me, and I see the whole thing as a very positive thing."
Friday, 5 August 2011
An English-speaking cycling team offered a potential Australian Olympic track medallist a wealthy contract, on condition that he did NOT compete at the 2012 Olympics.
Gossip, perhaps nothing more, that I heard from a rider, one of whose team-mates heard it from the party involved while training in Italy recently.
Things are said, distorted and embellished between friends – ‘Send three-and-four-pence, I’m going to a dance.’ I doubt direct questioning of the parties involved would shed much light on this. But it raises doubts.
Every commercially-sponsored road team with Olympic or World national team members, faces a potential conflict of interests. Stories abound about riders of one nationality – especially the smaller or poorer cycling nations - accepting money to ride the Olympics or the Worlds for a race favourite from another nation. On the other hand, remember Ullrich-Vino-Kloedi in the 2000 Olympic road race?
Set-ups that blur the distinction between national Olympic programmes and commercial road teams have been a feature of the cycling landscape since Cofidis sponsored the French national track team. So the issue has always been in the air. But these new rumours heighten the conflict of interest to new levels.
Sponsors like Katyusha, Green Edge and Team Sky, to name but three high profile structures, openly rejoice in the convergence of national and commercial sporting interests. But the gossip suggests that wealthy road teams, so closely bound to their national cycling programmes as to be, at times, indistinguishable from them, may already be trying to neutralise a potential Olympic rival by buying them out.
In those parts of the world where State or lottery funding of Olympic disciplines is intimately related to Olympic performance, it is not unthinkable that commercial sponsorship could be used to buy a foreign Olympic contender out of participating in the Games, thereby increasing national medal hopes, and making up the sum spent by the commercial sponsor through State or lottery funding.
Issues of business, institutional and sporting ethics are at stake here. Cycling’s ruling bodies should be looking into this, before the sport is hit by another scandal, this time at the interface between professional interests and the Olympic ideal.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Recent high points in road racing: brilliant, breakthrough rides by John Gadret and Kanstantin Siutsiu at the Giro. Yes, we knew they were good but their performances in Italy put them in a tiny elite group of stage racers. Worth remembering that, effective as JV has been in producing a surprise package in recent Tours de France (VDV, Wiggins, Hesjedal), so too has Bob Stapleton, with Peter Velits at the Vuelta last year, and now Siutsiu.
Also, after Robert Gesink and Bauke Mollema, Steven Kruijswijk is emerging as a force to be reckoned with. Add Michael Matthews, Theo Bos and Lars Boom, and Rabobank is looking like a powerful outfit again, after some lean years and, of course, the Rasmussen disgrace.
Now: Contador. William Gladstone, not otherwise known for his telling analyses of cycling matters, got it right when he said, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.’ To recap: on 28 September 2010, it leaked out, and was then confirmed, that Tour winner Alberto Contador was tested on 21 July and the analysis of his urine sample revealed traces of clenbuterol, a banned steroid. Alberto Contador announced that the contamination came from beef eaten prior to the test, and that the small amount of the substance detected explained why the process took two months in order to be announced.
On 27 January El Pais reported that the Spanish Cycling Federation (RFEC) had decided to impose a one-year ban on Alberto Contador. The following day Juan Carlos Castaño, the president of the Spanish Cycling Federation, confirmed that Contador had been informed of the expected decision. Contador had ten days to appeal before the judgment on 9 February.
He clearly did, and when the decision was published, late, on 15 February, Contador was officially cleared of wrongdoing and authorized to return immediately to competition. There was speculation that the volte-face had been influenced by a tweet posted on 10 February by the Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to the effect that “there are no legal grounds for sanctioning Contador”.
Days before the judgment was published, it emerged that Alberto Contador’s samples showed traces of Clenbuterol on four different occasions, spread over five days. There were no traces of substance in samples collected on 5, 12, 19 and 20 July, but on Wednesday 21 July, the second rest day, his samples showed the presence of Clenbuterol at 50 picograms per millilitre. This dropped to 16 picograms the following day, decreased further to 7 picograms/ml two days later and then increased again to 17 picograms/ml on July 24.
On 24 March, after studying documents received from the Spanish cycling federation, the UCI announced that it would appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) the Royal Spanish Cycling Federation's decision to acquit Contador. On 30 March, WADA announced that it too would appeal.
On the last day of March, the CAS Secretary General informed the parties that ‘the CAS would be ready to establish a procedural calendar allowing for the settlement of the dispute before the end of June 2011.’ On 27 April, the Court gave more details: ‘The written proceedings in this matter are likely to be concluded at the end of May and the CAS envisages to hold a hearing in June 2011, which would allow the settlement of the dispute before the end of June 2011. The hearing date will be published once it has been fixed.’ On 20 May the Court announced that the UCI v. Contador and WADA v. Contador hearings would take place on 6 to 8 June.
Six days later, it revised that schedule and made it public that a request from Contador's legal team had delayed the hearings until mid- July – during the Tour de France - and possibly as late as September.
Contador stands to lose his 2010 Tour win, and his 2011 Giro. Add to that this Spring’s results, and remember: he was fourth in the Volta ao Algarve from 16 to 20 February. He won the Vuelta a Murcia from 4 to 6 March and the Tour of Catalunya from 21 to 27 March, If, on the big mountain stage of the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon on 15 April, he had not had a mechanical problem on the final climb and lost contact with the leaders (a farcical payback for Andy Schleck’s problems on the Port de Balès on Stage 15 of last year’s Tour) , he would in all probability have won there too.
The point about all this was made during the Giro by Thomas Lovkvist, who told the Swedish news agency TT: ‘Who knows how Sunday’s stage would have turned out if Contador [had] not [been] there.’
I recall and treasure that stage up to Prato Nevoso, in the 2008 Tour de France, a day of compelling, open riding, when something like ten different riders in the yellow jersey group took it in turns to attack and put pressure on the race leader Cadel Evans. The presence of a super-dominant climber like Contador destroys that sort of racing. Racing is about winning, of course, but if Contador is eventually banned – especially if the decision comes after has won the Tour de France - the leaky, slow procedure will also have been guilty of destroying the past two seasons of cycling. Delayed justice for Contador denies justice to other riders, and to fans.
George Hincapie’s reported testimony before the Grand Jury in California has confirmed what has been quite obvious for some years now: that the results of the cycling seasons from 1999-2005 were unfaithful. How many more years can we afford to lose?
Finally, a prediction for the Tour: Rigoberto Urán to place highly on the Mont des Alouettes Les Herbiers at the end of stage one, and then to be the second Colombian in history to wear the yellow jersey after the stage 2 TTT.