Bradley Wiggins by John Deering Read Free Book Online

disappointment, and the eighteen-year-old was crushed by what he perceived
as his failure. The team management persuaded him to have a crack at the pursuit, which he saw as his weaker event. Amazingly relaxed and pressure-free after the expectation of the points race,
Bradley sailed through the rounds and ‘before I knew it I had won the bloody title’ as he later described in
In Pursuit of Glory.
    And before he knew it, the Junior World Champion was in Kuala Lumpur with the senior England squad for the Commonwealth Games and was winning a silver medal as part of a hastily rejigged team
pursuit squad. The five-man squad from which the quartet of riders were chosen was comprised of Bradley Wiggins, Matt Illingworth, Colin Sturgess, Jonny Clay and Rob Hayles. They represented the
best of Great Britain as well as England, and Bradley knew only too well what that meant: a place at the Olympics was in his grasp. With only two years until Sydney, he was part of the best team
pursuit squad this country had ever produced, running the all-conquering Australians close in Malaysia, with the best yet to come.
    That wasn’t even the sum of 1998’s good news. UK Cycling took their new Lottery money from UK Sport and gave £20,000 of it to Brad to allow him to train properly and prepare to
win medals for his country.
    There was a new star in the firmament.

STAGE 4:
Abbeville–Rouen, 214.5km
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
    The road to Rouen is paved with uncertainty. Crashes, crashes, crashes: the story of the first week in the Tour de France for many years. Is it getting worse? Or is it the fact
that we have a man in this race with the hopes and dreams of a nation riding on his shoulders? Is that why we watch with white knuckles gripping the armchair? We’re dreading ‘
Chute
dans le peloton!
’ to be swiftly followed by ‘101, Wiggins.’
    It doesn’t help that we’ve been here before. It is a fact of cycling that people who crash tend to crash again. They don’t necessarily cause crashes – though some do
– but they don’t have the supernatural awareness some have which helps them avoid the accidents when they happen. As somebody who has crashed out of this event once already, concerns
run high for Bradley Wiggins.
    Mark Cavendish is no stranger to ripped shorts either. He has been accused of being reckless by his sprinting opponents, and, when he was younger perhaps, they may have had a point. These days,
his problems in the sprint tend to stem from fearlessness rather than recklessness, as he continues to put his nose in where it hurts and take the risks needed to win races. Being the most marked
man in the sport brings its own dangers, too, as rivals fight to get on the wheel of the fastest finisher. In a sprint stage, if you finish in front of Cav, you probably win the race. More
insidiously, there are those who will actively try to baulk him, as the Italian sprinter Roberto Ferrari did in May’s Giro d’Italia. Ferrari callously flicked off his line when he
sensed Cavendish beginning to overtake him in the classic ‘switch’ – the most underhand and despised of all sprinting misdemeanours. At an estimated 75kph, with no protective
clothing other than a skid lid, the World Champion was lucky to get up from that crash and continue in the race.
    It wasn’t his only crash in the Giro, either. One problem riders don’t have to contend with on the Tour as much as its Italian counterpart is corners. The Giro organisers love a
90-degree bend 200m from the line. At least the Tour bosses realise that this is probably a bad idea if you want to keep your competitors alive, even if a smattering of road furniture and
roundabouts in the final run-in are often unavoidable. The beauty of road cycling as a sport is that it takes place on public roads that we can all use. The downfall of road cycling as a sport is
that it takes place on public roads that we all know have bends, potholes, bumps and narrow bits.
    You can