while Froome was donning his first jersey
For Sir Bradley Wiggins, riding his bike in
2013 is not necessarily about winning the Tour de France again. It's about
staying in touch with the reasons he loved the sport in the first place and
keeping the pressure to reproduce his runaway success story of the 2012 season
at arm's length. As he says: "I don't want to do another year [in 2013] like
last year."
Wiggins explains all this on the second-to-last day of the
Tour of Oman, his first stage race of the year. In a few typically deft phrases
and with disarming honesty – "Here I've been pretty mediocre," he admits – the
Sky rider takes apart and analyses each segment of why he is focusing on the
second most important Grand Tour, the Giro d'Italia, rather than, for now, Le
Tour.
And surprisingly for a leader of a team famous for their
ultra-scientific, unsentimental approach, Wiggins reveals "emotion is the
baseline". Without it, he says he cannot function as an athlete, and tapping
back into his feelings was, post-London 2012, no easy task.
"It took a
lot of time for the motivation to come back, and after the Olympics there was a
long time where I was thinking what the hell am I going to do here next year,"
he says.
"In the previous 18 months I had put so much into that Tour
project, I knew I wanted to go out and compete at a high level again, [but] I
didn't want to retire or go through a 2010 season and fail, and have to deal
with that again.
"So I had to find something to inspire me. And the Giro
is something I would really love to try and win. It's as big a goal for me as
winning the Tour was in 2012."
The logic behind that desire is anything
but cold-blooded. Instead, he says the Italian race's appeal dates from when, as
a teenager, "the Giro was the only other race that sometimes got broadcast on
British TV apart from the Tour".
He recollects watching Andy Hampsten,
the American winner of the Giro in 1988, "racing in that [leader's] jersey
through the snow, it seemed quite inspirational... I've always had a love-hate
relationship with it. In 2010 I swore I'd never go back there it was so hard,
but I've always had a soft spot for it."
The second big ingredient
behind Wiggins's 2013 programme is based on another feeling: that after what was
effectively a four-year build-up to the 2012 Tour win, starting with his
breakthrough fourth place in the 2009 Tour, "there was no way I was going
through all that again".
He adds: "I didn't want to have that direct
comparison all the time with last year. Unless I won all those races again there
was only one alternative, and that is to fail, and I wanted to avoid that. I
didn't want to put that pressure on myself."
Such was his desire to
avoid having his 2013 season held up against 2012 that a ride in the Giro,
preceded by a programme of relatively unexplored terrain in other races like the
Tour of Catalonia and the Liege-Bastogne-Liège Classic, became almost
inevitable. "It was working back from May, establishing the goals and when we
hit them we hit them like we did last year," he says.
Yet another factor
in the mix is Chris Froome, Sky's designated leader at Oman and keen to chance
his arm in the Tour de France. Far from fanning the flames of any latent
conflict between himself and his equally ambitious team-mate in their first
joint race since the 2012 Tour, Wiggins was reported by other teams to have put
in colossal amounts of spadework in the first part of the stages for
Froome.Special designs make the paneraireplicas watch itself
shinning.
"I don't want to be too self-conscious and say, 'Well, I'm the
winner of the 2012 Tour and if I'm not up there [winning] I don't want to race'.
It's not just about me in the team," is how Wiggins sees it.
So at the
moment, while Froome was donning his first jersey as race leader of the Tour of
Oman on Thursday, Wiggins was munching on a plastic bowl of rice in an empty
parking lot 200 metres away, all but ignored by the press and joking with some
British expat fans how he would be back in the UK this weekend "in time for a
Sunday roast".
Looking at how Froome is being groomed for his attempt at
the 2013 Tour win – which Wiggins does not rule out for himself, let it be said
– the cycling knight says he recognises parallels with himself in 2012.
"For me it was important to lead the races, and I recognised from years
before that was something I needed to do in 2012, whereas I'm on a completely
different thing this year," he says.Find the largest selection of ceramic shoesforladies on sale. "For
Chris, again, it's about the rest of the team having confidence in him and he
took that leadership role on when we came here, put his hand up and said he
would do it,Parking Guidance for fashionsandals and Vehicle Control
Solutions, and that's half the battle – accepting that."
As for how this
winning races in February fits in with Froome and the Tour, Sky's general
manager,Welcome to hublotwatch jersey
online we supply most popular. Sir Dave Brailsford, who has been present in Oman
all week, told The Independent on Sunday that "the obvious thing is that if you
want to try and win the biggest race you try and make it business as usual by
the time you get there – you don't turn it into an epic. The best thing to
do,womens sandals and womens boots including shoesforkids and designer. and this
is something we've learned from the earliest days of building towards the
Olympics, is treat it as if it's just another bike race."
Wiggins,
meanwhile, is as focused on the Giro as Froome is on the Tour. "There's no
guarantee I'm going to win it or even be up there," Wiggins concludes. "But it's
got enough for me to put everything else aside in my life and go and do it."
Words that would strongly suggest Wiggins's emotion-fuelled engine is about to
start firing again.