Blog Archives
Wigan’s Wiggo Wins Worlds’ With Wonderful, erm, Performance…?
Ahem. This is a little, well, embarrassing really. I mean, I don’t really have anywhere to go on this one…
And it’s not even like it was tweeted off the record. That was placed firmly on the record, and thus will remain there for the rest of time – any journalist will tell you that.
Oh well, I saved it
My gaffe notwithstanding, today shocked me. And not just in the, “Anything can happen on the road” cliched way. This was a proper, “Are you kidding?” sort of thing. Now, sure, it’s not like nobody knew who Bradley Wiggins was before today and, like the classic sporting underdog, he rose from nowhere to grab the title before returning to the relative obscurity of the Continental Tour within a year. He was always going to finish on the podium, but such are a) Martin’s dominating performances this year, and b) Wiggins’ less than dominating performances this year, I thought the German was the safe bet. In the end, 26 seconds is quite comfortable, and Brad even said he had some gas left in the tank. What a champion. Didn’t look like that when he basically collapsed over the finish line, but that’s the beauty of now having won virtually everything there is to win – nobody cares because you’ve won virtually everything there is to win.
Coming in second means very little in a tete a tete like this one, but just a quick word for Tony, who’s had a pretty phenomenal year on the TT circuit, taking victories in TdF and La Vuelta stages, as well as the German Champs, the GC of the Tour of Belgium, and a plethora of other individual stages. I still maintain that he is the greatest ITT-er in the world at the moment (despite today’s race!), and I have no doubt he will rebound strongly next year to once again be on top of the world. Unfortunately the course was a little too hilly for him today, when in the context of his personal race with Bradley, but I still remain a big fan of his continue-at-all-costs attitude and a big admirer of his raw talent.
Today also marked the last time that the World ITT Champs will see Bradley Wiggins, and he will be a big loss. He’s moving on to try and beat Jens Voigt’s new one hour record, and I only hope that we aren’t sitting here in 12 months bemoaning how predictable the TTs have become. On a side note, you do feel for Mr Voigt, who has dedicated his whole life pretty much to cycling, and for his last hurrah on the bike, decides to break the one hour record, which you assume Bradley Wiggins will break only a few months later. He deserves to go down in history in some form at least, but I can’t see Wiggo not going even better when he sets the hour record firmly in his sights. But that is a post for another day.
Just a short addendum to BMC, who also did remarkably well to win the TTT a few days ago. Unlike Tony Martin, they did “annihilate the field”, winning by 30 seconds. Considering that the next 30 seconds covered places 2-7, it was quite a performance. Kudos.
The not insignificant attention now switches to Sunday where the road racers take to the stage. It looks like the enigmatic “puncheurs” will be favourites – that means you, Sagan – but as we repeatedly see in these big races, quite literally anything can happen. If it comes to a group sprint, Bouhanni would be my choice, but all it takes is a well placed attack at the right time and anybody could be pulling on the rainbow jersey for the 2015 season.
If this were a TV show, I would now finish with a short montage of Bradley Wiggins receiving all his medals and trophies over the years with probably a Green Day song playing in the background. Unfortunately it’s not, so in its stead, I will finish with a quote from our champion who summed up his career pretty immaculately.
“Job Done”
Terrific Tony takes Time Trial triumph.
Alliteration. That is all.
Here’s an interesting fact for you: if Tony Martin had competed on his own in the World Team Time Trial Championships, he would have finished sixth. Sixth! One man on his own would have been faster than most of the six man teams competing in the competition. Just to outline how incredible this guy is if you can’t already see it, he would have finished 10 minutes ahead of the last placed team Velo Club Sovac. 10 minutes. 600 seconds. So here’s a list of things you could do in the time after Tony Martin has finished, and whilst waiting for Velo Club Sovac: Do a Sudoku; listen to just under half of ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd; clean your teeth 5 times; run about 2 miles; or just sit, watch, and laugh as one lone German manages to absolutely destroy some of the best teams in cycling. Wow.
As you can probably tell, the winner of this year’s individual time trial was Bradely Wigg- what? You mean all the hype and expectation placed on a British athlete by the British media for once didn’t result in British success? That almost never happens, particularly when it comes to football, I don’t know what to say really…
So the winner was of course Mr Tony Martin who, just for a change, pulls on the rainbow Time Trial jersey for the third year in succession. Now, normally I would insist that this is becoming boring and predictable, and petition for him to be taken out of the sport for being too dominant or something stupid like that, but I like Tony. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, it’s hard not to be amazed by the utter stupidity of what this guy can do. Bradley Wiggins is a world class time-trialist, winning gold in London and standing head and shoulders above most of the rest of the field (perhaps exclude Fabian Cancellara), but Herr Martin beat him by 46 seconds. Here’s a list of wh- no, that wasn’t clever in the first place. But you get my point, he’s an absolute machine.
The second reason I find myself not despising him for being too good is that most of the time he’s riding with an injury or some flesh wound that would stop us mere mortals from competing. For example, he crashed quite badly early on in this year’s TdF, but still managed to finish, with the added of bonus of, erm, winning the first individual time trial. He also seems to be very unlucky in the grand tours (if you exclude the stage wins), getting mechanical faults at horrendously bad times, and crashing more often than Pastor Maldonado… It’s difficult not to be happy at this guy’s success, but we don’t want you winning four years in a row now do we? Take one for the team and fall off next year please.
Unfortunately it wasn’t to be for Brad, who, to be fair to him, recognised that he was just beaten by the better man. Nobody in the world could have come close to that time, and you just have to take your hat off to the German in this instance. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.
So attention now switches to Sunday’s road race, where the Kenyan-born Brit carries the weight of expectation on those ever so skinny shoulders. Spoiler alert: he won’t win. There isn’t enough up and down stuff, and the British team will be competing against pretty much the rest of the peloton, who all seem to want to deny a British victory. That said, I look forward to be proven wrong.
Just a quick note: I managed to get to the end of that without using the words doping or erythropoietin. It’s not difficult. Just trust that some people are better than others, and that they don’t rely on drugs to ensure success. That’s so 1990s…
Geared up 