The Pain and the Glory: The Official Team Sky Diary of the Giro Campaign and Tour Victory. Chris Froome
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individual time trial. ‘Get through today with concentration,’ he’d say from the rear of the team bus during the directeurs sportifs’ presentation of the day’s stage profile. ‘It’s another day gone, another box ticked.’ On paper, this was the last of those days that had to be survived.
The Giro seemed now to be travelling in its own microclimate of glowering skies and perpetual rain. However long the transfer between stages, whatever the bearing – eastwards, northwards, north-westwards – the team always stepped off the bus to find the weather had not brightened. ‘When it’s raining, I don’t love it,’ said Wiggins glumly. On that Friday ride into Pescara, the conditions were testing and the pace fast. The peloton went through its usual dynamic at accelerated speed – the riders settling into the stage, marshalling potential breakaways and eventually releasing a small group that wouldn’t threaten anyone’s specific ambitions – and then started to splinter dramatically under the lashing rain and the demands of the sharply undulating route.
‘It was a complicated day. The weather was very cold, the conditions were very difficult, we were going full-gas from the start,’ said Urán. ‘It was a fast day, uphill, very hard, attacking on climb after climb because of the pressure other teams were putting on Bradley. Both Sergio and I were working hard for Bradley to bring him back on to the lead group after each attack. We were leading him out. I was calm. I had no worries. And then Bradley fell.’
Wiggins was one of many, including race leader Paolini, who slid and fell as they powered downhill at high speed. His tumble came as he attempted to round one of the mountain hairpins on the final descent. ‘Sergio and I were waiting around the next corner for him, but he didn’t come,’ Urán continues. ‘Usually he gets straight back up, but when he didn’t appear we started to wonder if he’d broken his collarbone. Eventually he came back, but his head was not fully there. It was pissing down. It was cold. He was knackered. We tried to guide him back to the front to make up the time, but he’d lost his concentration.’
The Team Sky leader rode gingerly to the line – right elbow and knee bloodied, his ripped Lycra also revealing a grazed hip – to discover he had dropped from sixth place to 23rd, and had lost 1 minute and 24 seconds to all his major rivals.
‘It’s all about how much balls Brad has now,’ was how Brailsford put in to the media, as he consigned the day to the ticked-off list and pointed to the recovery potential offered by the next day’s individual time trial. Once earmarked as the stage on which Wiggins could unleash his natural prowess against the clock and launch himself into the high mountains with a comfortable lead over his rivals, the ‘Race of Truth’ was now another ultra-stressful day, a pivotal day of catch-up.
How serious were his injuries? Would they affect him going forward? ‘Bradley’s crash was not anything spectacular and would have had negligible effect on performance,’ said team doc Richard Freeman, who was following in the team car. ‘A graze is painful and uncomfortable. He lost skin on his hip, elbow and knee, but it wouldn’t have stopped him performing. Grazes are a normal issue. There was no deep tissue damage. It would have been worse if there had been a bleed into the muscle or a bruised bone. But if you’re already miserable, those kind of injuries make you even more miserable . . .’
Hmm. For the first time, observers started to wonder if there was something else gnawing at Wiggins beyond the first-week trials and tribulations. Vincenzo Nibali had also had a fall on the same descent, but had bounced back up and pressed on like a man possessed, to rejoin the group that vainly chased the day’s breakaway winner, Adam Hansen. Wiggins seemed a tiny percentage off his characteristic form. How much was he out of sorts?
‘Not much seemed out of the ordinary to us,’ said Danny Pate. ‘Those days are still kind of normal for the Giro. But Brad really compartmentalises his own emotions. He may have seen the storm coming. He was feeling bad in his own health and he was really not enjoying those bad-weather days. But he was getting through them. One thing a team leader doesn’t do is be super-negative and drag down the team. Brad’s best quality is that he doesn’t do that. We never knew until much later that he was starting to feel ill.’
Urán and Henao also plummeted out of the top ten – Urán was down to 22nd, when he might have been in the maglia rosa had he not turned back for his leader. Typically, he was not bothered. ‘I do what the team asks me to do, whether I’m working for a team leader or I’m leading myself. It might have put me in a good position if I hadn’t had to stop, but my job is to wait for my team leader.’ But with that sense that the team leader was not descending well, the outside world questioned the team principal on the decision to send the Colombians back. ‘It’s the team’s call,’ said Brailsford. ‘Urán and Henao are here to ride for a leader. When you’re dedicated to a single leader, that’s the call that the team makes and that’s the right call as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to take setbacks on the chin and you have to show character. That’s what it’s all about. You have to keep fighting right until the end and that’s what we’ll aim to do.
‘There’s a long way to go. Bradley’s fine. There’s no physical injury. Ultimately, when you have difficult conditions like these and hard racing, this type of thing can happen. It’s the Giro. You can have good days and bad days, and you have to wait until the end to tot them all up and see where you are. It’s a setback, but Brad’s still very much in the hunt. We’ve now got to take each day as it comes, focus on fully recovering tonight and hitting the time trial hard tomorrow. We’ll see where we are tomorrow night, and take stock of the situation then.’
The pivotal day dawned. Could Wiggins do his stuff and claim the maglia rosa? Waiting for each rider, rolling down the start ramp at two-minute intervals, was a 54.8km course that challenged technical skill as much as stamina and judgement of pace. The fan-lined ramp up to the finish at Saltara was a sting in the tail, giving spectators a close-up view of the agony etched on each rider’s face as they eked out their last watt of power towards the line. As Wiggins noted, ‘It’s one of those tests where you have to be good from start to finish. If you die off at the end, you’re going to lose three minutes on the final climb.’
Team Sky approached the potential Sir Bradley Wiggins masterclass with customary forensic scrutiny. Wiggins had ridden the route, studied videos and absorbed the opinions of his support team. The plan was to get up early, ride the first 30km again, drive the final 25km, then get on the turbo bike, plug in the pump-up music and let the adrenalin take over.
Under cloudy skies and sporadic sunshine, Alex Dowsett – a former Team Sky rider and Giro débutant – set a time early on that was proving unmatchable for rider after ever more highly placed rider. As Wiggins sped off the starting gantry, alone in a private world of pain and focus, his junior compatriot’s time of 1 hour, 16 minutes and 27 seconds was still the time to beat. Wiggins was the Olympic road time trial champion, an undisputed expert at getting from A to B with superb aerodynamic efficiency, but it was nerve-wracking watching his progress over the tight, technical course. The winding narrow country lanes made it difficult to get into a rhythm. The previous day had not been an ideal lead-in, but surely here he could reverse the momentum of the last week for himself?
Eighteen minutes in – yet more wretched luck. Wiggins was indicating ‘puncture’ with a frantic gesture to the team car shadowing him. He was off his new Pinarello Bolide time trial bike, chucking it into the hedge, and back on his old Graal model, trying to stay in the zone, striving to re-establish