I've always thought of Bradley Wiggins as a pasty faced Brit also ran,but having seen a long interview with him he comes across as a very pleasant intelligent bloke.Being touted as favourite for the tour is almost certainly the kiss of death for him but I hope he does well.
Looking forward to the tour, off to look at the stage list to make sure I don't miss the mountain stages
No wonder smoking was such a difficult nut to crack in France. A shame they don't still have to fix their own punctures ...
I thought Cancellara would probably win on that short, quite technical course, but fuck me, not by a whole 7 seconds.
Because he is the very epitome of the boring time trial focused type of GC rider? I quite genuinely can't recall him making a single attack in his whole career. It's rational for him to ride that way, given his strengths and his weaknesses, but it makes him very difficult to like as a rider. He has a legitimate chance of winning, but him succeeding would almost certainly mean that it was an incredibly dull Tour. Also, he's a mod revivalist.
Perhaps we should refresh your memory then and talk about stage 6 of the 2007 tour when Wiggins attacked and rode for over 200km on his own before being caught by the peloton just 6km from the line. Heres a link so you can watch him:- . Criticising him for being a 'boring time trial focused type of GC rider' is a bit like criticising a concert pianist for having only ten fingers. Evans and Wiggins are what you get sans dopage. I'm sure we'd see more explosive, incredible, impossible GC riding a la Contador, Schleck, Armstrong and your fave posterboy Menchov but we all know what we're seeing isn't credible. Perhaps you prepare twelve fingers...
200km on his own? On a pan flat stage? That's a breakaway, not an attack. And if that's all you can find from the passed 5 years then I think Nige can rest his case.
Oh a breakaway is not an attack then? I suppose he just ended up miles off the front of the peloton after a freak tailwind. It was enough to win him the combativity award that day so its ASO and me that disagree with you. Pedantry aside these days 're sometimes looking at maybe a handfull of attacks in the GC mix in 3 weeks of racing. The swashbuckling days are over. Moaning about Wiggins not being an exciting racer is facile. Do people want clean TdF winners or bent ones?
No it isn't. It's a breakaway. Was Wiggins a danger in the GC when he 'attacked'? Did anyone in the peloton have a problem with him being up the road? Did anyone try and stop him? The combativity award is just ASO's was of making it worthwhile for riders being out all day in a futile break. That and the hope that something might happen behind them or that the peloton miscalculate. Although in these days of GPS and race radios, the only people likely to miscaculate are Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett. And I don't see that the choice is between exciting racing and clean racing. Apart from anything else, this about the fourth time since Festina that 'they' have declared the peloton to be clean. I'm not any more inclined to believe them just because an Anglo is the outright favourite.
So an attack is only an attack when battling for GC in your world...a KOM or green jersey contender 'leaving the front of the race' can't be said to be attcking...that means perhaps 15 attacks in total in all three GCs in the last five years then. Good luck with that. I wonder if you and Nigel are the same person as you both have a predilection for stating the bleeding obvious a lot. I am more inclined to believe the TdF is clean now for the first time since the late 80s - the performances back this up, the climbing speeds were back to the mid 80s in the last few years, average speeds first stopped increasing and are now static. Nothing to do with who's are the sharp end, I couldn't care less as long as the racing is clean. The superhuman performances of Armstrong and Contador (to name only two) cannot be explained by equipment differences, diet, training, determination, cancer, whatever. The differences between Evans, Wiggins etc can. Believe what you want, why the fuck do you watch it if you don't think its a fair contest?
What a load of bollocks. I should have known though that saying something less than fawning about Saint Bradley would bring out the nationalist knee jerk drivel from the likes of you. Yes, Wiggins went in a few breaks of the day back before his miraculous reinvention as a GC rider, back when he used to come in with the autobus on every mountain stage and when he used to finish outside the top 100 in Grand Tours. That was rational as he was a non-sprinting, non-climber with no other way to get a win on a non-time trial stage than getting into an occasional long break and relying on his total irrelevance to avoid being chased down. Since his miraculous reinvention he doesn't even do that any more. He grinds his way along, day after day, following wheels. It's perfectly rational for him to do this, but it's incredibly fucking boring and there's no way in fucking hell you would be cheering for him if he wasn't British. As for Menchov, who I have no fucking time for at all for the same reasons I have no time for Wiggins plus a few more, he's exactly the same kind of rider. Menchov has never been an "explosive, incredible, impossible" "swashbuckler". He's precisely another deeply dull GC man of the hold on for grim death in the mountains and make time in the TT type. I can excuse your ignorance on that score because Menchov is practically invisible most of the time, even when he's winning and because he's not British you don't get English language commentators prattling on about him the whole time. Evans has pretty much the same sort of spread of abilities as Wiggins and Menchov. Evans used to be boring. Nowadays he is not, because he does actually attack. He does actually ride to win stages. He does actually take risks. Your doping comments are garbled beyond belief. Indurain was another rider of the same basic sort, not a swashbuckling attacker at all. Are you going to tell us that he was clean? How about Menchov? Is he dull enough for you to believe in? I presume that we can at least assume you believe in Leipheimer, given that he rides like Wiggins but not as well? Plodders dope and exciting riders dope. Plodders don't dope and exciting riders don't dope. The pre-EPO era was much more "swashbuckling" than the EPO era. The fact that today's racing is duller isn't down to the absence of dope - although I do think that the peloton is somewhat cleaner than say a decade ago - it's down to greater professionalism and organisation and also down to things like power meters. And riders like Wiggins are at the forefront of that trend - maintaining the same unchanging pace up every mountain, never accelerating, never attacking, just one robot and his numbers. Even within that trend though, a less attacking peloton doesn't mean that everyone rides like Wiggins. Wiggins is at the most extreme end of the boredom scale in today's peloton. What's more, Wiggins has a whole team built around him with the express intention of neutralising all attacks in the mountains by keeping up a super-fast, steady pace on every climb. That's true service to the cause of boredom. I see no particular reason to assume that Wiggins is cleaner than a Rodriquez, or a Nibali, or an Evans, all of whom have better Grand Tour records than him and all of whom attack more than him. Having a British passport does not entitle you to any more (or any less) of a free pass. Particularly not when you've shown a mid career improvement in the mountains as marked as anyone since Armstrong. I don't assume that any of these riders are hopped up, but I'm not going to take any cyclist's word on their own cleanliness to the extent that I'll use them as a metric for what's possible for clean cycling in the absence of other evidence.
Are you suggesting that British posters tend to believe in and cheer for Wiggins because of his loveably ugly Paul Weller haircut?
I'm suggesting that you're introducing a very weak and insulting support for your argument and not one that's backed up by any posts from sigmund on this thread or on cycling in general. You cheapen a decent exchange by doing so.
Pardon me for assuming that you had an understandable reason for your credulity, rather than just gullibility, or perhaps a strange love of boredom.
Can I also add that the 80s were far from clean. There is no doubt that the peloton cannot dope with impunity as they did throughout the 90s and, to an extent, post 2000. But when you have Pozzato openly admitting to working with Ferrari, and others alledged to have been. When you have riders testing positive, and soigneurs being caught smuggling PEDs. The best you can say is that the peloton is cleaner than it used to be. Oh, and ban power meters and race radios. Then we might see some *actual* racing breaking out. Edit: actually, power meters should be compulsory. But they shouldn't have knowledge of their 'numbers' during the stage.
