Read Online Bradley Wiggins: My Time by Bradley Wiggins - Free Book Online
Authors: Bradley Wiggins
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thing; the riders don’t want to look foolish. There was no scientific reason for not having a warm-down, it was just that no one did it. Another thought Tim had was that he felt that a team should not just be about the leader. In his view, it should be about getting all the guys to the same level as the leader they are supporting. He asked more basic questions: why is it only the team leader who gets to go on the training camps where we reconnoitre the mountain stages? Why does only the leader get set blocks of time for training while the rest of the team race themselves to death? Why don’t we get the eight other guys who will race in the Tour – or as many of them as we can – to ride together all year and race in the same races, go to the training camps, go and recon the mountains together and get to know each other as a football team would? That single point made me realise that during that first year at Sky we had all raced all over the place. The first time I raced with Geraint Thomas and Edvald Boasson Hagen and all those guys was when we got to the Tour. I’d hardly seen them all year.
Tim was looking at a host of little things that traditionally no one had ever questioned. He was responsible for us beginning to use altitude training camps, with one in Tenerife in May 2011, and another at Sestriere, in the Italian Alps, that June. And he would ask: why don’t teams have training camps in December? Well, we said, they normally have training camps but they’re more sort of drinking camps where everyone gets to know each other and you collect your bikes, that sort of thing. January’s the serious training camp. Why? Tim would ask. Why don’t we do that one in November, and have a serious one in December, because that’s quite an important month. Traditionally in professional cycling teams, everyone gets their training bike in January; Tim wanted to know why they couldn’t get it in October and then have a training bike that they use at home? And what about specific time-trial bikes, not just for the leader but for the whole team?
Tim went away, looked at the data he had gathered from me and the other riders in the 2010 Tour and began examining the numbers. He worked out what rate you need to be climbing at in the Tour de France. That calculation was done in terms of VAM –
velocità ascensionale media
– which translates into English as ‘average climbing speed’, or how quickly you gain height in a climb. It’s basically a measure of how fast you are going upwards as if you were in a lift, measured in metres per hour. He figured out what power output you needed to be averaging for a certain body weight if you were going to win the Tour. He wrote down all the demands of the event and we went from there. We’d not done any testing with reference to the Tour, so the first thing he did was get me in the lab. We started testing and slowly started to build a picture of what I was capable of doing and what I couldn’t do.
It took a while to build a trust between the three of us. As the season went on, as the training and racing and going to altitude took effect, we started to come away with better and better results. The progression was clear: 3rd place at Paris–Nice, a time-trial stage win at Bayern Rundfahrt, the overall title at the Dauphiné. We had set off into 2011 with the idea of aiming for a top-ten place in the Tour, but eventually we realised that I could be up there with the likes of Cadel Evans and Alexander Vinokourov who were going for the podium.
There was another aspect that made us more optimistic as the Tour drew closer in 2011. Various things were coming out on the anti-doping front. It emerged that the UCI had established an ‘index of suspicion’ – I rated five out of ten – which at least meant they were on the case. Most importantly, they had brought in a needle ban, forbidding the use of injections across the board, even for substances used for recovery such as sugars and
Tim was looking at a host of little things that traditionally no one had ever questioned. He was responsible for us beginning to use altitude training camps, with one in Tenerife in May 2011, and another at Sestriere, in the Italian Alps, that June. And he would ask: why don’t teams have training camps in December? Well, we said, they normally have training camps but they’re more sort of drinking camps where everyone gets to know each other and you collect your bikes, that sort of thing. January’s the serious training camp. Why? Tim would ask. Why don’t we do that one in November, and have a serious one in December, because that’s quite an important month. Traditionally in professional cycling teams, everyone gets their training bike in January; Tim wanted to know why they couldn’t get it in October and then have a training bike that they use at home? And what about specific time-trial bikes, not just for the leader but for the whole team?
Tim went away, looked at the data he had gathered from me and the other riders in the 2010 Tour and began examining the numbers. He worked out what rate you need to be climbing at in the Tour de France. That calculation was done in terms of VAM –
velocità ascensionale media
– which translates into English as ‘average climbing speed’, or how quickly you gain height in a climb. It’s basically a measure of how fast you are going upwards as if you were in a lift, measured in metres per hour. He figured out what power output you needed to be averaging for a certain body weight if you were going to win the Tour. He wrote down all the demands of the event and we went from there. We’d not done any testing with reference to the Tour, so the first thing he did was get me in the lab. We started testing and slowly started to build a picture of what I was capable of doing and what I couldn’t do.
It took a while to build a trust between the three of us. As the season went on, as the training and racing and going to altitude took effect, we started to come away with better and better results. The progression was clear: 3rd place at Paris–Nice, a time-trial stage win at Bayern Rundfahrt, the overall title at the Dauphiné. We had set off into 2011 with the idea of aiming for a top-ten place in the Tour, but eventually we realised that I could be up there with the likes of Cadel Evans and Alexander Vinokourov who were going for the podium.
There was another aspect that made us more optimistic as the Tour drew closer in 2011. Various things were coming out on the anti-doping front. It emerged that the UCI had established an ‘index of suspicion’ – I rated five out of ten – which at least meant they were on the case. Most importantly, they had brought in a needle ban, forbidding the use of injections across the board, even for substances used for recovery such as sugars and
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