Bradley Wiggins Read Free Page A

stage in the overall competition.
    Cav’s requirements become more accentuated the nearer we get to the finish. If he’s in there, he’s trusted to win. He’s the fastest man here out of the 200-odd riders
competing. If the team can bring him through, they will.
    Edvald Boasson Hagen, champion of Norway, is a popular man at Team Sky. Blessed with immense strength, he has the ability to blast his way to victory on hard days. His overall hopes are hampered
by his difficulties in the high mountains, but he is a wild card, a quality accessory that any team would be glad to have. Let him go his own way.
    The crashes have begun. First to hit the deck is Tony Martin, his run of bad luck continuing after a puncture robbed him of a big shout in yesterday’s prologue. He carries on with a
battered wrist, lacerated elbow and sour demeanour.
    Team Sky regroup around their leader and settle in for the long haul, taking it in turns to make sorties back to Yates’s car and return with bottles. It’s a showery day, and as the
pace picks up towards the day’s
dénouement
, things become increasingly fraught. The six escapees show no desire to be caught, and though the RadioShack-Nissan-powered peloton
closes the gap to a minute with 30km left to ride, they grit their teeth and press on gamely.
    The dreaded shout of ‘
Chute dans le peloton!
’ crackles Yates’s radio, and he cranes his neck round the cars and riders in front to see who has gone down. Luis Leon
Sanchez from Rabobank is hurt . . . a couple of Spanish guys . . . oh shit, a Team Sky jersey. It’s his trusted road captain, Australia’s Mick Rogers. Vastly experienced and a former
contender himself, Rogers is Yates’s eyes and ears in the bunch. He is bumped and bruised but uninjured. Yates lets out a breath he has been holding for some time and chases after the race,
now closing inexorably on the six men in front and the finish in Seraing.
    Cavendish moves up under the patronage of his minder Bernie Eisel. Eisel arrived at Team Sky from HTC with Cavendish and has been at his side unstintingly for the last couple of years.
    The big danger to the pure sprinters – Cavendish, Greipel, Farrar, Petacchi – is the siting of a nasty little hill within the finishing town of Seraing. It’s clear that several
riders have this in mind, and the pace reaches crazy levels as the escapees are finally gobbled up and those with aspirations push on. There is a huge roar from the crowds beneath the finish
line’s big screens as the yellow jersey himself, Spartacus, Fabian Cancellara launches a searing move with just 1,500m to go. He tears the field apart with the burst, but two men just manage
to hang on to him: powerful Slovak Peter Sagan and our own Edvald Boasson Hagen. Unable to rest lest they be reeled in by the desperate bunch, Cancellara opens the sprint, but he’s easily
overhauled by a blistering burst from Sagan who has time to pull off a dancing victory salute as he crosses the line. Edvald is third. A powerful performance but not at the level of Sagan.
Cancellara has lost the stage but retained the jersey and his famous grin.
    What of Cavendish? Like the other pure sprinters, the speed and the severity of the final short climb was too much for him to be in a position to compete and he saved his finish for the
following day, rolling in among the main field in 128th place.
    Wiggins, however, has had a first stage to remember. Having avoided the mishaps that have split the bunch at times, including the spill that put his captain Mick Rogers on the deck alongside
him, Bradley has stayed calm, maintained his position in the bunch and, despite not having designs on stage victory, positively flew up the last climb to take an excellent sixteenth spot on the
stage alongside his main rivals Evans and Nibali. He will look them in the eye tonight and say, ‘I’m coming for you.’

    PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT TO talk about Bradley’s dad, but it’s his mum they should