The route from Limoux to Foix was highlighted by Tour 2012 magazine as one of the key stages that would have an impact on the race. ‘More unknowns, more compelling viewing. Something will happen on the Mur de Péguère, but nobody knows what,’ it trumpeted. ‘We’re in the Pyrenees, and the day’s star turn is a huge climb that is called “the Wall”. It’s never been in the Tour de France before. It’s really remote. The way up and the way down are both difficult, and it’s not far from the stage finish. It’s a day full of don’t-miss stuff.’
Never mind the race fans following on television, online or on handheld devices, for the riders the ‘don’t-miss stuff’ turned out to be impossible-to-avoid tacks on the road. Sabotage. Not entirely unheard of in Tour history – in 1950, the French government had to apologise when drunk spectators blocked the road in the Pyrenees and forced an Italian team to withdraw – but not at all acceptable for the yellow jersey group whose tyres were decimated at the top of the final climb. Jean-François Pescheux, competitions director of Tour organisers Amaury Sports Organisation, expressed his horror: ‘We don’t know who it was. No one saw anything. We’ve found some of the tacks. They’re the kind of tacks you use in mattresses or carpets. They were obviously thrown by a spectator. There were around 50 riders together in the front peloton at the top and about 30 of them ended up with punctures. Some of them had three or four nails in their tyres. We couldn’t neutralise it straightaway because we didn’t know what had happened. Fortunately Team Sky neutralised the race.’
The incident was unfortunate, but it didn’t faze Wiggins and co. This three-week race was all about protecting Wiggins on various levels – safeguarding him from rivals’ attacks in the heat of competitive action, guarding against injury or illness, helping him keep settled and focused. Two weeks had now been successfully ticked off, but day 15 proved the virtue of the Team Sky minute-by-minute mantra of wariness. ‘For the whole three weeks, we were in the driving seat, but we couldn’t make any mistakes,’ said Brailsford. ‘Any second, any minute, any hour, it could all go wrong – as it did last year when Bradley crashed and broke his collar bone. We never relaxed, we never got complacent. We never let ourselves think “It’s going to take something really extraordinary to go wrong now”, because extraordinary things do happen. We were vigilant to the end.’
On the day on which he became the first Briton to wear the yellow jersey for a seventh time, Wiggins asserted his authority as race leader and earned himself the reputation of ‘Le Gentleman’. Cadel Evans, the defending champion, was one of the worst affected by the sabotage – the Australian had to wait for two minutes for a spare rear wheel, then suffered two more punctures on the way down the final climb. Wiggins called for the peloton to slow their effort to allow Evans to bridge the gap. ‘No one wants to see something like that have an impact on the race,’ he said afterwards. ‘As a group the thing to do was to wait, the stage win was over. The climb was over. There was nothing left to contest. I wouldn’t want to benefit from something like that. I thought the best thing to do was to wait.’
Pinarello, who supply Team Sky’s bikes, had provided special-edition yellow frames as soon as Wiggins took the lead, but the yellow jersey man himself was cautious about turning comprehensively yellow, opting for touches on the frame and a yellow saddle. His team were pleased to no longer be wearing the yellow helmets (awarded to the outfit topping the team classification in a 2012 initiative from the organisers). As Servais Knaven said, ‘Other teams thought we were being arrogant when we wore them on the first stage. We hadn’t got the yellow jersey – why the helmet? They didn’t know the new custom. At the beginning I wasn’t happy either. You do everything to make the team livery perfect and coordinate clothing, bikes and helmets, and then we had to wear the yellow helmet!’ Boasson Hagen agreed: ‘They just didn’t look good. Yellow didn’t match with anything, except the yellow jersey, which we didn’t get until the beginning of the second week.’
For the mechanics who accompanied the sports directors in the race cars, it had been a frenetic afternoon of wheel changes and tyre assessments, but the introduction of yellow onto Wiggins’s bike gave extra meaning to their long night of washing, cleaning and preparing 27 machines. The team was edging towards its goal. They could see the reward of the painstaking, meticulous work in soaping frames, checking every bolt, tyre and wheel, changing gearings. ‘For us, the Tour means four weeks away from our wives and families, so the team becomes our family,’ said Rajen Murugayan. ‘The best part of the day is after the race, when you ask the riders how the race went, how the bike felt. We share all the emotions of their day.’
