On paper, the tactics for the 2012 Tour campaign looked simple. Survive the first week, take time off our rivals in the second, then defend all the way to Paris. But first you have to roll down the start-house ramp. You have to commit yourself to the ticking of the clock. ‘I’m always nervous before a big race, so I wasn’t feeling great,’ said Edvald Boasson Hagen. ‘But I knew that I had trained well, I was well prepared. Everyone has a special feeling before the Tour starts. It’s the race you train all year for. There was a lot of expectation from ourselves and from outside the team. It was time to see what would happen.’
For all the talk of teamwork and working selflessly on behalf of the team leader, three of the 21 stages on this 2012 Tour are time trials – when each rider is on his own. As a group, they have absorbed a precise presentation of the 6.4km individual time-trial stage on the screen at the front of the bus. They have studied the detailed information in the race book. They know from personal recces that it’s quite ‘technical’, with changes in direction, in road width, type of surface, grates on the racing line, and so on – and they know it is up to themselves individually to get pumped up, in the zone, prepared to turn themselves inside out to ride to the absolute edge of their capability. As Dave Brailsford says, ‘A time trial is called the Race of Truth because you’re on your own. No one else is involved. It is a question of how much you can push and hurt yourself over a given time in a given event. These guys have their own way of preparing for the focus that requires. Bradley is remarkable; in the last hour and a half, he listens to music, he psyches himself up, he knows the process to go through until his heart is pounding, his nerves are going, his body releases adrenalin. These guys figure out that feeling bad is probably good.’
A time-trial day calls on several levels of mental toughness. With 198 riders going at two-minute intervals, there was a lot of hanging around before the day’s seven-odd minutes of all-out sprint effort. To reach the optimum level for physical performance, each rider has a pre-race massage to loosen the body before warming up on turbos to a rate set by Tim Kerrison, head of performance support, and measured by heart-rate monitors. The carers give out cotton wool daubed in a decongestant to clear the airways and ensure efficient breathing to feed oxygen to the muscles. (Chris Froome, in his excitement, left the cotton wool in his nostrils when he went down the ramp and still came 11th. ‘If he did that time just breathing through his mouth, how fast can he go breathing through his nose and his mouth?’ laughed Brailsford.)
Wiggins has made time trials his domain, but coming into the Tour he was facing unprecedented media attention. How did he feel to be favourite? Had he peaked too soon? Behind his mirrored, specialist time-trial glasses, Wiggins was perfectly composed. ‘In the past we had gone to races early in the season and used them for training, but this year we had gone to races to try and win, to learn how to start leading races and defending a lead, and to familiarise ourselves with all the hassle, the press, the extra stuff that goes with being dominant,’ says Brailsford. ‘We’d thought, “let’s get used to that until it feels normal.”’
When Wiggins burst down the ramp in Liège, his aim was to come out on top of the timings – though he had conceded in a team meeting the previous evening that the only man who might edge him out was Fabian Cancellara, the Swiss time-trial specialist known as ‘a motorbike in prologues’. Wiggins rolled down in classic form: not pushing too hard at the start, maintaining a consistent pace throughout, ending the day a mere seven seconds off Cancellara with his rival for General Classification honours safely behind him.
‘It’s a good start,’ Wiggins said. ‘The main thing was to stay upright, safe and trouble-free. Physically I felt fantastic out there. It’s everything we’ve been training for.’
Bradley Wiggins. Team leader. Age: 32. Nationality: British. Career highlights (as of eve of 2012 Tour de France): Six Olympic medals and 10 world championship medals in track cycling. Road race honours include Critérium du Dauphiné (2011, 2012), Paris-Nice and Tour de Romandie (both 2012).