The Pain and the Glory: The Official Team Sky Diary of the Giro Campaign and Tour Victory. Chris Froome

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       STAGE 7

      There is no such sentiment as ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ in the professional cyclist’s week. Nothing about the profile (a continuously testing route, marked by four tricky categorised climbs and an irritating series of small, steep ramps) or the conditions (heavy downpours and greasy roads) suggested that Friday 10 May would include a happy hour. The forecast had always been ‘tough’; the reality for Team Sky was worse. Every day, Brailsford had gee’ed up Wiggins by exhorting him to count down the days until Saturday’s individual time trial. ‘Get through today with concentration,’ he’d say from the rear of the team bus during the directeurs sportifs’ presentation of the day’s stage profile. ‘It’s another day gone, another box ticked.’ On paper, this was the last of those days that had to be survived.

      The Giro seemed now to be travelling in its own microclimate of glowering skies and perpetual rain. However long the transfer between stages, whatever the bearing – eastwards, northwards, north-westwards – the team always stepped off the bus to find the weather had not brightened. ‘When it’s raining, I don’t love it,’ said Wiggins glumly. On that Friday ride into Pescara, the conditions were testing and the pace fast. The peloton went through its usual dynamic at accelerated speed – the riders settling into the stage, marshalling potential breakaways and eventually releasing a small group that wouldn’t threaten anyone’s specific ambitions – and then started to splinter dramatically under the lashing rain and the demands of the sharply undulating route.

      ‘It was a complicated day. The weather was very cold, the conditions were very difficult, we were going full-gas from the start,’ said Urán. ‘It was a fast day, uphill, very hard, attacking on climb after climb because of the pressure other teams were putting on Bradley. Both Sergio and I were working hard for Bradley to bring him back on to the lead group after each attack. We were leading him out. I was calm. I had no worries. And then Bradley fell.’

      Wiggins was one of many, including race leader Paolini, who slid and fell as they powered downhill at high speed. His tumble came as he attempted to round one of the mountain hairpins on the final descent. ‘Sergio and I were waiting around the next corner for him, but he didn’t come,’ Urán continues. ‘Usually he gets straight back up, but when he didn’t appear we started to wonder if he’d broken his collarbone. Eventually he came back, but his head was not fully there. It was pissing down. It was cold. He was knackered. We tried to guide him back to the front to make up the time, but he’d lost his concentration.’

      The Team Sky leader rode gingerly to the line – right elbow and knee bloodied, his ripped Lycra also revealing a grazed hip – to discover he had dropped from sixth place to 23rd, and had lost 1 minute and 24 seconds to all his major rivals.

      ‘It’s all about how much balls Brad has now,’ was how Brailsford put in to the media, as he consigned the day to the ticked-off list and pointed to the recovery potential offered by the next day’s individual time trial. Once earmarked as the stage on which Wiggins could unleash his natural prowess against the clock and launch himself into the high mountains with a comfortable lead over his rivals, the ‘Race of Truth’ was now another ultra-stressful day, a pivotal day of catch-up.

      How serious were his injuries? Would they affect him going forward? ‘Bradley’s crash was not anything spectacular and would have had negligible effect on performance,’ said team doc Richard Freeman, who was following in the team car. ‘A graze is painful and uncomfortable. He lost skin on his hip, elbow and knee, but it wouldn’t have stopped him performing. Grazes are a normal issue. There was no deep tissue damage. It would have been worse if there had been a bleed into the muscle or a bruised bone. But if you’re already miserable, those kind of injuries make you even more miserable . . .’

      Hmm. For the first time, observers started to wonder if there was something else gnawing at Wiggins beyond the first-week trials and tribulations. Vincenzo Nibali had also had a fall on the same descent, but had bounced back up and pressed on like a man possessed, to rejoin the group that vainly chased the day’s breakaway winner, Adam Hansen. Wiggins seemed a tiny percentage off his characteristic form. How much was he out of sorts?

      ‘Not much seemed out of the ordinary to us,’ said Danny Pate. ‘Those days are still kind of normal for the Giro. But Brad really compartmentalises his own emotions. He may have seen the storm coming. He was feeling bad in his own health and he was really not enjoying those bad-weather days. But he was getting through them. One thing a team leader doesn’t do is be super-negative and drag down the team. Brad’s best quality is that he doesn’t do that. We never knew until much later that he was starting to feel ill.’

      Urán and Henao also plummeted out of the top ten – Urán was down to 22nd, when he might have been in the maglia rosa had he not turned back for his leader. Typically, he was not bothered. ‘I do what the team asks me to do, whether I’m working for a team leader or I’m leading myself. It might have put me in a good position if I hadn’t had to stop, but my job is to wait for my team leader.’ But with that sense that the team leader was not descending well, the outside world questioned the team principal on the decision to send the Colombians back. ‘It’s the team’s call,’ said Brailsford. ‘Urán and Henao are here to ride for a leader. When you’re dedicated to a single leader, that’s the call that the team makes and that’s the right call as far as I’m concerned. You’ve got to take setbacks on the chin and you have to show character. That’s what it’s all about. You have to keep fighting right until the end and that’s what we’ll aim to do.

      ‘There’s СКАЧАТЬ