21 Days to Glory: The Official Team Sky Book of the 2012 Tour de France
By Team Sky and Brailsford
3.5/5
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About this ebook
The official, illustrated, insider story of the 2012 Tour de France was won, from Team Sky. With stunning photos from Scott Mitchell and exclusive interviews with the main players this is a must-have for all cycling fans.
‘21 Days to Glory’ tells the story of the victorious 2012 Tour de France campaign from behind-the-scenes at Team Sky.
With stunning illustrations from acclaimed official Tour photographer, Scott Mitchell, as well as exclusive contributions from all the major players in the team, this is a unique insight into one of the great British sporting successes as told by one of the most successful teams of recent years.
It is a stunning and fascinating must-have book for all fans of the Tour de France and anyone who has been captivated by the heroics of Team Sky
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21 Days to Glory - Team Sky
PROLOGUE
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.’
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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).
STAGE 1
Energy, nerves, excitement, aggression, danger: the first road stage is always highly charged. The race to Seraing was one of six days – a mad, mad week – to count down before the relative safety of the mountains. To win the Tour de France you need to be a strong time trialler, a robust climber, and you need to perform without errors or suffer bad luck at inopportune moments. On the eve of the 2012 Tour, Team Sky and Bradley Wiggins had ticked those boxes repeatedly, with victories at Paris-Nice, the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné. They were the dominating force, the favourites.
‘Nothing had gone wrong, so it would soon, right?’ That was the private fear of Sean Yates, Sky’s senior sports director, who prides himself on his intuition. ‘That’s my forté, judging feelings,’ he says. ‘In Liège I had a dream that Bradley had a crash. I kept quiet about it, then I told one of the coaches and he said, Keep that to yourself!
But I had it at the back of my head all the way, the worst nightmare, because it had been building all year. Nothing had gone wrong whatsoever. I had a feeling there was a situation waiting for us somewhere down the road, but I didn’t want to spook anyone …’
On that first morning after the prologue time-trial efforts, Team Sky readied themselves for the 20-day bubble of singular focus and team unity that could end on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées in Paris with the crowning of the first British winner of the most illustrious of cycling’s Grand Tours. Compared to the other competing teams, the line-up had an interesting dynamic. ‘From the start of the year we had a core group – nine riders, all super duper. Not many teams have that luxury,’ Yates said. ‘We kept them together, training and racing, so they’d get a good understanding. Our goal was to top the GC, to win the yellow jersey, and everyone had their role.’
Wiggins, a superb athlete who had worked harder than ever before, was team leader. World champion Mark Cavendish, a big character, was the sprinter. With Cav came Bernie Eisel, his experienced helper. Michael Rogers, hugely respected and calm, would be road captain in the mountains, aided by his Australian compatriot Richie Porte and Kanstantsin Siutsou of Belarus, both heroic climbers. Christian Knees, a big engine and supreme protector, was Bradley’s right-hand man. Edvald Boasson Hagen was – according to Yates – ‘a massive, massive luxury. He can climb, close down gaps, go on breakaways, he’s Mr Perfect’, while in-form Chris Froome was Option 2 if Bradley went.
‘Cav added a challenge,’ admits Yates. ‘He was the world champion, and would be included in the team. Traditionally a sprinter needs leadout, so therefore there was an element of compromise. However, we felt we were capable of winning the overall and the stages without a full complement of GC riders to support Bradley, but it was a gamble.’
For Wiggins, the mission was to stay out of trouble and not lose any time until he could make killer blows on his rivals in the time trials. Stage 1 went according to plan, with Wiggins shrugging off a fierce uphill sprint attack from defending champion Cadel Evans. The stage otherwise threw up the usual mix of good and bad: Boasson Hagen finished a buoyant third, but Froome suffered a puncture and crossed the line 1:25 down in 95th place.
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STAGE 2
Within the relentless 21-day cycle of effort and recovery, breakfast is a relaxed time. At this point everyone is feeling as fresh as they’re going to within a 24-hour timeframe. The food on offer is less strictly nutritional and more about personal preferences, as the riders burn it off within hours. Conversation is random banter, anecdotes from the peloton, thoughts for the day. For Cavendish, the stage to Tournai offered the prospect of a tasty duel between the sprinters, which he particularly savoured in his first Tour wearing the world champion’s rainbow bands.
After a quiet