Sir Bradley Wiggins’s final stage race of his five-plus years with Team Sky is set to be the Paris-Nice “Race to the Sun”, which he won in 2012. Wiggins is expected to ride the eight-day event from 8-15 March as part of his buildup to an attempt on the Paris-Roubaix one-day Classic on 12 April.
The website cyclingnews.com has released the rest of Wiggins’s provisional schedule leading up to Paris-Roubaix, which is expected to be his final event with the team. It is a typical programme for a rider building to the spring Classics, and it should see him start his season with the Mallorca Challenge, a series of four one-day races between 29 January and 1 February on the island which is his favourite training base. Wiggins is expected to ride three of the Mallorca races before the Tour of Qatar from 8-13 February.
He then plans to return to Europe for the start of the one-day northern Classics, which open with two Belgian events, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Sky have twice won Kuurne and took Het Nieuwslblad last year with Britain’s Ian Stannard.
Paris-Nice follows, starting with a 6.7km prologue at Maurepas in the western suburbs of Paris, in which Wiggins should be one of the favourites given his time-trial pedigree. The remainder of the route is due to be announced on 3 February, but it is already known that it will include a mountain-top finish on the Croix du Chaubouret outside Saint Etienne in central France on 12 March, after which the race heads for the south of France.
Wiggins will then take a brief break before two final one-day events; the Grand Prix E3 at Harelbeke in Belgium on 27 March and the Schedeprijs on 8 April. At present he is not down to ride the Tour of Flanders on 5 April, but in 2014, as part of his run-in to Roubaix, he was drafted in at the last moment and rode strongly.
After Paris-Roubaix Wiggins plans to move to a new development squad entitled Wiggins, which is being backed by Sky to enable him to build up to what he hopes will be his swansong at the Rio Olympic Games. Provisionally his next major goal following Roubaix will be an attempt on the UCI hour record, which is currently planned for June or July with the London Olympic velodrome as the likely venue.
