Sir Bradley Wiggins has said that Chris Froome can emulate his 2012 Tour De France and Olympic time-trial double but thinks it may be more difficult for his Team GB team-mate and former Sky lieutenant because the Games are being held in Rio. Wiggins followed up his 2012 Tour success with victory against the clock around the streets of London, a race of truth in which Froome took bronze.
With Wiggins concentrating on the track in Rio, Froome’s best hopes of a gold rest in the time trial, where his chief rival, the Dutchman Tom Dumoulin, is now a serious injury doubt with a fractured wrist sustained during the Tour. “I think it’s probably harder for him this time,” said Wiggins. “He has to travel out to a completely different continent whereas we came back home, and that is probably more of a challenge for Chris.”
Speaking of his own victory in the final time trial of the 2012 Tour, Wiggins said it left him buoyed with confidence that he would also prevail in its Olympic equivalent. Froome, he believes, has every right to feel equally bullish.
“The power I averaged that day, I knew nothing was going to change in 10 days,” he said. “If I just did it again, I’d be all right. There wasn’t too many challenges for me to overcome other than I couldn’t get down my lane [to my house] for a couple of days. He can do it, definitely. The way he won the Tour, that’s not going to go anywhere for two weeks. If anyone can do it, he can do it.”
Following his withdrawal from the Tour before the peloton’s assault on the Alps, the slave to two masters that is Mark Cavendish was generous in his praise for both of his employers after switching his attention to Team GB in the wake of four stage wins and a day in yellow for Dimension Data.
“They’ve been supportive of my whole thing this year,” he said of his South Africa-based employer. “It’s a big thing for them to let me do it this year but it’s only one year. Team GB have been wicked, too. We’ve got a stubborn East German coach and that’s probably the hardest bit of the whole thing. Heiko [Salzwedel] can be very stubborn and he’s the hardest person to make believe”
Neither Cavendish nor Wiggins were prepared to offer particularly strident opinions on the IOC’s refusal to apply a blanket ban on Russian athletes competing in Rio, citing the rigours of the Tour and hours spent playing Grand Theft Auto respectively as excuses for their lack of informed comment.
Wiggins did, however, hark back to the devastation he felt when his Cofidis team were thrown off the 2007 Tour de France after Cristian Moreni failed a drug test. The Team GB women’s cyclist Emma Pooley was far less reticent.
“Of course I’ve got a view on it, because I follow it on the news,” said Pooley, who has returned from a retirement spent competing in triathlons to target gold in the time trial. “I can see it from both sides: there must be Russian athletes who aren’t cheating and for them it would be terribly unfair to have a blanket ban on all Russian athletes in all sports.
“On the other hand, as an athlete who is regularly tested out of competition by Ukad and in fact wherever I’m training by the local anti-doping agencies, you know it’s unfair because you could be racing against people who haven’t had the same level of out-of-competition scrutiny.”
Pooley cited the Russian cyclist Olga Zabelinskaya, who won bronze medals in the time trial and road race at London 2012 before failing a test two years later, as one example. “That makes me pretty angry because I just don’t trust her,” said Pooley. “I don’t think she should be in the race.”
Under current IOC rules, Zabelinskaya is precluded from competing because she has served an 18-month ban, but she can still appeal. Asked if she would shake the Russian’s hand in the event of losing to her, Pooley’s answer could not have been a more emphatic. “No,” she said.
