OT - Wiggins out of the Tour de France

Chris Froome's revelations could damage Sir Bradley Wiggins's Tour de France ambitions

The bad blood between the two Team Sky riders is back in the public domain after Froome attacked his team-mate in his new autobiography.

Sir Bradley Wiggins's chances of making Team Sky’s Tour de France squad this summer are unlikely to have improved following Chris Froome’s decision to lay bare the extent of his falling out with both his team-mate and his team during the 2012 race.

Writing in his autobiography, The Climb, which is due out on June 5 and is being serialised in a Sunday newspaper, Froome accuses Wiggins of being “arrogant” in an interview he gave during that Tour when discussing Froome’s support role. And more generally, of hiding behind humour and a “gruff geezer cloak”.

“We rode around him and his moods like he was a traffic island,” Froome recalls of Wiggins, who won that Tour before picking up the Olympic time trial title and the 2012 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.

Froome recalls that he was not invited to the “Yellow Ball” that Wiggins held later that year to celebrate his Tour win, nor did Wiggins give him the bonus payment which is traditionally handed out to all the riders who had ridden for him as a token of appreciation.

The 29-year-old, who went on to dominate the 2013 Tour with Wiggins absent injured, is equally scathing of Team Sky’s management that year, describing how he felt Sir Dave Brailsford reneged on an agreement to let him race to win.

Having delivered what amounted to an ultimatum in late 2011 over his pay and his role within the team, Froome signed a three-year deal believing that he would be allowed to compete for the yellow jersey the following summer.

However, he accuses Brailsford of “being clever” with his words during their negotiations, giving the impression that the Kenyan-born British rider would be allowed to race for the general classification whereas in fact he was always intending to use him as a support rider for Wiggins.

“Dave’s approach was rather like a character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,” Froome says. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – ‘neither more nor less’. My understanding was that I would go to the Tour as a protected rider but the details were never teased out. Dave’s words would mean just what he chose them to mean.”

One interesting anecdote involves then Sky team-mate Mark Cavendish, who was also unhappy during the 2012 Tour after it became clear the team would prioritise the general classification rather than the sprints. Froome says that Cavendish effectively encouraged him to pursue his own goals.

“Within the team, the mood wasn’t as good as it should have been: Brad wasn’t always happy, I wasn’t happy and Cav wasn’t happy,” Froome says. “One day on the bus Cav slipped me a note: ‘No great man ever complains of want of opportunity.’

“I felt Cav was saying: ‘Don’t get to the end and say you didn’t have the opportunity.’ This was tough but powerful. I wasn’t going to dandle grandchildren on my knee in years to come and explain that, ‘Yeah, I had the chance to win a Tour de France but I passed it up for a quiet life on the team bus’.”

He went on to ride away from an exhausted Wiggins on stage 11 to La Toussuire before being ordered back and later reprimanded. “I realised, at last, that everything had been geared towards this,” he writes. “It was never going to be any different. The story was completed long before we got to France. Bradley wins. The book is written. The documentary is made. The promise is fulfilled. We had just been acting it out.”

The strength and timing of Froome’s comments, less than six weeks before this year’s Tour de France starts in Leeds on July 5, may well reopen old wounds despite all parties – Wiggins, Froome and Team Sky – insistent that what went on in 2012 is water under the bridge.

That remains to be seen. The two have spent virtually no time together this year. Froome is currently training in Tenerife with Wiggins in Majorca. There is also the question of whether Sky will want the two men riding together again, with all the added pressure that brings.

Wiggins, who is enjoying his best form since that summer with a top-10 finish at Paris-Roubaix last month followed by victory in the recent Tour of California, has said many times this year that he is hoping to ride in support of Froome. However, the 34-year-old has also acknowledged that his selection is far from certain, with it now being “Chris’s team”.

Froome, for his part, said recently that no one had been ruled out as far as Tour selection was concerned “and certainly not Brad”. He also said he did not think the revelations in his book would cause any issues. “Anything that’s in the book is basically already known in one form or another, especially with regards to Brad,” he insisted. “We have sorted out our differences.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/ot...radley-Wigginss-Tour-de-France-ambitions.html

 

I was listening to 5Live on the way home last night and there was a Championship athletics meeting on. For the past few years Usian Bolt has appeared at this meeting and the crowds were 50,000 each time, this year he's not there and only 15,000 turned up.

Wiggo not being there won't have that big an effect, obviously, but it will definitely have an adverse affect on the crowds.