CYCLING: THERE WAS no lie-in for Britain's Bradley Wiggins yesterday. While other Tour de France teams occupied themselves on the race's final rest day by going for a gentle training spin and meeting up with their families, Wiggins and several of his Garmin-Slipstream team-mates took a helicopter ride across the Savoy Alps to reconnoitre the route of Thursday's time-trial.
In previous years, the 40km race around Lake Annecy would have offered Wiggins his best chance to shine. No longer, however, is he thought of as a track star with a secondary speciality in the race against the clock, and not much else. He may have started this Tour with an encouraging fourth place in the Monaco time-trial, but his subsequent performances have proved that the winner of three Olympic gold medals now possesses the all-round skills to be a genuine contender for a podium place in Paris on Sunday.
Wiggins liked what he saw of the Annecy course and Alberto Contador, the new race leader, yesterday paid the Englishman the compliment of saying that since he fears his prowess in the time-trial, he plans to attack over the next two days in order to widen an advantage over Wiggins standing at one minute 46 seconds.
To a Tour whose plot lines have been absorbing but largely foreseeable, the 29-year-old Englishman has brought an injection of unpredictability.
"I'm surprised in terms of the position but not in terms of the performance," Wiggins said last night. "I always thought I'd be capable of climbing well here. Now it's about consolidating where I am. I'm not stupid enough to think I can beat Alberto Contador. He's proved he's far and away the best bike rider in this race."
Foreign observers, however, are reacting with amazement. "Incredible Wiggins" L'Equipe called him yesterday, analysing his part in the explosive climax to Sunday's stage 15 on the ascent to Verbier, when he outclimbed Carlos Sastre, Cadel Evans and Lance Armstrong while vaulting from fifth to third in the overall standings, the highest position taken by a British rider into the final week of the race. "A surprise, a mystery, a revelation," wrote the correspondent of La Gazzetta dello Sport.
Such words are often used as a coded expression of doubt - which, in cycling, means only one thing. Thanks to the recent examples of Floyd Landis, Michael Rasmussen and Ricardo Ricco, sudden improvements in performance now give rise to suspicion.
After a particularly impressive performance in the Pyrenees during the race's first week, when he kept pace with some of the world's finest climbers, Wiggins felt it necessary to use his Twitter site to tell his fans: "Keep the faith, people, I ain't no Bernhard Kohl" - a reference to the Austrian rider stripped of last year's king of the mountains jersey after testing positive for EPO.
Wiggins has spent the past week explaining why and how he chose to change the emphasis of his career, leaving the velodrome, the scene of his greatest triumphs, to concentrate on the road, despite mixed and sometimes unhappy experiences during his two previous appearances in the Tour.
After finishing fourth in the London prologue and making a long solo break on a stage in northern France two years ago, he made a string of good decisions. The last of them, after winning his second and third Olympic gold medals in Beijing, was to finish his celebrations and then put everything into his ambition to become a great road racing cyclist.
He began by changing the shape of his body. On his two previous appearances in the Tour, he weighed around 76kg. In Beijing he was up to 82kg, the difference explained by the extra muscle and upper-body mass required to produce maximum power over the 4,000 metres of the individual pursuit.
For the Tour de France, however, with its chains of mountain stages, less is more: every kilogram of weight a rider loses can shave off a quantifiable and significant amount of time over a 3,400km race. His radical weight-reduction programme left him at 71.5kg by the time he left the starting ramp in Monaco for the first stage of the Tour 18 days ago, and so far he has paid no penalty in terms of endurance for the loss of more than 10 per cent of his body weight.
"It's the tightrope that a bike rider walks," he said. "Body weight is not something that you hear riders talking about, but it's the biggest thing for any of them. People ask what's been the biggest change, and that's been my biggest change, so a lot's been made of it.
"But it's been a long and calculated process, and I've got people helping me with it, and up to now it's been pretty spot on."
The task now is to keep his feet firmly clipped into the pedals and to pay no attention to the sudden rush of acclaim.
"I got a lot of stick after I said in Monaco that I had the possibility of finishing in the top 20," he said. "People were laughing at me. But I've come this far with my team and we're going to stick together and enjoy whatever comes. Up to now we've done a pretty good job.
"Tomorrow's another day in the Tour de France - and, as the history of the Tour shows, everything can be lost in one stage. I'm going to carry on doing what I've been doing.
"I'll just get through tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the time-trial, and then get through Mont Ventoux. Paris is a long way off and the race is by no means done yet. It's day by day at the moment."
No Tour de France is complete without sudden narrative twists, and the next two days feature five big climbs, including the hors-categorie Col du Grand Saint-Bernard. There may yet be a further surprise or two in store for, or from, Bradley Wiggins.
GuardianService
