- Feb 20, 2010
- 33,064
- 15,272
- 28,180
Wiggins was in peak condition for riding at peak power for 4km. Not 40.Dear Wiggo said:I think you missed a post I made in another thread. Lemme go find it...
Now, with hindsight, this seems obvious, right? Noone says, "tactics", focusing on the WCs, or any other excuse. Just: he was autobus, then he was winning.
I know I sound like a broken record, but how in the hell is that any different to Wiggins 2012 and Wiggins clean (pre 2009)?
2012: Final GC:
2008 Giro 39.4km TT:
Nibali is 8' down, Wiggins is down 1:16. It is a TT the day after a rest day.
How? He was WC and Olympic gold medallist at IP that year. So he is in peak condition.
Wiggins' ITT has improved immeasurably since then, and I think Team Sky are shady as all hell, but a point like this doesn't help your case.
Better to point out that Wiggins was a TTer of around the levels of David Millar or modern-day Dave Zabriskie before; a guy who would drop time and wait for the ITT, and put in a top 10 showing, and maybe win if the course suited him, the big names underperformed, or it didn't start raining at an awkward time like when he lost the '09 Giro TT to Ignatas Konovalovas. That's no shame, it puts him as pretty much the best TTer of the GC guys; but he was competing at the same level as guys like Evans and Contador, who were also fighting for GC day in day out.
This year, however, he was unstoppable. Didn't lose a TT over 9km in length. Finished 2nd in every TT under that length except one (Romandie). Smashed the field in all of them. But the improvement in the TT wasn't so obvious until the Tour, because we focused on his improvement in climbing or his discovery of long-forgotten skills like when he won the bunch sprint in Romandie barely getting out of the saddle. We reconciled ourselves with knowing that he'd always been a top time triallist, and it was only under closer scrutiny you realised that actually his time trial had improved massively too.
I made the comparison to biathlete Kaisa Mäkäräinen. She'd always been a there-or-thereabouts talent, known for fast skiing and erratic shooting, until the 2010-11 season. Then, she was shooting accurately and skiing away from the field. And I thought, hey, she's always been fast, she's just improved her shooting. But then, when the statistics were looked at, it showed that her ski times were way up as well. But there's more to just "clean/dirty" about the comparison though. Confidence levels are one thing, but you race harder when it's for the win than when it's for 15th place.
