And so Wiggins stewed over the comparisons being made between Team Sky and the US Postal Services teams of Lance Armstrong, the way in which they only came out to play a couple of times before the Tour and the way in which they sat at the front all day and drove the pace, like Duracell bunnies on Prozac, never tiring, never showing the strain. And Wiggins formulated a response. And the response Wiggins came up with was Biblical in its nature - an eye for an eye, insult met with insult:
"I say they're just ****ing ****ers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can't ever imagine applying themselves to doing anything in their lives. It's easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of **** rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that's ultimately it. ****s."
Okay, maybe I didn't mean Biblical, maybe I meant infantile.
While the salle de presse may have applauded, Wiggins' outburst hadn't actually solved the problem, silenced the questioning. That took the person ghosting his Guardian Tour diaries, who offered a more eloquent defence. This, of course, is one of the problems with Wiggins' comments on doping: too many have them have been delivered on his behalf by ghost-writers, men like Brendan Gallagher and William Fotheringham who daily report on this sport and can find the words that Wiggins himself seems so unable to find when faced with a microphone.
What can Wiggins say? At this stage it's hard to imagine, the man has contradicted himself - played the game - far too often for anything he says to be believed. Others might want to blame dopers who have used the same defences Wiggins employs, accuse them of creating the circumstances in which fans question what Wiggins says. Me, I blame the man himself: he has played the game too well, too often said what he thinks people want to hear. How are we to know when he is not just mouthing the phrases people want to hear?
According to My Time the secret of Sky and Wiggins' success is neither pill nor potion, but the realisation that training is more important than racing (something the Wiggins who wrote In Pursuit of Glory disagreed with, he then saying "You can never quite replicate the competitiveness of a Tour in training."). Sequestering themselves in Tenerife and putting in harder days training than they would have achieved had they raced is, for Team Sky, this year's version of cadence or extract of cherry oil or iPod pillows.
Reading My Time you might form the opinion that this is something no one had realised before Sky came along, that heretofore Tour champions and would-be champions have been spending the months before the big buckle racing hard when they could have been training harder. As with many of the 'discoveries' that get credited to Sky, this is bunkum. It is the strategy that has been employed by many, including - whisper it quietly - Lance Armstrong. Even before the recent past you can find riders who sequestered themselves for months on end, avoiding races and training training training to win the Tour. According to some cycling historians this is exactly how Ottavio Bottecchia won the 1924 race.
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