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Wiggins Discussion thread.

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Wiggins will win the Giro with ease.

Honestly cant see anyone to stop him, Nibali will go pretty much the same way as he did in the Tour against Wiggins, zero threat basically.
 
The attacks by VDB and Gesink have been interesting if not successful. Sky have not had their best team at Catalunya but I think it's the long range attacks and maybe some informal agreements amongst other teams which will threaten them the most at the Giro. Nibali will have to look for some help from other teams to try and isolate Wiggins which won't be easy with Sky's strength. Wiggins looks good but so do others. One of the Euro commentators stated that Ryder is aiming for the Tour this year instead of the Giro but I have not heard anything official. His form at the moment is not too good but he may have gone into the race to use it as training, who knows.
 
Apr 10, 2011
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greenedge said:
But Nibali at T-A did a great ride to beat Chris Froome- at least 3x the climber Wiggo is.

Even if he cannot beat him on the mountain stages, by big margins what about Firenze?

However that wasn't in moutains he beat him. It was on steep hills and we know Froome is not the best in the world on them ( ie not as good as few others )

Such stage as we seen in Tirreno ( which was said as hard as Liege Bastogne Liege ) will not be present in Tour or Giro.

However I do beleive Nibali can crack Wiggins at some point in Giro and hopefully win it.
 
Jul 19, 2010
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RownhamHill said:
To be fair wasn't he working for the team, rather than leading the team in Oman, and didn't his team, ermm, win that race?

he was hoping that his training could make him shine in Oman. Turned out his teammate and his ex lapdog Froome was stronger than him. So yeah, as a team player, you should be working for your winning teammate. But it was porte the one that was crucial to help Froome close the gap when he was left behind?:p
 
Jul 19, 2010
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Angliru said:
I could be mistaken but I thought he went into this event with the intention of winning. He was his team's protected rider/leader. How does a race become meaningless after stating the intention is to win prior to it's start? Nothing is a given so these WT races I would think do carry a degree of significance. I wouldn't call the results a failure but it falls short of their stated goals of dominating.

Yep. You are 100% right. Before the start of catalunya, his DS said it loud and clear that wiggins came to win. So none sense if some one says that this is just some meaningless win.

here's the link
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/hunt-sky-is-at-volta-a-catalunya-to-win

To me wiggins seems to try to find some race that's small so he can win :D. Because he knows, in the bigger race, he will have to deal with his team mate Froome and Contador (now also Porte). And he doesn't want to expose himself that he is down a notch compare to those guys.:p. Very smart indeed, to boost your confidence you know..

and not to mention that his team mate and ex lapdog Froomey has won 2 stage race so far. And he was against the big gun. Now, his own domestique won the prestigious P-N. He chose race that doesn't have a full stack of heavy hitter (other than Purito and Valverde), and he got beat by Quintana. Yeah I agree, there's nothing painfull than watching the success of what used to be your domestique.
 
Dec 27, 2010
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Waterloo Sunrise said:
Not sure if his performance so far is due to a lack of motivation or just a different schedule, but if the former, the success of team'mates' will likely be a decent spur to fix that.

Nothing is as painful as the success of friends.

Lack of motivation?

Did you watch the same Tour of Catalunya as I did?
 
Waterloo Sunrise said:
Motivation is more than trying in the race. It's pretty easy to care in the moment. I, pretty clearly, was talking about motivation to train quite as much as last year.

All indications and reports suggest that Wiggins has been training like a demon since January. I think the problem, if there is one, is the 2-3 months before January so he's playing catch up a bit.
 

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In six days, Bradley Wiggins begins a challenge that could turn out to be even greater than that of last year, when the "Kid from Kilburn" won the Tour de France and added Olympic gold 10 days later. The Giro d'Italia, which starts on Saturday in Naples, is cycling's biggest stage race after the Tour; Wiggins is making his first attempt at winning it, and – depending on the form of Sky's designated Tour leader Chris Froome – he may then go on to attempt the legendary "double" of Giro followed by Tour de France.

The turnaround in Wiggins' fortunes since 2010, when he joined Team Sky and had a disappointing year – albeit one in which he won the prologue time trial of the Giro and wore the legendary maglia rosa – has been masterminded by Tim Kerrison. The former rowing coach and sport scientist with the Australian and British swimming teams was brought to Sky from British Swimming when the team was formed. In 2010, recalled Wiggins, "Tim started asking all kinds of questions ... stuff an outsider to cycling might ask. He wrote down all the demands of the Tour and we went from there."

In characteristic style, Kerrison breaks down the big challenge into two parts. "We aren't looking much past the Giro at the moment. The biggest challenge with the Giro is that we know what it took to get it right for the Tour – we had six or seven months from November but you have to do it in two months less for the Giro. I feel we've ticked all the boxes. The difference this year is that Brad is trying to focus on skills he needed to develop for the Giro – limiting his time loss on climbs, being responsive to the punchier climbers on climbs, being in contention without a long flat time trial." That change of focus explains why Wiggins will go into the Giro without a solo win, whereas he hit the Tour last year with three major stage race titles under his belt.

As for Wiggins riding the Giro and Tour with his eyes on high overall placings in both events, Kerrison says he is "not interested in anyone saying something can't be done. There are a lot of myths and assumptions. A Grand Tour is very demanding but a month is a long time to recover. The transition from Giro to Tour is very achievable. [Brad] can recon the stages, recover, and focus on doing his job in the Tour, whatever it is."

If Dave Brailsford is the high-profile front of Team Sky, Kerrison is the quiet man in the background, the one who tends not to get noticed although Wiggins has referred to him as "the guru". He started out competing as a rower in the late 1980s – "not a particularly good one" – then moved into coaching, "because I realised I didn't have the talent to be the best as an athlete," working at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS). His biggest success story as a rowing coach was Marguerite Houston, who won a world title in record time at lightweight women's quad scull in 2002.

Initially, Kerrison was holding down full-time jobs coaching, rowing and swimming, but in the run-up to the Athens Olympics he moved to swimming, still with the Queensland Academy of Sport. There is a misconception, he says, that he worked with Ian Thorpe, but that is not the case. At the QAS, he and a fellow coach, Shannon Rollason, decided to work on the women's sprint, a weak area for the squad, which had a strong record in distance swimming.

"We began a little project changing the way the women's freestyle sprinters trained, stripping it back to first principles, and came up with the concept of reverse periodisation." This inverts the traditional precept that intense work is brought into training on top of an endurance base; instead, intensity is included from the start and is seen as part of the foundation. Their two-year project culminated at the Athens Olympics in 2004, where Jodie Henry won three gold medals in three world record times, in the 100m freestyle, the 4x100m freestyle relay, and the medley relay, becoming Australian Swimmer of the Year.

His core principle, across all three sports, is that of tabula rasa – you move away from the past and begin again from new. "I've always resisted looking at how people have done things in the past. I prefer going in and looking at a sport, the demands of the event, the competition, the psychology, the physiology, biomechanics, and then what is the best way to develop a human being to achieve that. When you look at the past, it biases things going forward. Over time you pick up snippets from the past, but I've never liked looking back. That's why some of the things I've come up with are so fundamentally different."

Kerrison believes that swimming coaches are obliged to think outside the box. "They are by far the most creative of all coaches, because it is a pretty boring sport. In swimming you can die of boredom; in cycling the terrain creates variety and there is a social element as you ride. In swimming you are stimulated by variety within the coaching." He came to cycling knowing nothing about the sport, but says: "That naivety was a strength. I could ask a lot of stupid questions; luckily people were patient and generous."

The lack of structure in professional cycling coaching meant that, when properly coached, Sky's riders had a considerable margin for improvement. "It was quite amazing how much scope there was to work with these guys. The British and Australian guys were much more coachable because they'd come through a system, but it can take a long time for someone who has never been coached, who isn't used to structured training efforts, to work with a coach, to get their heads round the level of prescription they are given." If Wiggins has responded best of all, that's not surprising: "He's so coachable, because he's already been coached all through his life; other guys are learning to be coached for the first time."

Kerrison believes professional cycling teams have had a tendency to spend their money on buying riders rather than on getting the best out of them, and again that has created a gap for Sky to exploit as they have developed a coaching network that has expanded from one coach in year one, to four this season. "Other teams have spent on recruiting riders but it doesn't make sense buying in the best then hoping. You can see from this team how much you can get by investing relatively small amounts in coaching. The gains are disproportionate. It's so obvious that it's a shock other teams aren't doing it."

The bare bones of Kerrison's approach is that he has looked at every area of the Giro, broken it down, and then created graphs in which one line shows the riders' performance in a given area, another the required performance. Training is tailored to make the lines converge. Wiggins credits Kerrison, variously, with getting him to him race less, making him use races as practice for leading the Tour de France, working on his core strength – an area he had ignored – working on his fitness for climbing steep hills and making him time trial at lower pedal revs and larger gears.

Kerrison, however, is keen to refute the notion that Sky are "all about numbers". Critics have said the team simply ride to the power outputs on the computers on their handlebars in a rather soulless way, but he says: "We use numbers for training but race on feel. We use the numbers for feedback, but if you are over-reliant on it you would be lost when the numbers aren't there. All this about us racing to numbers isn't what happens. We train the guys to race without SRMs [the computers that cyclists use to measure power] – sometimes they cover them up because it's important that they can ride on feel."

As well as the accusation of robotic training and racing, Sky have been hit by the fact that in the post-Lance Armstrong era, success for riders and coaches comes at a price: suspicion that it is being achieved through illicit means. "People will question me," Kerrison acknowledges. "The better the job you do, the more people question it. If it's done fairly, they have the right to have suspicions because there have been plenty of riders and teams who have insisted they were clean and have turned out to be far from the case. Initially, for anyone faced with that, the reaction is very similar – it's anger, you don't know how to respond to it. I went through that adjustment last year, Brad's been through it, Froomie has and Richie Porte [Sky's Australian rider who this year won the Paris-Nice race] will go through it. Last year with everything we learned about the US Anti-Doping Agency, Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, that helped us understand that the public are at a point where they don't know who they can trust. We have to earn everyone's trust again."
 
Thx for that- is there a link?

How do they plan to earn that trust, i wonder.

Sky have not spent any money on buying riders- Porte, Cav, EBH, Wiggins who are unproven :)

Most other squads do not have the money to use 4 coaches.

It's funny/ odd that someone who knew basically nothing about cycling (admittedly a genius in other sports and by all accounts, now the "Guru") could come into cycling and work with cyclists, when he knew nothing about them and not annoy the riders to such an extent he would have to be fired- did he go through an understudy phase? He says he asked stupid questions then the lack of professional cycling coaching- he filled in for, that progression does not make sense.


I thought Wiggins used lighter gears than riders like Tony Martin, he always looks to be spinning quite a bit in an ITT?

So the gains are now "disproportionate" rather than "marginal" :)

Wiggins could have gone to Bruyneel for that exact same approach of using races as training.
 
Nov 14, 2011
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In the Sky documentary kerrison mentioned using his first year as a research year; to find out how things are done and to increase his knowledge and use that as a springboard for his second year.

In regards to the TT gears Wiggins used to spin the pedals pretty quickly (being a track pursuitist) this but was always a bit off Martin so they changed his cadence by dropping the revs. They got this idea by essentially copying Martin's TT cadence. (thats also from the same tv series)
 
Jun 29, 2009
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is it this year that Bradley Wiggins' contract ends? could he be bold enough and sign for another team next year?

i want to see him race against Christopher Froome for real

shouldn't he rather work at tesco's than have to follow team orders and not get a fair shot at the giro-tour double, really?
 

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