latest Paul Kimmage article happens to be an interview with Wiggins;
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/cycling/article328940.ece
some extracts in case you cant link to it;
“Okay, now this is not a loaded question, but how do you explain that transformation?” I ask.
He doesn’t blink. “A lot of people — my peers and people I had been riding with at Cofidis [his team in 2006] — raised their eyebrows during the Tour last year and said it was impossible to do that transformation without the assistance of other things, and I can understand that.
“How did you deal with it?” I ask.
“My initial reaction was ... After the first week, a French journalist asked: ‘What do you say to people who are suspicious of your performances?’ and I reacted aggressively and angrily. It was the first time it really hit me that people were starting to doubt my performances. And then I didn’t really hear anything for two more weeks until after the final stage in Paris. I was in a nightclub at three o’clock in the morning and saw [Cervelo team rider] Brett Lancaster at the bar.
“We had raced on the track together for years and I went and said hello and he said, ‘Well done, Wiggo, blah-de-blah. I know a lot of the riders are saying you’re on drugs but I don’t think you are. You have always been a class rider on the track’. And I went away from him thinking, ‘So all the riders are saying I’m on drugs, are they?’ And I went home. I cracked it. I thought: ‘What is the f****** point in all that hard work and sacrifice if people are going to assume that?’ It really depressed me."
“So that was quite hard initially, but I can understand why people thought that, because I would have been, and still am in some respects, suspicious of some performances that I see. And at something like the Tour de France, to come from nowhere to fourth is just . . . I had jumped a huge, vast margin.”
To be a really good road racer, he needed to climb better; to climb better, he would have to lose weight. He had tipped the scales at more than 80kg (12Åst) in Beijing but began slimming down with a diet supervised by the British Cycling nutritionist, Nigel Mitchell.
“They summed it up as trying to transform from a petrol engine to a diesel,” Wiggins explains. “I had to change my whole way of eating and what I ate at certain times. Off the track, you just eat pasta every day and as much of it as you like, but with this, on rest days I’d have to have salads.
“We were gluten-free for the whole year with Garmin, so we just had white rice, no pasta. I cut salt out of my diet; I cut sugar out of my diet — I used to have so much sugar in my coffee — it was just simple things.”
The season was two months old when he first noticed the difference during the mountain stage of the Criterium International in March 2009. “In other years, I would always get dropped on the first climb and just about make the time trial in the afternoon, but I was still with the front group until 5k to go.”
He had weighed in that morning at 77kg and went to bed that night with a smile on his face. “I thought, ‘Blimey! I wonder if I lost another two kilos?’ And I kept going like that. I started the Giro [the Tour of Italy in May] at 75 kilos — three kilos lighter than I had ever raced before — and hung on for as long as possible on the first mountain stage. I was only about 40th, but everyone was saying it was brilliant. The next day I was 20th and it just went from there.
“[Teammate] Tom Danielson actually said to me: ‘The way you are climbing, there is no reason you couldn’t do top 10 at the Tour’. And I was like, ‘No, don’t be silly’, but he was like, ‘No, I'm serious. The climbs will suit you much better’. So I came away with this idea for the Tour ... I said [told journalists] I could finish top 20 but I knew I was capable of top 10.”
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there's more about Vaughter's and Brailsford and cycling in general. The above is relevant to this thread...
OK
it might be an idea if people want to ask Kimmage questions to put to members of teamsky to email him at the sunday times. a lot of guys on here have extensive knowledge and could put some tasty questions his way. i suggest using your real name and not a forum one ; )
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