Bradley Wiggins’ knee problem

The somewhat tiresome media-fuelled battle for Sky team leadership at the Tour de France might have been resolved. Bradley Wiggins is apparently suffering from knee-knack and can’t train properly.

You need knees as a cyclist. They move quite a bit when you’re on the bike. I haven’t done the exact maths, but I think you can count on each one bending about a billion times over the course of a three-week stage race. If you flex your knee once and think: “Ooh, what’s that?” then imagine what you’ll be thinking once you get into the high millions.

One hypothesis has it that there has been ‘too much play’ in his pedal (and not enough work?). If that’s the case, every pedal stroke will have been exacerbating the problem.

To make the Tour, Wiggins needs to recover sufficiently to do some hard training and also get a race in during June. Perhaps all those trials against time have put him at odds with it, because it is now against him. He may well not get into top form in time for the Tour, in which case he might have a stab at every stage-racer’s favourite Plan B, the Vuelta a Espana.

I actually got the impression that Richie Porte was earmarked for the Vuelta, so maybe we’ll benefit from a second tiresome media-fuelled battle for Sky team leadership. Hurray!

Update: It has now been confirmed that Wiggins will miss this year’s Tour.


Comments

5 responses to “Bradley Wiggins’ knee problem”

  1. I tried to do the maths:
    The SRM website helpfully gives cadence information for just over half of the Tour, it averages at about 74.6RPM.
    Bradders won in 87h34m47s (5,254.8m), roughly making 391,920.5 revolutions.

    Let’s say that’s 391,920 bends of the right knee, and fully 391,921 of the left, hence the problem.

    1. That explains it. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, devotes a whole chapter to the 391,921st pedal revolution and its impact on the knee joint.

      You’d think Sky would have been onto that.

      1. daneel avatar

        Surely they freewheel downhill? Nobody enters on a fixed gear bike, do they?

      2. Pete says it’s an average, so I guess that’s factored in.

        Pete, your research is now ‘peer reviewed’ and therefore entirely valid.

      3. daneel avatar

        Ignore me. Too early, no coffee yet. My brain is not yet engaged.

        At least I now know what cadence means, so I learnt something today.

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