Tag: Tour of Britain

  • How did Bradley Wiggins win the Tour of Britain?

    The same way he always wins stage races. He rode steadily and conservatively on all the road stages and then smashed everyone to pieces in the time trial. Why break from a winning formula? And to complete a picture of British cycling in microcosm, Mark Cavendish won the final stage. Cav winning the sprints, Wiggins…

  • Mark Cavendish jiggles up Guildford High Street

    Sprint finish. Mark Cavendish won. But it was a bit of an odd one. It seems Cav’s lead-out man, Alessandro Petacchi, is still strong enough at the age of 39 to split the peloton on the run-in to the line when everyone’s pretty much going flat out. There was him, Cavendish and then some other…

  • Bradley Wiggins makes nothing happen on Caerphilly Mountain

    When you’re ahead in a stage race, you basically want nothing to happen. If nothing happens, you win. If something happens, you might not. Sometimes, it can take a hell of a lot of effort to make nothing happen. Caerphilly Mountain invited attacks. Attacks came. Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky chased them down. Everyone important…

  • Pen y Pass sort of does its job in the Tour of Britain

    I said that Pen y Pass could prove a good point at which to attack. Being as the stage finished in a bunch sprint, you might think this didn’t happen, but it was actually a small barrage of attacks on the climb which led to that sprint. Prior to that, it looked for all the…

  • Bradley Wiggins wins a 10-mile time trial

    Because road racing used to be banned in Britain, time trialling became a big thing because it allowed covert competition. Even though road racing has been legal for many years now, modern culture still reflects this history. You can see it in the distances. Road races are measured in kilometres; time trials are measured in…

  • Using Honister Pass and the Lake District in the Tour of Britain

    If you use Britain’s geography properly, you will get good bike racing and spectacular scenery. They really got it right with stage two of the Tour of Britain. Apart from the weather, it was the ideal advert for road cycling in this country. Cycling’s not about sprinting down the Mall. It’s about having the freedom…

  • Elia Viviani won stage one of the Tour of Britain

    I thought he’d done a piss-taking pinky-fingers-out reference to us being a nation of effete tea-drinkers as he crossed the finish line, but it turned out that the website we were reading had used a photograph from a completely different race. Mark Cavendish? Sort of boxed in. Didn’t really compete for the sprint. Bradley Wiggins?…

  • Jonathan Tiernan-Locke – a punchy climber and could he ride the Classics?

    Britain has produced a ridiculous number of top cyclists in recent years. The track cyclists are untouchable and we’ve most bases covered on the road. We’ve Bradley Wiggins, time trialist and Tour de France winner; Chris Froome, climber and time trialist; and Mark Cavendish, the supreme sprinter of his era. But if there’s one thing…

  • Stoke stage of Tour of Britain sees riders going backwards

    Literally in Bradley Wiggins’ case. He turned round and went back to try and find Mark Cavendish who was suffering long before his nemesis, Gun Hill. He found him and then they both concluded that all was lost and dawdled to the finish. I sometimes think about what it would be like to ride with…

  • Jonathan Tiernan-Locke is still poised in the Tour of Britain

    I’ve not written about the first three stages of the Tour of Britain because there hasn’t been too much going on with the general classification. That changed a little bit today on stage four, as a lot of riders lost time. My man Jonathan Tiernan-Locke is one who’s still in contention, however. Team Sky took…