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.