Yes, I know, I’m British so I would say that. But he can. Here’s why.
Long before he won the Tour de France, which I did not see coming – I know I shouldn’t admit that, I’m supposed to be a cycling journalist for heaven’s sake – I saw him winning a Classic.
In fact I told him as much in 2010 after doing an interview just before the Tour.
My reason was based on history. Okay, there are riders, the greats, who won Classics and Grand Tours, but many Classics specialists, especially cobbled Classics specialists, tend to have a good track background.
I was thinking of Francesco Moser, a world pursuit champion and triple Roubaix winner. Or another triple winner, Rik Van Looy, who was a demon six-day racer. So was Roubaix double-man Gilbert Duclos-Lasalle. And what about the 2004 Olympic Madison champion Stuart O’Grady?
But Wiggins proved me wrong, and he won the Tour, which is great, brilliant in fact. Now I think he should go for greatness and crown his career in the Classics.
He’s looked at Roubaix now, done it for real and finished tenth. I still think he can go all the way and win it in 2015.
Why? Well, two reasons really.
One, he didn’t do the classic, Classics programme, and a potential winner needs to do that. Wiggins should have ridden Het Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne then the E3 Grand Prix and Dwars Door Vlaanderen and rounded it off with the Three Days of De Panne and the Tour of Flanders. Plus, throw in a Paris-Nice while he’s at it.
Okay, not every winner does every one of those races every year, but they are the bones of the programme, the training a rider does just puts the muscle and skin on them.
Wiggins did the training he needed to do, but his first cobbled race was Flanders, and it’s not enough.
I told you about Barry Hoban the other week, and used his words to describe how he won Ghent-Wevelgem in 1974. I spoke to Hoban the day after Paris-Roubaix and he said: “Did you see how Bradley had his fingers on the brakes all the time. He wasn’t comfortable, he was nervous.”
And he wasn’t comfortable because he wasn’t used to racing on the cobbles. All the others were, because they’d done the programme. Most of them have been doing it for years.
If Wiggins does the programme next year he’ll reach the final with more energy, enough to launch an attack and win. Wiggins can do what Niki Terpstra did, no problem. Oh, and Terpstra is a very good track racer too.
My other reason for thinking Wiggins can win is I reckon he went for a placing this year. I might be wrong, and on my previous predictions with him I probably am, but I think he needed a good performance, and that meant top ten at least, so he didn’t take a risk.
If he’d risked an attack it might have worked, but it just as easily might not, in which case he’d have gone backwards as fast as a fast-reversed film, right out of the lead group, but the wrong way. Then the keyboard racers would have started on him again, saying he’d failed.
So, Wiggins has his top ten. Now I reckon he can step up and be the first Tour de France winner to win Paris-Roubaix since Bernard Hinault in 1981.
Then Wiggins would be one of the greats as well, and he’d like that. He’d like that a lot.
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