After the blood, sweat and tears Bradley Wiggins does not deserve the smears

 
P68 EDITION 20/7 epa03310193 British rider Bradley Wiggins (R) of the Sky Procycling team in action during the 16th stage of the Tour de France 2012 cycling race between Pau and Bagneres-de-Luchon, France, 18 July 2012. Wiggins retained the overall leader's yellow jersey. EPA/NICOLAS BOUVY
EPA/NICOLAS BOUVY
20 July 2012

Bradley Wiggins can reflect that he could hardly have achieved more as he rides down the Champs Elysees on Sunday. The fountains will sparkle, the band will play and for the first time an Englishman will lay his hands on the greatest sports prize of the Republic. If there was a parallel, which there isn’t, it might be a ­Frenchman scoring a century at Lord’s.

Wiggins, who already owns three Olympic gold medals, has clearly put himself in place to be the Englishman of a golden summer of sport. Victory in the Olympic road race would surely provoke one question: is there anything this extraordinary competitor cannot achieve?

Unfortunately there is and L’Humanite, France’s voice of the left wing, will spell it out in the same way they were doing all those years ago when home-grown heroes Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Thevenet, Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon were sweeping into Paris with the yellow jersey on their backs.

L’Humanite used to be the official outlet for the French Communist party and now it has a more independent stance. But on the issue of the Tour its opinion is utterly seamless.

The Tour, says the newspaper which used to land on the tables of Paris cafes almost before the first splash of champagne on the Champs Elysees, is not a sports event but a charade. It is the invention of the corporate classes and one that is cynically inflicted on working people. The heroes are the boys from the farms and the vineyards who dream of glory — and are required to seek chemical help in pursuit of their ambitions.

Anquetil, the great champion, hardly deflected this argument when he declared that the surprising thing was not that “the boys” used drugs but that anyone expected them to conquer such inhuman challenges in the mountains without their help.

This is the argument that has twice sparked Wiggins into rage in the last few weeks of his most sustained and brilliant piece of riding in a distinguished career.

One occasion his language was purple. Always he is filled with indignation. But maybe Wiggins is now obliged to accept the world as it is and not how he would like it to be.

Clearing suspicion from the minds of a public which was most dramatically separated from implicit trust in the greatest of sports achievement in 1988 when Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100metres Olympic gold after smashing the world record is a task beyond anyone individual, however impassioned, however clean.

Once again we were reminded of this when Frank Schleck, of Luxembourg, who finished third last year, became the second rider to be dismissed from the current Tour.

He had tested positive for a diuretic, which means he is under suspicion of using something commonly categorised as a masking agent.

No, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the great race has gone rotten again. The claim from within cycling is that a new culture has emerged and it is one that Chris Froome, Wiggins’s chief assistant in the battle to deliver a historic yellow jersey, announced briskly the other day when he produced the equation: “Dedication and hard work equals results. End of story.”

It is a claim that if proved in a suddenly perfect world would bring so much more resonance to the cheers and the speeches in the Champs Elysees.

This is not so hard to say if you have been on those mountainsides when the climbers have gone for broke, when the cheers are not only for sporting achievement but extraordinary examples of human spirit.

This is where each year at least part of the argument of L’Humanite goes wrong. The allegation is that the riders are weak, dupes of the exploiting classes but, of course, it could never be as simple as that. The Tour de France has a history of cynicism, and betrayal, but when the band plays on Sunday there is something else to celebrate.

It is the bravery which men such as Wiggins have displayed so ferociously down the years.

It is a reason to understand the rage of the man who threatens to dominate a remarkable summer of sport — and the hope that it is reasonable to believe.

Scott sparks new round of bellyaching

Adam Scott played beautifully to go to the top of The Open leaderboard yesterday but it would not be true to say that his ascent was universally welcomed.

The trouble is that old man’s broom-handle putting style. “You shouldn’t be allowed to lead The Open, of all tournaments, putting like that,” shouted one diehard. Scott, of course, is 32, a young age to resort to an implement which the great Tom Watson, despite an horrendous attack of the yips, said that he could never use because it was so aesthetically displeasing.

Jack Nicklaus, like all the finest players, reached an age when his own putting stroke, the one that delivered the 18 Major titles Tiger Woods pursues with increasing desperation, had problems of his own. But he, too, was emphatic that the broom handle — and the belly putter — had no place in the upper levels of the game and pointedly refused to use.

The worry is that results are beginning to build on behalf of the case for the golf equipment which filled Watson with such displeasure —and provoked Nicklaus to say that using it represented nothing so much as a failure of confidence and nerve.

“I never missed a putt in my mind,” said the Golden Bear. Two of the last three Majors have been won with belly putters wielded by Keegan Bradley and Webb Simpson — and now Scott threatens to develop the trend in the oldest great tournament of them all.

The Royal & Ancient Golf Club, who make the rules of the game along with the United States Golf Association, are, however, on red alert.

Chief executive Peter Dawson said: “At the moment these putters do not break the rules — but we are looking at the issue.”

In the hoary old bars of golf they are muttering that is about time.

Shortcut is just greedy

In English cricket there is surely one prime cause for rage during this frantic summer of sport.

Why has the Test series with South Africa — the one that will decide the No1 ranking among Test nations, which is of course the supreme form of the game — been squeezed into three matches?

It is because of the money-grubbing enslavement to the pyjama games, the short-form versions of a great game that are beloved of TV schedules and those with reduced attention spans. It is a national disgrace.

Read James Lawton on Fridays in the Standard and also in The Independent and the i newspapers.

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