London - With the credibility of cycling now in tatters, this year’s Tour de France winnner Bradley Wiggins could be forgiven if he decides not to defend the yellow jersey.
And when the mountainous route of next year’s race is unveiled in Paris today, he may not want to anyway.
Wiggins won the 2012 race over a terrain that suited his time-trialling pre-eminence and limited his exposure to the high-altitude finishes that trouble him.
For next year’s 100th Tour, the organisers have devised a course which offers little respite from mountains.
The legendary peaks of Mont Ventoux and Alpe d’Huez will feature in a handful of summit finishes which mark the 2013 Tour as a race for climbers like Alberto Contador, Andy Schleck and Wiggins’s Sky team-mate Chris Froome.
Alpe d’Huez will be climbed twice on the same stage while the final stage on the Champs-Elysees in Paris will be held at night under floodlights.
While two individual time trials will entice Wiggins to compete, one of them will be over the hilly terrain of the Alpes-Maritimes, meaning that he may give serious thought to the advice of Shane Sutton, his mentor at Team Sky, to skip the Tour next year and concentrate instead on the Giro d’Italia in May and the Vuelta a Espana in September.
Today’s unveiling of the route is supposed to be a celebration of the centenary Tour. Instead, Wiggins and race director Christian Prudhomme will be besieged by questions about Lance Armstrong, doping, cheating and cycling’s credibility.
The Tour is now a race without a recent past after Armstrong was stripped on Monday of his seven Tour triumphs beginning in 1999.
Add in the retrospective expunging of the names of Floyd Landis in 2006 and Contador in 2010 and the inevitable tarnishing of Contador’s wins in 2007 and 2009, and only Wiggins, Carlos Sastre in 2008 and Cadel Evans in 2011 can be considered clean winners in the past 14 Tours.
Even Armstrong is no longer publicly declaring himself a seven-time Tour champion after changing his Twitter profile to reflect being stripped of his Tour success by the International Cycling Union (UCI).
On Monday, Armstrong’s profile read: ‘Father of 5 amazing kids, 7-time Tour de France winner, full time cancer fighter, part time triathlete.’ By yesterday that had been amended to: ‘Raising my five kids. Fighting Cancer. Swim, bike, run and golf whenever I can.’
Meanwhile, the pressure mounts on UCI president Pat McQuaid.
World Anti-Doping Agency president John Fahey said: ‘Looking back, clearly the doping was widespread.
‘If doping was widespread then the question is legitimately put: Who was stopping it? Who was working against it? Why wasn’t it stopped? It is relevant to ask those questions.
‘UCI clearly have to take the blinkers off, look at the past, examine people who are there, ask themselves the questions, “Are those same people still in the sport and can they proceed forward with those people remaining?” I don’t think there’s any credibility if they don’t do that.’
Tyler Hamilton, a former US Postal team-mate of Armstrong retrospectively stripped of his 2004 Olympic time trial gold medal for doping, said: ‘Pat McQuaid’s comments expose the hypocrisy of his leadership. He has no place in cycling.’
Daily Mail