Cycling: Wiggins works wonders

Briton's unrelenting pace hands opening victory to Sky in team time trial

(IAN LANGSDON/EPA)

Tour contender Bradley Wiggins's 2010 season got off to the ideal start yesterday as the Londoner's Team Sky squad clinched their highest profile victory to date in the opening team time trial of the Tour of Qatar.

First across the line for Sky in the wind-blasted 8.3km course somewhere in northern Doha's deeply unglamourous suburbs – starting outside an electricity sub-station and finishing a stone's throw away from a half-built supermarket – was Wiggins's team-mate Edvald Boasson Hagen.

The 22-year-old Norwegian now leads overall thanks to his last-second dash for the line at the head of the eight-man Sky squad, but the 2009 Tour of Britain winner had nothing but thanks for his team-mates' efforts that collectively earned Sky their third win in two weeks and which continues a remarkable debut season.

"The strong winds made it difficult but we worked well as a unit," the Scandinavian said. "We got the result we wanted."

As one of cycling's most experienced time triallists, Wiggins's contribution to that result was huge. The three-time Olympic gold medallist kept up an unremitting pace at the head of the Sky team for large chunks of Doha's interminable straightaways. Just for good measure, he then provided one last fierce burst of speed in the final kilometre.

Sky finished eight seconds clear of closest rivals Garmin-Transitions, a massive gap considering the shortness of the course and that this was their first-ever team time trial.

"It was all the little things, the attention to detail, that added up and made the difference," Wiggins said before making his first visit to a winner's podium in 2010.

"We didn't just come here thinking, 'Oh, it's only Qatar – what does it matter in the grand scheme of things? We'll just go flat out and hope'."

"The approach and the strategy was all there, we executed it and we won."

Qatar's first race leader last year when Garmin won the opening stage – "I've got a 100 per cent success rate here", Wiggins joked – the 29-year-old Londoner defined Sky's time trial as "the best team effort I've ever done."

"We got here very late two nights ago, but yesterday we must have done a dozen laps of the circuit. Then we did another two laps this morning to check out the changes of wind direction and correlate that with our game plan.

"Guys like Russell [Downing] who's not really super-strong at this sort of effort, he took us up to 70 kilometres an hour in the first kilometre. After that we got the engines [riders] going through that can keep that pace up for longer," said Wiggins.

"It was shades of Beijing all over again," added his Sky team-mate Geraint Thomas, a gold medal winner in the team pursuit track event in the 2008 Olympics alongside Wiggins.

"Like in the pursuit, a team time trial is all about keeping that speed all the way through, whether you're on the front for two seconds or 20."

Following the unpleasant war of words with former team-mate David Millar that marked his Qatar build-up, and with five desert stages remaining, Wiggins himself seems relieved to be finally getting down to straight racing.

"After all that talk of he said this, he said that, it's just good to be on the road in a Sky jersey," Wiggins concluded, "and this is a great way to start."