Bradley Wiggins & Team Sky

I have to admit that I have been totally captured by Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky’s performance not only at the Tour de France this year but during the whole year.  They have been very impressive.

I love diving into things and investigating why a person or a company or a particular item is successful.  I normally jump on my computer, plow into a hundred websites, send emails and ask a lot of silly questions and often ask the same question to a number of people to see what they all come back with.

The way Team Sky goes about with their business is incredible.  Early 2010 they brought in Australia swimming coach Tim Kerrison as their head coach.  Now Tim really has no cycling experience.  He has come from a swimming back ground. 

Instantly he notice that there is very little formal coaching and training structure in professional cycling with a lot of riders going from race to race with maybe a few days in between for recovery.   Tim and his coaching staff went about setting the entire squad at Team Sky on Training Peaks where they are able to closely monitor their training and racing data and ensured all riders were using it correctly. 

Every athlete gets their own personalised training program, the team warms down on wind trainers after each race and there really is just a lot of little things to help each rider become the best at what their duties are.

The part that stands out the most to me is the reduced racing days. Tim’s concept is focus more on training where he can control the volume, intensity, etc during each training session where a lot of this is out of his control during racing. 

I saw an interview with Bradley Wiggins where he was talking about his training and he said that his coach Tim Kerrison keeps him about 95-97% fit all year round and times in the past where he would normally take time off and lose a lot of fitness, he is still doing long base training blocks. 

There was a lot of talk (including myself) saying has Bradley peaked too soon. The times of starting January unfit and slowly building up to July is a thing of the past under the way the team is coached and it will be interesting to see how far this method of training will go. 

I know there has been a number of doping allegations made about Bradley but Bradley comes from British Track Cycling and they are well known for their hard core drug policies and procedures so I personally believe that Wiggins is ridding more on the clean side. 

I can honestly say that I have enjoyed watching Team Sky dominate this year’s Tour and I can only imagine that most teams will start to adopt a number of Team Sky’s tactics.  I think Tim Kerrison has changed the way of professional cycling just like Lance Armstrong did back in his day.