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he
hadn’t regarded as his forte. By then he was convinced that his future lay in professional cycling, and that’s what he was going to do. He loved riding his bike, but he wanted to make
money out of it, too, not play at it. He saw it as his best chance of making a good life for himself. He got himself on to the national junior squad with another good run of performances at the
following year’s championships and was now on track to be a cyclist.
    Which was lucky, because he’d completely lost interest in education. School had fizzled out and a lacklustre enrolment on a business studies course ended prematurely after racing got in
the way of lectures.
    It looked like Bradley Wiggins had no choice. He would have to be a bike racer.

STAGE 3:
Orchies–Boulogne-sur-Mer, 197km
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
    Second place in the prologue and second place overall for Bradley Wiggins mean Team Sky have had a relatively relaxed first couple of days on the Tour de France. It has fallen
upon the leader Fabian Cancellara’s RadioShack-Nissan team to do all the hard yards at the front of the race to ensure their man stays in yellow for as long as possible. As they are well
aware that Cancellara’s leadership of the race is certain to end in the mountains, it’s the perfect arrangement as far as Team Sky are concerned. What’s more, their prolific stage
winner, Mark Cavendish, has already given them a victory, and they didn’t even have to do anything to help him. It all adds up to a dream start.
    Today will be a wake-up call.
    Kanstantsin Siutsou is not one of the most prominent members of this squad. If people were likely to say ‘Who?’ about anybody when the team revealed their nine men for the Tour de
France, it would have been about the Belarusian. For heaven’s sake, we weren’t even sure how to write his name: he was often Constantine Sivtsov in race results and remained Kanstantsin
Sivtsov at his previous team, HTC.
    When the Team Sky hierarchy sat down to figure out the final line-up for Liège, most of the names picked themselves. They weren’t going to go without Wiggins, Froome, Porte or
Rogers; they were the men who would form the mountain commando unit charged with bringing home yellow. They would surely take Edvald Boasson Hagen. The Norwegian’s all-round power would be
enough to make him leader of many rival teams. They hadn’t spent that money on Mark Cavendish to leave the rainbow jersey hanging in a cupboard in Douglas. The seventh spot would go to
Cavendish’s lieutenant, Bernie Eisel, brought from HTC with his boss for this exact purpose. There would have to be a
rouleur
that could be relied upon to do the donkey work, day in
day out, especially if everything went to plan and the team found themselves defending the yellow jersey for many days. The team was spoilt for choice in this department, with Ian Stannard and Matt
Hayman fancied by many outside the team, but the metronomic Christian Knees got the nod from those in the know. Who would be the last member? Geraint Thomas had been a revelation in last
year’s race, taking the fight to the opposition after Wiggins had been dumped out of the contest. He had also been indefatigable in the classics, where his efforts in the jersey of GB
Champion were appreciated by Boasson Hagen and Juan Antonio Flecha. Rigoberto Urán Urán was surely worth a spot for his glorious name alone, never mind his sterling efforts for the
team in just about every performance he had made over the last two years. In the end, the Olympic team pursuit squad would be Thomas’s goal, and Urán Urán would ride both the
Giro and the Vuelta so a third grand tour was out of the question for the young Colombian.
    To see why Siutsou got the call, we need to go back to the Critérium du Dauphiné of 2011. An important goal in itself, June’s Dauphiné has long been the destination of
Tour de France hopefuls fine-tuning their form. Previously known as the Dauphiné