With Contador's recent doping scandal, the 2011 Tour de France is wide open and Spyns believes British rider Bradley Wiggins has a shot.
Team Sky's Wiggins insists he has learned from his 2010 Tour de France problems and will not make the same mistakes next year. The Briton was heralded as a potential champion going into the race this year but a miserable prologue in Rotterdam – in which his team badly misjudged the weather forecast and Wiggins, riding in the worst of the rain, finished 77th – precipitated a failed assault on the general classification. Wiggins admits the Rotterdam decision was "over-thought" but believes the seeds of the malaise were sown even earlier. "In hindsight, riding the Giro d'Italia was perhaps not the best thing to do," he told Procycling magazine. "It was a brutal race. The guys who did the Giro all seemed to fall by the wayside at the Tour – myself, Cadel Evans and Ivan Basso had a shocker.
"The next mistake was not racing at all between the Giro and the Tour. Last year I raced a Premier calendar, some local chippers and a 10-mile time trial. "But this year, it was like: 'Well, you can't go and do domestic races now. Tour riders don't do that. Lance [Armstrong] would never go and do a 10-mile time trial.' We were trying to be too smart about it, too pompous in many ways." Moving on to the Tour, he continued: "I had a disappointing prologue. We tried to be too smart about it and get one up on everyone with the weather reports and I got advised to go off early to beat the rain and it turned out to be the other way around.
"Again, it was overcomplicating things. I should have just gone off with the other leaders and ridden around. We were trying to over-predict and over-think these things. We were always on the back foot after that." Wiggins was criticised for not working on any altitude training before the Tour, and duly struggled in the mountains – a situation he has pledged to rectify. "That was the other thing that came out of the Tour," he said. "I had the power and that power didn't diminish in the Tour. I just was lacking over a certain altitude, four or five kilometres from the summits. The Giro took up three weeks, so there was never any time to explore altitude training. It's something we're going to look at doing next year to see whether it works for me or not. That could be the one thing that maybe makes the difference."
All in all, the 30-year-old labelled his debut year with the new team "a huge learning year in the sense of how not to do it", adding: "It showed what we can do differently next year. "We've already had long discussions and the plan is for me to hit the ground running, to race early season to win races and then stop around April and have a break, and then start building towards the Tour. "I'll stop after [the Paris-Roubaix] and have a bit of a break, and then start building up towards the Tour with perhaps the traditional Dauphiné [Libéré] run-in. So there will be two parts to the year and I'll be thinking of taking opportunities early in the season rather than thinking about the Tour de France in March.
"It was hard to deal with at the time, but if I do get it right in the next few years I think I'll look back and think of this year as beneficial in terms of learning. "I think if we had gone on to get the podium this year then it would have been almost too much of a fairytale, almost too easy, and next year would have been even harder. Sometimes you do need big disappointments in sport. Sometimes you have to fail at something to realise how to do it."
Organizers will unveil the 2011 Tour de France route on October 19, 2011. Spyns is an active travel company based in Whister, BC (Canada) and Beaujolais France. Spyns offers active holidays to Europe including trips to the 2010 Tour de France. For more information about Spyns 2010 Tour de France tours, please visit http://www.tdf-tours.com, http://www.spyns.com or call 1.888.825.4720.
