Simon Yates can’t bury past even with Giro win

If Yates triumphs, he will join Wiggins and Froome as British champions at a grand tour.

Britain's Simon Yates of team Mitchelton-Scott celebrates in the pink jersey on the podium after the 18th stage. Picture: AFP.

It could be written up as a sporting fairytale — and perhaps it will ­deserve to be if Simon Yates goes on to win this Giro d’Italia on the back of a day’s racing that thrilled everyone apart from the race leader.

On course not only to be the first Briton to win the maglia rosa but with remarkable dominance at just 25, Yates now finds himself fighting to defend a lead that was dramatically cut in half yesterday to 28 seconds. Sleep might not have come as quickly as he would have wanted, even with all the ­fatigue.

No one ever said winning a grand tour should be easy — certainly not as simple as it looked for Yates on Sunday, leaving Tom Dumoulin, the defending champion, and Chris Froome, the pre-race favourite and four-time Tour de France winner, toiling behind him for the final 18km of stage 15. We wondered if that attack might not just define a race but a career.

Now it appears that this little bundle of a racer from Bury may need to go to previously unexplored depths of physical and mental resilience, unsure himself what he will find there. There are two big mountainous days ahead, and Dumoulin, in second, and Froome in fourth, will hope to cause havoc.

If Yates can make it to Rome in pink tomorrow, he will surely come to recognise that a hard-earned victory is the sweetest — although if he does not win, it will be no consolation whatsoever that people will cease asking questions about whether he was doing it clean all along.

I don’t think it is just newspaper offices that ask those questions — can we freely celebrate this? Should we believe? My mates ask me that on a Saturday morning as we head out to the Surrey Hills, and not just of Yates.

That is cycling for you. And unless you are a total cynic who refuses to believe anything or anyone in the peloton (and, yes, it is understandable), there is not much more you can respond with other than, “I certainly hope so”.

It sounds wishy-washy — you are a journalist aren’t you? Get the facts! Find out! And don’t you know better these days than to trust anyone! — but what are you meant to say other than to put a rider and his achievements in context and, if they add up, celebrate until you know better.

Presumption of guilt is something that we should try to resist, even in cycling.

For Yates to win the Giro will certainly be a surprise, especially to some bookmakers who had him at 33-1 when he came to the starting line. Even a few cycling publications have been sweating over their predictions given that he was not always ranked best in his team.

But to be where Yates is now, striving for the finish and for glory, is not a crazy outlier. Ever since his breakthrough year in 2013, a world champion on the track, a stage winner at the Tour of Britain in a field including Bradley Wiggins and Nairo Quintana, he has been talked of as a big hope.

Team Sky spent months trying to lure him but, sensing better ­career development, Yates took the unusual step of snubbing the Manchester United of his sport to join what is now called the Mitchelton-Scott team based in Australia.

“I couldn’t give a damn about the money, really,” he replied when asked whether it was about cash or opportunity.

Joined by twin brother Adam (not identical, though good luck spotting the difference), Simon is five minutes older and had always seemed the quicker developer; ever so slightly bigger, a marginally better sprinter and finisher in those days.

Like the similarly grounded Brownlee brothers, it may be that one could not have come this far without the other. Riding out of Bury up to Oswaldtwistle Moor, inspired by a father who was a keen cyclist, they would spur each other on, perhaps as only brothers can. “We learned to race before we learned to train,” as Adam once put it.

Since those days riding for Bury Clarion, it has been a question of working out just how far these little climbers could ascend at 5ft 8in (173cm), little more than nine stone (57.15kg) — and who would reach the top first. Adam’s fourth in the Tour in 2016 had been the standout until this Giro, although Simon previously had two top-10s in grand tours.

It was the way Yates had dominated that had been the surprise (albeit no doubt assisted by Froome’s first-day crash) though suddenly he does appear vulnerable — which can be a better look in cycling than superhuman, for ­obvious reasons.

There is no ignoring that to be fully up to speed with the whole Yates story, we are required to have a quick refresher on medication, and doping rules. No change there, then.

If Yates triumphs, he will join Wiggins and Froome as British champions at a grand tour — which is not all they share, as asthmatics. Three out of three is a statistic bound to draw cynicism though it should perhaps be ­directed at sport in general when one study found a third of elite ­cyclists had asthma, half of cross-country skiers, and an even bigger proportion of swimmers.

Of the trio, Yates is the only one to have actually served a ban. Tested during Paris-Nice in March 2016, he was using Terbutaline to treat his condition but the exemption certificate required for that drug had not been signed for by the doctor. The team sought to take the blame, and the facts pointed to clerical error.

Accepting a backdated four-month ban which meant that he missed the 2016 Tour, Yates said at the time: “Unfortunately as a ­result of an honest mistake of my team doctor, whom I trusted wholeheartedly, there will now be a doubt cast over my name, my previous results and any future glories.” Some burden to carry for what the UCI accepted was a “non-intentional violation”. It was never meant to be a life sentence.

The Times