Porte team loads up
RICHIE Porte has been surrounded by a strong BMC support cast in his bid for Tour de France glory.
The Australian will have a mix of climbing and powerhouse domestiques at his disposal for the July 7-29 race.
But the make-up of BMC’s eight-man squad shows its concern over the first nine days, with the string of tricky classics-like stages representing a potential pitfall before the Tour reaches the mountains.
Porte will be supported in the Stage 3 team time trial, Stage 9 cobbles and through potential crosswinds by some of the strong- est flat-land riders in the world.
Paris-Roubaix champion Greg Van Avermaet, veteran Aussie classics specialist Simon Gerrans, New Zealand’s time-trial specialist Patrick Bevin and Swiss duo Michael Schar and Stefan Kung will look to guide Porte through to the Alps and Pyrenees. Once Porte gets there, Tejay van Garderen and Damiano Caruso will stay by his side for as long as they can.
Van Garderen has twice finished fifth (2012 and 2014) at the Tour and Caruso narrowly missed the top 10 at last year’s race.
Porte said the make-up of BMC’s team had given him further confidence after his Tour de Suisse triumph.
“I would love to stand on the podium in Paris,” he said. “As we saw last year, anything can happen so I really will be taking things day by day, week by week.”
Meanwhile, four-time champion Chris Froome insisted yesterday he would compete in this year’s Tour despite the controversy over an adverse drug test.
Team Sky star Froome was found to have twice the permissible amount of asthma drug Salbutamol in his system in September’s Vuelta a Espana, which he won, before also winning May’s Giro d’Italia, becoming the first man to hold all three grand tours at once since French legend Bernard Hinault in 1983.
Hinault has emerged as one of his biggest critics and has called for the peloton in the Tour de France to strike if the British rider lines up at the start of this year’s event.
Froome has denied wrongdoing and an investigation has been ongoing since last September.
He told Sky Sports News he would be on the start line to launch his bid to win the Tour for a fifth time.
“Definitely. I have done nothing wrong here. I have every right to be racing,” he said.
“Through this process, I am allowed to demonstrate that I have done nothing wrong and I am fully expecting to be exonerated by the end of this process.”
Hinault has described Froome as a “cheat”, a claim which infuriated Team Sky who described the Frenchman’s remarks “as irresponsible and ill-informed”.