EDWARD PICKERING

C

EDITOR

hris Froome’s Vuelta win was an impressive thing. Add it to his Tour win this summer, and he’s the male rider of the year. He became the third rider after Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault to win the Tour and Vuelta in the same year, and the first to do so since the Vuelta moved to its current slot on the calendar.

Sky came to the Vuelta with a formidable team, and were all but impervious to his rivals’ ambitions. Even when Froome had a mild off day at Los Machucos – the one chink in his armour in three weeks - he bounced back the next day. He won by 2:15, a smaller margin than most of his Tour wins, but he was every bit as dominant.

I don’t love Sky’s style of racing. I’ll always prefer the feint and bluff of finer tactics, and I love the alliances forged on the hoof during a tactical race. But nor do I blame Sky for the way they race. To paraphrase the old football saying, it’s some cyclists’ job to race; it’s other cyclists’ job to stop them racing. Sky crush the life out of their rivals because they have the strongest rider and the strongest team. Either of these is a formidable weapon; to have both is as close to a guarantee of victory as it is possible to get.

I also think Froome is a hell of a racer and the more I think about his 2016 Tour de France win, the more I admire it. If there is a problem, he solves it. A relatively weak team cost him the Vuelta last year; no such mistake in 2017. A perceived vulnerability on downhills has been turned into a strength. The big problem now is Tom Dumoulin, but you can bet when they clash in next year’s Tour, Froome will be ready.

My instinct is that Froome will do the Tour in 2018 – a fifth win would cement his place as a cycling great. Then the impossible double in 2019 – the Giro and Tour, to make him the seventh man to win all three grand tours, and the first to win six yellow jerseys. It will be close to impossible, but I’m learning not to bet against Chris Froome.