Let’s toast the Froome double act

CHRIS FROOME said he had been “on a knife edge every day” after becoming the first winner of the Vuelta a Espana and the Tour de France in a single season for 39 years.

Only two men, cycling greats Bernard Hinault in 1978 and Jacques Anquetil in 1963, have won both Grand Tours in the same year.

And Froome, 32, may well join the two Frenchman to become a five-time Tour de France winner next season.

But for now the Team Sky rider can celebrate being the first Briton to take the Vuelta a Espana, after three runnersup places since 2011.

Froome said that the Vuelta may be less well-known than the Tour de France but it is in some ways a tougher event to win.

“We’ve been on a knife edge every day,” said Froome, after sealing his win on Saturday’s final summit finish. “The Tour had some easier days, here they took every opportunity to attack me.

“Every single day somebody has gone for it and they did expose me on the one day I was extremely vulnerable.”

Froome’s “one bad day” was last Tuesday’s summit finish to Los Machucos, a narrow cattle track so steep in places that team cars’ clutches burned out and where he lost more than 42 seconds to rival Vincenzo Nibali, slicing his overall lead by nearly half.

“I was feeling flat after the time trial on Monday where I probably went much deeper than I should have,” said Froome. “And after those crashes on stage 13, I’ve been struggling to get through each day, one day at a time.”

Arguably Froome’s biggest challenge was that, with just four weeks between standing victorious on the Champs Elysees in Paris on July 23 and rolling down the start ramp of the Vuelta in Nimes on August 20, he had to maintain his top condition for far longer than usual. “It’s extremely hard to keep your form for that period,” he said.

Given the Vuelta’s nine summit finishes, most of them ending on very steep gradients and narrow roads, Froome also spent the build-up to the Vuelta in the Alps with trainer Tim Kerrison, riding up as many similarly difficult, littleused climbs as he could find.

“We had some really amusing training sessions where Tim did just find these narrow goat tracks, partly gravel and over 20 per cent, up the side of a mountain,” said Froome. “We’d make a big effort going into the climb, mimicking a bunch coming into the climb at full speed, then make a full gas effort from the bottom to the top.”

The time gaps remained stubbornly tight in the Vuelta, with less than two minutes between himself and Nibali going into Saturday’s last ascent of the Angliru.

Froome said it was only when the Italian, suffering after he crashed hard on an 80km descent earlier that day, fell behind in the last kilometres that he believed the Vuelta was his. “As soon as I saw Nibali fighting it a bit, it was then that those emotions started,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’ve got this, now, I’ve got this. Unless something drastic happens, I should be safe’.”

Froome’s next big aim could well be the World Individual Time Trial title next week. Next year the “golden prize”, as he calls it, will be a recordequalling fifth Tour de France. But he does not rule out trying for the Giro d’Italia, held in May, at some point too. Italy’s Grand Tour is unconquered by a British racer.

“I’m not writing it off but it’s a difficult balance,” he said. “Certainly I felt stronger in the climbs on the Vuelta than I felt in the Tour. So that does give me some hope it’s possible.

“But it is a risk because, in the second Grand Tour, you’re always going to be on that knife edge physically.”

In any case, Froome is now Britain’s first winner of the Vuelta in a year where he also stretched his tally of Tour de France victories to four. As he rightly said: “I think I’ve sealed my place in cycling history.”