Stunning win
Thomas produced the performance of his career to break Froome’s stranglehold on the title. Hugely impressive in his first grand tour with Sky. Colombian showed why Sir Dave Brailsford expects him to become a future leader of the team.
Numerous times Team Sky have lost control of their own movie: the one where a worldconquering outfit is built from scratch and wins with no ethical compromises. Geraint Thomas’s first Tour de France victory puts them back in the director’s chair – for now.
Scene-shifting is seldom more timely than this. Chris Froome, who won a legal and scientific case against the UCI, the sport’s governing body, and the World Anti-doping Agency to take his place on the start line, was superseded by the universally popular Thomas, a Team Sky stalwart who, like Sir Bradley Wiggins, claimed his first title at the age of 32. Froome dropped away – not into oblivion, but far enough to prevent the uproar that would have accompanied a fifth Tour win for Thomas’s predecessor as champion.
Clearly this is not meant to suggest Team Sky can control a 2,082-mile contest on the basis of PR advice about who would make the best “feel-good” tale. But Thomas’s win was serendipitous. It protected Froome from the worst of the flak waiting for him on the Champs-elysees without breaking his reputation.
On the contrary, Froome’s willingness to accept defeat and switch to a supporting role for
Somehow, Sky’s renegade pose and the hostility they arouse in France morphed into a romantic narrative about a much-loved rider fully coming of age on the road six years after his gold for Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics.
Where Brits used to flock to France to buy holiday homes in the Dordogne, now they go over there to win the Tour de France. Three – Wiggins, Froome and Thomas – have won since 2012, amassing six of the seven titles in that period, after a wait of 99 years for the Union flag to be hoisted over Paris.
Wiggins was the groundbreaker for a new team whose high ideals made life complicated when it was revealed that therapeutic use