Cycling: Froome’s historic double
At the start of July, many people wondered whether Chris Froome’s best days were behind him, said Tom Fordyce on BBC Sport online. Two months on, it’s clear that the 32-year-old is not, in fact, the rider he once was. “He is a superior one.” After bagging his fourth Tour de France in the summer, he has become the first British cyclist to win the Vuelta a España – and only the third cyclist in history to win the double. Froome’s triumph required monumental physical and mental exertion: across the two Tours he raced for more than 4,200 miles, through six countries, “in blazing heat and pouring rain”.
Froome’s double “bears comparison with the achievements of any British athlete”, said Matt Lawton in the Daily Mail. The Vuelta might not be as prestigious as the Tour de France, “but the climbs are steeper and more frequent”. Competitors must ascend “dusty dirt roads better suited to four legs than two wheels” – and Froome prepared by cycling up “goat tracks” in the Alps. For all his success, however, he remains unloved in Britain, said Matt Dickinson in The Times. That’s partly down to his “mixed nationality”: he grew up in Kenya and South Africa, and lives in Monaco. Cycling for Team Sky doesn’t help either: the team are still dogged by questions over the mysterious “Jiffy bag” delivered for Bradley Wiggins during a 2011 competition. But Froome has benefited from Sky’s huge resources, said William Fotheringham in The Guardian. In France and Spain, they fielded two almost completely different line-ups of riders, both of “virtually equal strength” – ensuring that in the Vuelta, at a time when many rival teams were “racing on fumes”, Froome could rely on fresh back-up. “Love them or loathe them,” Sky certainly know how to manage a Grand Tour: they are “the supreme practitioners of their art”.