‘Froome and Sky are not the limit if Porte can hold his nerve’ – Kelly
‘The Tour has become almost predictable’
AS the 104th Tour de France rolls off the starting blocks in Dusseldorf today, Sean Kelly will watch from the Eurosport TV booth, fearful for the future of the race he graced 14 times.
Unlike the wire-to-wire relentless racing of the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta Espana, the big daddy of cycling’s Grand Tours has become almost humdrum.
And should Chris Froome, the polite Kenyan of British stock, claim a fourth Tour triumph over the coming three weeks, that perspective will harden.
‘Outside of cycling, the Tour is the sport’s major attraction. People follow it more than any other race; it’s the climax of the year,’ observed Kelly, the former world number one.
‘Inside racing, there is a different point of view which suggests the Tour is not the best race any more. It has almost become predictable, unlike the Giro or the Vuelta which are more edge-ofthe-seat stuff,’ he added.
As a top TV analyst, Kelly had a ringside seat for the Giro in May which wasn’t decided until the final push of the pedals through the streets of Milan.
‘The focus was on Tom Dumoulin and whether he could hold on. Then he lost two minutes and there was suspense all the way to the final day’s time trial.
‘Any one of three riders could have won the overall, [Nairo] Quintana, [Vincenzo] Nibali or Dumoulin, who came through in the end. It was old style racing as he [Dumoulin] didn’t have a team around him and it was like the 1980s all over again,’ said Kelly.
‘When [Greg] Lemond won the Tour in ’89, he was riding for ADR who weren’t a strong team and he was virtually on his own.’
In contrast, Team Sky had become the masters of building an impregnable protection unit around their chosen leader.
In 2012, it was Bradley Wiggins who benefited from the SWAT shield; since then, Froome has been guided safely from pillar to the post in Paris by the outriders in dark suits.
The Sky stranglehold has robbed the race of any capriciousness. Wiggins won by almost three and a half minutes, while Froome’s three wins have been by almost 10 cumulative minutes.
Only once did he wobble, in the final days of his 2016 win, a summer when he was also targeting the Vuelta and the Olympics.
This year, there has only been one peak on the Froome horizon, ‘Le Grande Boucle’, which reinforces Kelly’s view that the 2017 Tour is in danger of becoming boring.
‘Froome and Sky have dominated the last few Tours by such a margin that everyone knew going into the last week that it was all over.
‘If he [Froome] gets through the first week with everything under control, he’ll be the one to beat,’ said Kelly.
The dominance of Sky may have influenced, in part, the decision by race organisers to pare back the length of the two time trials to just 37km, as well as curb the mountain top finishes to three.
For the first time in living memory, three of the most iconic climbs don’t figure on the route, the Alpe d’Huez, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubuisque, where Kelly finished behind Stephen Roche in an Irish 1-2 in 1985.
The changes appear designed to fence in Froome and give others a chance, according to Kelly.
‘We’ve seen Froome take a minute and a half out of his rivals in the time trials before, but this year he won’t have that opportunity,’ he said.
‘With fewer mountain finishes, he won’t have the advantages of previous years and can expect more challenges to the yellow jersey than before.’
While it helps Froome that 2014 winner Nibali – and Dumoulin – are skipping the Tour to wait for the Vuelta, the line-up is no pushover with Quintana, Alberto Contador and Richie Porte spearheading the challenge.
Porte rode shotgun for Froome during his 2015 Tour win – the tightest of his three – before leaving to become a team leader at BMC, where his most loyal Tour lieutenant in the coming weeks will be Nicolas Roche.
The tough Tasman, who finished fifth last year, prepped for the race by climbing 17,000 feet in three weeks in May and will be marked by Froome and Team Sky – wherever he goes, they will go too.
Kelly holds Porte in high regard but is unsure if he has the mental resilience to de-throne Froome after allowing a victory in the recent warm-up stage race, the Dauphine Libere, slip away.
‘Porte is physically capable of winning a Tour but he can’t afford a repeat of what happened in the Dauphine when he let his rivals, including Froome, get away from him on the final day and he became isolated,’ said Kelly.
‘He put in one heck of a ride to reel them back in; it was a super performance and he only lost the race by 10 seconds, but he can’t allow that to happen in the Tour. In every race you must mark your rivals.
‘He will rely on riders on his team like Roche to counter attack and be wary of threats. I see Porte as a genuine contender, but his mentality needs to be stronger than it was in the Dauphine.’
Kelly feels Contador, now 34, is no longer able to ‘sustain control over a race like the Tour’ and believes Quintana’s efforts to win the Giro will catch up with him.
‘The Giro was a very difficult race. It was non-stop racing every day and it’s so hard to follow that; you have to pay a price. It’s hard to keep something in reserve when you’re riding both the Giro and the Tour and I think Quintana will find that out.’
For Kelly, the likely one-two is Froome from Porte and he gives Irish Olympian Dan Martin a shot at a podium finish.
‘Romain Bardet and Thibeau Pinot are strong climbers but the pressure from the French media is huge on the Tour and that brings its own problems. ‘Martin can climb with the best and will have less time to lose in the shorter time trials. I see him riding a very big race.’
Kelly isn’t into schmaltz, which is just as well, as he might have cause to connect this Tour with past regrets.
The last Tour depart from Germany was in 1987 when Kelly went on to suffer an innocuous fall on the road to Bordeaux on stage 12 and was forced to abandon with a broken collarbone as Stephen Roche, his friend and rival, pedalled to a famous victory.
Of all the Tour’s stop-offs in the coming weeks, the stage nine finish in Chambery may echo deepest with legend. It was there, in 1989, where he reached out for gold in the world road race championships only for the medal to spill from his grasp in a thriller.
This Tour could do with a similar blanket finish.