Froome secures 4th Tour title

Groenewegen wins final stage of race Scoreboard

PARIS, July 23, (AFP): Briton Chris Froome secured his fourth Tour de France title at the end of the 21st and final stage won by Dylan Groenewegen on Sunday and said it was a huge honour to be amongst cycling’s greats.

Sky’s Froome had previously won the 2013, 2015 and 2016 editions and sits fifth overall in the all-time list of Tour victors behind five-time winners Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain.

“It’s a huge honour to be talked about in the same sentence as those guys with their place in the history of the Tour de France,” 32-year-old Froome, who will aim to match them next year, told ITV4. “It is just a privilege to even be in the position to be going for that kind of record. “Each time I’ve won the Tour it’s so unique and so different and it is such a different battle to get to this moment. “So they’re all special in their own ways and this year I think will be remembered for being the closest and most hard-fought battle between the GC rivals.”

At the end of three weeks, 21 stages and more than 3,500km, Froome rolled over the line on the Champs Elysees in Paris with a broad grin alongside his Sky team-mates, who wore a special kit for the occasion with their usual blue stripe replaced by a yellow one.

It was Froome’s closest Tour struggle yet as his final winning margin was less than a minute for the first time, Colombia’s Rigoberto Uran finishing second at 54sec with Romain Bardet of France, the runner-up last year, third at 2min 20sec.

The 103km final stage began with a nod to history in Montgeron, where the very first stage of the inaugural Tour in 1903 also began, at a leisurely pace giving Froome, his team-mates and the winners of the other distinctive jerseys the chance to celebrate with glasses of champagne as they rode out of the town and towards the French capital.

Tour de France 2017’s winner Great Britain’s Christopher Froome (center), celebrates his overall leader yellow jersey on the podium at the end of the 103 kms

twenty-first and last stage of the 104th edition of the Tour de France cycling race on July 23, 2017 between Montgeron and Paris Champs-Elysees. (AFP)