Dean: Beyond the tour winner

Although it wasn’t a thrilling yellow jersey battle, Team Sky’s dominance should be admired.

I am not a fan of complete domination and although I do have much respect for a team that implements science, programmes and systems that are so good they dominate sporting fields, to me it limits viewing interest.

Such is the case with the All Blacks and in cycling the All Blacks’ equivalent is Chris Froome and his Sky team.

The planning and execution of their resources has been near perfect and despite all the curve balls that a three-week event such as the Tour de France can throw at riders, Team Sky’s precision in their processes of how they have approached the 2016 Tour de France, has been outstanding.

With a team’s financial strength comes higher expectations and this produces a lot more pressure to deliver.

In such an environment the task of delivering is certainly complex – especially where luck or lack thereof can turn everything on its head in seconds - yet Team Sky seem to have turned this task into a perfectly finely-tuned systematic process and their capacity to do that, although somewhat unexciting from spectator’s point of view, is itself commendable.

If you’re like me and are more interested in the spectacle of a great ding-dong battle and the onthe-seat-of-your-pants a in unpredictability that the Tour is known for, then you only need to look beyond the dominant race leader of this year’s Tour for an awesome sporting contest.

Although the top spot on the podium in Paris looks done and dusted, the race for second and third changed daily and with one critical stage left in the French Alps before the final parade into Paris, it was still anyone’s guess who will be standing next to Froome on the podium.

Coming into the penultimate mountain stage, although Froome had more than four minutes on second place French rider, Romain Bardet, there was still barely a minute between the next four places after almost three weeks and 3200km of testing French roads.

From my own perspective as a performance manager for OricaBike Exchange, the stand out has been the defence of the young rider’s jersey by our team’s young British rider, Adam Yates.

Up until 2016 our team’s focus in the Tour has been on stage wins and an attention on the overall has been something that’s existed only in forecast projections with the young talent that we have spent our resources scouting.

In more ways than one, Adam as a 23-year-old, has thrust us into this position sooner than we would have ever hoped and seeing young guys like him excel is very fulfilling and always one of the most inspiring aspects of sport across the board, albeit at club level or on the world’s biggest annual sporting stage.

Reflecting back on the Kiwi’s influences on this year’s Tour, as a nation we have not been invisible and the stand out has been George Bennett, who for avid fans has consistently been in the breakaways vying to cement his place in the Dutch Lotto NL-Jumbo team, letting them know that despite his late call up, his place in the Tour de France has been well justified.

Unfortunately, Shane Archbald aka ‘The Flying Mullet’ had an ‘off’ at 70km/hr in stage 17, fracturing a hip and was unable to continue, despite getting back on and riding to the finish, in the hope that it wasn’t that bad, only to find out that he was on his way to hospital for surgery; testament to the fact that although we won’t see him in Paris for the final this year, we will see him in the future.

And who knows, we could see Kiwi statesmen, Greg Henderson, deliver his man, Andre Greipel to victory in Paris on Sunday (Monday NZ time) on the sprinters’ greatest stage in world cycling on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.

For sure, Andre Greipel, who pre-Tour was pegged as a favourite for the sprint stages, has until now been denied his awaited victories so is undoubtedly keen to deliver in Paris.