History calling but Froome still has a mountain to climb
AFTER six weeks of bike racing, over the course of two Grand Tours, a mere eight miles of road stand between Chris Froome and a place in cycling history.
But that winding stretch is the Alto de L’Angliru, and a climb that is widely regarded as the toughest in professional cycling could yet prove Froome’s undoing in his bid to become only the third man to win the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana in the same year.
The smart money says Froome will rise to the challenge and protect the slender advantage he takes into the 20th and penultimate stage before the ceremonial roll into Madrid tomorrow.
If there were doubts about his durability when he was dropped by Vincenzo Nibali on the viciously steep Alto de Los Machucos on Wednesday, he displayed remarkable powers of recovery the following afternoon to steal back precious seconds from the Italian on the concluding ascent of the stage. In just 600 metres he opened up 21 seconds on his great rival.
The Angliru is no ordinary mountaintop finish, however. With an average gradient of 10 per cent and ramps, in the latter stages, that hit 23.5 per cent, it is a climb that strikes fear into the professional peloton.
Not least because it comes after two similarly testing first-category climbs to the summits of the Alto de la Cobertoria and the Alto del Cordal.
But nothing quite compares to the Angliru in this race and the light rain forecast in the Asturias region today could make it all the more problematic for Froome and the main contenders.
In 2002 the wet conditions created chaos, with team cars stalling on the steeper sections and failing to get going again because of a lack of traction owing to the paint used by fans to scrawl messages of support across the road.
Some riders were caught behind the stricken vehicles. Others had to press on with flat tyres because their mechanics had been caught behind the jam.
Scotland’s David Millar famously tore off his number a metre from the finish line, withdrawing from the race in protest.
Millar would regret his moment of petulance, later apologising to his team, but he had crashed badly on the descent off the Cordal and he was unhappy with the race organisers for putting riders at risk.
‘We’re not animals and this is inhuman,’ said Millar, who had also been knocked off his bike by a team car. ‘ Half the field was wiped out the previous year — and there are other and safer ways in. But in the wet they sent us over again, and loads crashed.
‘I’d already had a heavy crash, and then got hit by the car. That was what I was protesting about. I was dripping with blood and they were treating us like performing bears on bikes.’
Vicente Belda, the manager of the now disbanded Kelme team, once claimed the climb was too hard unless a rider took performance-enhancing drugs.
‘What do they want? Blood?’ he said. ‘They ask us to stay clean and avoid doping and then they make the riders tackle this kind of barbarity.’ Speaking this week to The
Cycling Podcast, Millar suggested it was because of doping that such climbs were introduced to the race at the end of the 1990s.
‘We have to remember the sport has changed massively in the last 20 to 25 years,’ he said. ‘These sorts of climbs didn’t happen until the 1990s.
‘There was a quest to find climbs that were unheard of and were more difficult. The Vuelta managed to find something they claimed would be the hardest climb ever done in professional cycling, and rightly so.
‘It’s a beast. It’s got a crazy average gradient and, worse than that, it’s got crazy max gradients that normally you would do for 200 metres or 300m but which go on for hundreds of metres, or even kilometres. The irony back then is that it was doped more than ever.
‘The race was faster than ever, so they were trying to find harder and harder climbs to stop the beasts they had created.’
Millar was asked if such physical tests are good for the sport.
‘I can see both sides,’ he said. ‘They are great from a media perspective, they create stories. But in all honesty, it makes the racing worse, because the harder the finish the longer everyone waits to race. It should be all about tactical moves, when to go and so on. But with Angliru it all comes down to who is strongest.’
Froome is the strongest rider of his generation but on the steepest gradients he does sometimes come unstuck, as we witnessed when he lost the yellow jersey on the ascent to Peyragudes on this year’s Tour de France.
But even when he struggles, the 32- year- old generally proves strong enough to limit his losses and the 97- second lead he protected yesterday on stage 19, from Parque Natural de Redes to Gijon, should be a winning one even if cold, wet conditions also bring on the chest problems from which he occasionally suffers.
If Froome comes through today unscathed, he will complete a double only Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault have managed in the past.
Given the sheer size of the achievement, he might even get a few more votes on the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year.