Channel SBS’s coverage
of this year’s Tour de France was as good, if not better, than any I’d seen
before; but not necessarily for the excitement of the race itself. Take out Marcel Kittel’s five race victories and the tragic accidents suffered by Mark Cavendish,
followed by Richie Porte’s calamity on the descent of the Cote de Chat, and
there was little unpredictability about the event throughout the entire three
weeks.
Barring Chris Froome
coming to grief himself, he was always going to win the General Classification,
especially from the moment he opened up a 28 second lead over his rivals by the
end of the Stage 1 Time Trial. Apart from Romain Bardet and Fabio Aru’scameo performance up to Peyragudes ski resort (Stage 12), the wiry Brit was
never in trouble, cocooned by his support team, Sky. And if his support team
looked tested, there was always Spaniard Mikel Landa to guide him over the
line. Yes, the now four-time
champion endured the odd bicycle problem, like a punctured tyre or a
near-calamity among other riders, but a white-shirted cyclist was never far
away to return him to safety near the front of the peloton.
Clearly, Chris Froome’s
ability to time trial was the difference between his closest competitors. But
apart from the daily breakaways by riders who had little bearing on the end
result by the time the Tour reached Paris, we were left each day with the same
scenario; nothing was going to happen in
relation to knocking off the three-time winner and his support team.
While the days of drug-assisted
breakaways – the likes of Floyd Landis’s 120 kilometre solo breakaway in the
mountain stage (17) of the 2006 Tour de France – are but a thing of the past, the
might of particular teams still seem to determine the winner of the General
Classification. With the exception of Andy Schleck’s (Team Saxo Bank) win in
2010, as a result of Alberto Contador’s
(Astana) disqualification, and Cadel Evans’ (BMC) triumph the following year, either
Astana (twice) and Team Sky (six times) have monopolised the French Tour throughout
the last 10 years.
During this year’s Tour
de France there was plenty of discussion about the advantage of teams such as Team Sky and Katusha, which have significantly higher budgets to induce better
cyclists; also the idea of reducing (by one), the number of riders in a team.
Port de Bales |
Chris Froome deserved
his 54 second win of this year’s Tour, but rather monotonously, his success was never
in doubt. Take away Team Sky, even just Mikel Landa, and we well may have had a
less predictable race altogether. One can only but hope that this month’s
Vuelta a Espana offers one of the General Classification’s most important
ingredients, at least to spectators and followers, unpredictability.
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