The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Eight key questions for the Tour de France from the Criterium du Dauphine

15th June, 2016
Advertisement
The peloton heads uphill for Stage 17. (Photo: Team Sky)
Expert
15th June, 2016
15
1124 Reads

With the Criterium du Dauphine finishing on Sunday night (AEST), with Chris Froome once again showing his dominance. But still, the Dauphine raised plenty of questions ahead of the biggest race on the cycling calendar – le Tour de France.

Let’s have a look at the key questions coming from the Dauphine.

Can anyone stop Team Sky’s three-week victory parade around France?
Since 2011, the Tour has been the domain of Team Sky, apart from 2014 when Froome crashed a few times and abandoned the race, allowing Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) to take victory.

Based on what we saw at the Dauphine, nothing looks like changing.

Sky have an incredibly strong domestique train, signing Mikel Landa, who finished in third place at the 2015 Giro d’Italia behind Alberto Contador and his then-Astana teammate Fabio Aru.

Landa has effectively replaced Richie Porte, who is now riding with BMC and has his own leadership aspirations.

Landa will be equally as strong for Froome as Porte was, meaning nothing will change from one Tour to the next except the name of the people in the black and blue train.

If Landa isn’t enough to suggest Team Sky are once again the strongest, they also have workhorse Wout Poels on the books and Colombian climber Sergio Henao, who was third at this year’s Tour Down Under and sixth at Paris-Nice.

Advertisement

With all that strength, it is going to take brute strength and a rider with a team at the peak of their game to stop Sky. No one has a team quite as strong, although Etixx-Quickstep did their best to dispel that theory on the last stage of the Dauphine.

In answer to the question though, no one will be able to go with Sky on a team-for-team basis, and it is going to be down to individual rider tactics and attacks if anyone is to outclass Froome.

What is the best strategy to attack Team Sky?
If anyone is going to beat Froome and Sky, it is going to happen with attacks – but not just an attack a few hundred metres from the finish line or on the final climb of the day.

The attack to properly put Sky on the back foot has to come on the big mountain days, and a long, long way from home.

Alberto Contador’s attack on the final stage of the Dauphine was almost the perfect example of how to put Sky under pressure, even if some half-hearted descending meant it didn’t end up working.

Contador used all the good work of the Etixx-Quickstep team, who had led the peloton all day, to put in a monster attack over the top of the Category 1 climb. Just 15 kilometres from the finish line, with a Category 3 climb still to come, Froome’s teammates were around a minute behind.

However, they made their way back and the final climb was as uneventful as the 21st stage to Paris usually is.

Advertisement

With the final mountain of the Tour this year coming 20 kilometres from the finish line, with a descent to follow, attacks must be backed up.

The bottom line is you won’t break Team Sky without long-range, persistent attacking, possibly from more than one rider. Think outside the square or Sky will win because they are the strongest by some distance.

Did Nairo Quintana miss a trick by not racing the Dauphine?
One rider who was forgotten during the Dauphine was 2015 Tour de France second-place getter Nairo Quintana – and that is probably just what he wanted.

Quintana enjoys avoiding the spotlight, but you have to wonder if training for a race like the Tour de France at an altitude camp in Colombia, before racing the Route du Sud, is the best idea when your rivals are at the Dauphine.

Generally speaking, the Dauphine is the biggest lead-up race to the Tour, and the one to be at if you want to win in July – in fact, it’s hard to remember a winner of the Tour who hasn’t been to the Dauphine.

While training at altitude made sense for the Giro d’Italia, where there were climbs to 2700 metres above sea level – just ask Alejandro Valverde how much he enjoyed that – the Tour doesn’t go above 2000 metres more than twice.

Avoiding the Dauphine doesn’t seem the right option for Quintana, when the Tour will be on from Day 1 and race form is pivotal.

Advertisement

What the hell is going on at BMC Racing?
Richie Porte, who was signed from Sky in the offseason for the BMC squad, led the team at the Dauphine, with Tejay van Garderen currently riding the Tour de Suisse.

While the team say the pair will share the leadership at the Tour, Van Garderen placed outside the top 50 in the Tour de Suisse Stage 1 individual time trial – a discipline he would be aiming to make up time in at a race like the Tour.

Porte has been in solid form, able to follow most of the attacks at the Dauphine, but there is still a lot of improvement to be made given he just followed wheels for a week and couldn’t launch a single attack.

BMC must work out their tactics in a hurry or risk having split resources at the Tour, which never ends well.

Why is Fabio Aru racing so badly?
The Astana leader’s form coming into the Dauphine was under a major question mark, which he changed to exclamation points following the term ‘terrible’ following the lead-up race.

Aru was dropped nearly every time there was a chance to be dropped, and even though he managed to crack a breakaway on the second-last stage, he was dropped even out of that before long, as climbers who are well below his level rode away from him.

Astana could be left frustrated at the decision to send Vincenzo Nibali to the Giro, even though he won. The team’s focus is getting results at the Tour, and it doesn’t look like Aru has it in him to finish within the top ten.

Advertisement

Will a Frenchman stand on the podium in Paris?
If the answer to this question is yes, then the name will be Romain Bardet of the Ag2r La Mondiale team.

Frenchmen last stood on the podium in 2014, with both Jean Christophe-Peraud and Thibaut Pinot, and they last won the event in 1985 through Bernard Hinaut.

After crashing early in the Dauphine, Bardet went into a long-range attack and managed to claw back nearly all the time he lost, despite some strange tactics with Thibaut Pinot in the same move – rest assured Pinot won’t be anywhere near the top of the leaderboard based on form.

Bardet ended up finishing second overall and is a serious threat for the Tour. He is a strong climber and was a major animator at last year’s edition.

He won’t win the race, but don’t be surprised to see him somewhere on the final podium.

Can Orica-GreenEDGE do damage at a second straight Grand Tour?
Our little Colombian-Aussie, Esteban Chavez, finished second overall at the Giro, and it was only the class of Nibali that stopped him from donning the pink jersey in Torino.

The Australian team’s focus now switches to Adam Yates, who looked the goods in the Dauphine. He finished seventh overall, but managed to come back after being dropped a few times, and finished just a few seconds behind Julian Allaphilippe for the white jersey – some better descending and he might have won the young rider’s classification.

Advertisement

While he will get little support at the Tour, as the team focuses on stage wins, Yates could be one of the key aggressors in the mountains, knowing he won’t have support and there would be very little point just trying to hang on.

Watch for a top-ten finish for the Briton.

Does Alberto Contador still have the legs to go for three weeks?
Alberto Contador proved on the last day of the Dauphine he still has it, in a big way – but that came after some strange tactics and a bad day where he lost over half a minute as Richie Porte and Chris Froome rode away like he was standing still.

The big question for Contador is whether the 33-year-old can still go for the whole three weeks.

As long as he’s riding, El Pistolero will be a threat, as evidenced by the fact his performance went downhill on the penultimate day of last year’s Giro d’Italia, but he still managed to win the race. Although he didn’t factor at the 2015 Tour – granted, he was riding back-to-back Grand Tours.

Roarers, how do you see the Tour de France playing out? What other key questions need answering?

Don’t forget The Roar will have live coverage of each and every stage of the 2016 Tour de France.

Advertisement

Follow Scott on Twitter @sk_pryde

close