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Like team-mate Bradley Wiggins before him, Chris Froome has spend much of the Tour de France’s second rest day parrying accusations of foul play from the world’s media.
“It is just quite sad that we are sitting here a day after the biggest victory of my life, quite an historic win, talking about doping,” said Froome less than 24 hours after he became the first rider wearing in yellow to win atop Mont Ventoux since Eddy Merckx in 1970.
Echoing his protégé, Sky’s manager David Brailsford, the mastermind behind what looks increasingly like a second successive Tour victory for the British team, said:
“It’s a rest day, it’s 10.00am, and the bottom line is I’m defending somebody who’s done nothing wrong.”
Froome is 28 years old and entering the prime of his career.
This likely Tour victory has hardly come from nowhere: he has finished in the top four in his past three Grand Tours and many believe he could have beaten Wiggins last year had he been let off the leash.
The way he has brushed aside his opponents in both the mountains and in time trials suggests the softly-spoken Froome could go on to dominate the sport in the same way as some of the previous greats who won the Tour five times.
Some sceptics are worried he may go about it in exactly the same way as the last man to join (and be dismissed from) the five-Tour club – a certain Lance Arnstrong.
Froome was clearly agitated when put in the same bracket as the Texan, perhaps regretting his earlier comment to a Norwegian journalist atop Ventoux that he found comparisons to Armstrong as “complimentary”.
“Lance cheated. I do not cheat. End of story,” snapped Froome.
“My team-mates and I have slept on volcanoes to get ready for this, we have been away from home for months training together, working hard to get here.
“Here I am being accused of being a cheat and a liar, and that is not cool,” he added – understandably losing said cool.
Put simply: in Froome, cycling possibly has a rider on the cusp of a period of Tour domination not seen since the likes of Merckx and Hinault. He should be on top of the world – but instead the world is on his back.
Quite literally, in the case of the French newspaper Le Monde.
Le Monde was one of the most vocal opponents of Armstrong during his era – and along with The Sunday Times for which David Walsh wrote, the French daily always questioned the legitimacy of the American’s reign.
Unsurprisingly, Le Monde has been dining out on Froome’s “super-human” performances – most notably with their employment of former Festina doctor Antoine Vayer as a glitzy guest columnist.
Now, as you can imagine with such credentials, Vayer knows a thing or two about doping – but, like Armstrong, he is so imbued in his own nefarious past that he can not comprehend the sport without doping.
On the eve of the Tour, Armstrong told Le Monde that the world’s greatest cycling race could not be won without doping.
(Well, he didn’t actually say this for his words had been taken out of context – in all likelihood, deliberately – by the paper).
Anyway, not to let the truth get in the way with a good soundbite, Le Monde have pressed Vayer to hammer home this point in a series of articles on the 100th Tour.
You have to give it to him – his dry, accusatory vernacular is quite brilliant, blending humour and a sense of faux-naivety that (and this is the worrying thing) probably goes over the head of many of his readers.
His – and Le Monde’s – agenda is clear: do their best to show that Froome is a cheating doper without actually printing those words in that order.
So, for example, Vayer will use the fact that Froome rode his 32km time trial at an average speed of 54.25 km/h and then add, matter-of-fact, that this time was “almost as quick as the entire Argos team, nine riders pulling as one, riding the 25km team time trial”.
Of course, Vayer didn’t bother comparing Froome’s time to that of the ITT winner Tony Martin, which would have been the most logical thing to do.
Instead, he compared it to a team whose decision to ride their TTT with their foot off the gas was vindicated by Marcel Kittel’s second of three stage wins the next day.
After Ventoux, Vayer then used his (estimated) power figures for Froome to make his not-so-laboured point that Froome’s ascent was quicker than that of previous records set by both Armstrong and Marco Pantani, concluding that “Froome is the best climber of all time”.
Although elsewhere other people have made the calculations that Froome’s total ascent was only the second-fastest and slower even than efforts from the likes of Andy Schleck and David Moncoutie.
Of course, Vayer’s rhetoric would be more believable should he actually have the numbers to go by – but he doesn’t.
No one does. Sky don’t release their rider’s power data – for fear of exactly this: that they will be used by ‘pseudo-scientists’ like Vayer in a squinted fashion to fit a premeditated narrative.
But with the spotlight increasingly on Froome and his riders, Brailsford did say – for the first time – on Monday that his team were ready to start making all their data available – not to members of the public, but to haematological experts at WADA.
Sure, this won’t help shut up people like Vayer who want to be able to make their own conclusions – but it should at least end the on-going accusations of Sky’s lack of transparency.
Le Monde’s near namesake Greg LeMond, the former three-time Tour champion and a rider widely considered to be the last clean winner of the race before the EPO era of the 90s came in, was present at the top of Ventoux to witness Froome’s swashbuckling performance.
When quizzed on live French TV about whether or not he thought Froome was clean, a flustered LeMond said:
“I don’t like it when people ask me questions like that and I want to believe in what I’m seeing. There can be spectacular performance without doping.”
It was a very familiar answer for it was something the 52-year-old had told me himself when I interviewed him for Cyclist magazine last month in the French Alps.
In a nutshell, LeMond – although admitting that he could be rather naïve on the topic of doping – said that a cleaner sport had levelled the playing field in the opposite way to doping, but had resulted in the same reactions from the public, ie. disbelief of any extraordinary performance.
But he stressed that riders who previously were held back by others who were doping now had the chance to come through and shine – which was what we could see with the likes of Ryder Hesjedal, Vincenzo Nibali and Bradley Wiggins winning Grand Tours.
LeMond and Froome have a lot in common – most obviously, a huge natural talent and powerful engine that even doping can’t improve (LeMond’s VO2max is said to be the highest of any cyclist in history – even than those doped to the gills).
In 1985, LeMond finished second to team-mate Bernard Hinault in the Tour after being given the Badger’s word that, a year later, the compliment would be returned – a scenario that was echoed by the Wiggins-Froome saga that had us enthralled earlier in the year.
This is perhaps one reason why LeMond feels a certain level of solidarity with Froome.
But it’s also worth bearing in mind that LeMond himself was robbed of some of his best years by the scourge of doping – and that LeMond himself was vocal about Armstrong’s suspect performances.
In short: he is no doping apologist.
When LeMond stood atop the podium after his third and final win in Paris in 1990, he was only 29 and there was little to stop you thinking he wouldn’t become the first – and only – American to win five Tours.
Provided he comes through the rest of the race unscathed – plus there are no scandals in the next year – Froome will be 29 next July when he defends his yellow jersey.
If cycling is cleaner – of which he says he is the living proof – then Froome won’t face similar obstacles as LeMond.
Froome is already six years younger than Cadel Evans, and five years younger than Wiggins, were when they won their first Tours.
Unlike Evans and Wiggins, there should be more in store for Froome. Despite Le Monde pulling him down, Froome also has the world at his feet.
Once his performances can be accepted as genuine – and don’t get me wrong: measured, intelligent suspicion is both understandable and healthy – Froome’s accomplishments will be something to celebrate.
It will take time – and for some, for whom cycling’s image is irreparably tainted, it may never happen – but Sky’s willingness to play ball with their power data is a step in the right direction.
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