Tour de France on TV

Tag: Chris Froome

  • Chris Froome can still cycle uphill at great speed

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    Alex
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    Not the greatest revelation ever. Up there with ‘oranges are still orange’ and ‘online marketing is a pointless, zero-sum game practised by cold, dead-eyed charlatans who talk the talk to a far greater degree than they walk the walk’. But if you write a cycling website, you take what you can at this point in…

  • Why does Chris Froome cycle with his head down?

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    Alex
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    Some people think it’s because he’s slavishly devoted to his power data. They accuse him of ‘riding like a robot’ as if robots are highly-regarded for their cycling abilities. Actually, Chris Froome cycles with his head down because that’s just the way he cycles. Richie Porte says he frequently rides into him during training. You…

  • How did Chris Froome win the 2013 Tour de France?

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    Alex
    in

    By cycling slightly more quickly than everyone else, you might answer, if for some unexplained reason you wanted to be profoundly irritating. Let’s not go down that route. Let’s instead review the race. Now we’ve got a complete picture, we can look back and identify the bits that matter. Artists and photographers will tell you…

  • Best of the 2013 Tour de France

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    Alex
    in

    Ben: What’s your favourite Beatles album then? Alan Partridge: Tough one. I think I’d have to say The Best of The Beatles. Everyone likes a ‘best of’. Best moment – Sir Jan Bakelants The second yellow jersey of this year’s Tour tried to claim a knighthood for himself after his stage win. Personally, I think…

  • Chris Froome’s position on the bike (and in cycling)

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    Alex
    in

    For much of this year’s Tour de France, I’ve been trying to work out whether Chris Froome looks more like a stick insect or a grasshopper when he’s on a bike. I was just settling on grasshopper when I saw this. Turns out he looks more like a praying mantis. A scuttling riding style It’s…

  • Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana on Mont Ventoux

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    Alex
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    On stage 15, Chris Froome won cycling. I don’t mean he won at cycling, as in winning a race. I mean that even if he doesn’t go on to win the Tour, he won the sport of cycling. The longest stage for 13 years, the 100th Tour de France, a stage finish atop Mont Ventoux,…

  • Tony Martin in flat time trials

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    Alex
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    Tony Martin didn’t actually win by as great a margin as might have been expected. But he did win. Even without any back skin, he’s the strongest time trialist in this race. The majority of his body is little more than air-sucking foundations for a pistoning pair of thighs. General classification changes A bit of…

  • Team Sky training methods might need tweaking

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    Alex
    in

    With Chris Froome and Richie Porte finishing first and second by such a margin on stage eight, many started preparing not-at-all-depressing black liveried floats for the procession to Paris. Stage nine was therefore exactly what the race needed. Sky were so far from invincible that Froome was left without team-mates for 130km of a 160km…

  • Wiggins and Froome – defensiveness on the road and off it

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    Alex
    in

    Does anyone else wish that Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome would just knock it off? They both know that wattage speaks louder than words, so why all this public campaigning to be the designated team leader at the Tour de France? What’s going on? It’s primarily Wiggins’ fault. He’s been doing it all year. Whenever…

  • Team Sky support riders can’t control everything

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    Alex
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    How much support do you need, if that isn’t too personal a question? This week we saw one of Sky’s support riders win Paris-Nice, largely because of the efforts of HIS support team, while a parallel Sky team has provided the same high level of service to Chris Froome in Tirreno-Adriatico. Where does it end?…