2013 Tour de France

[Col_M]

So it's Kittel. Nicely done.

 

[Col_M]

Strange to hear those announcements in English rather than French

 

[Marty]

So thought Cav was going to tip over there at the end. Bike was flying all over the place, not even close to a straight line.

Kittel a very worthy winner, all the same.

 

[Col_M]

this coverage is poor. would have been nice to see the presentations

 

[chinaman]

Good for Froome. Will he be knighted?

 

[Col_M]

Wow look at the sparkling jersey!

 

[yawa]

Good for Froome. Will he be knighted?

If Murray is being considered then Froome should certainly be above him on the list.

 

[nightgoat]

For a moment I thought Ned Boulting was going to ask Sagan if he'd dyed his pubes green.

 

[Col_M]

Every year I promise myself that I'm gonna visit Paris. It beautiful.

 

[cockjol]

So it's Kittel. Nicely done.

think talk of change at top of sprinting is premature....cav has clearly had problems with his lead out this year...think they're going to make attempts to sort that out next season...obv kittel is going to provide some fierce competition

 

[nightgoat]

think talk of change at top of sprinting is premature....cav has clearly had problems with his lead out this year...think they're going to make attempts to sort that out next season...obv kittel is going to provide some fierce competition

Mark Renshaw, his old lead out man from HTC is joining OPQS next season. I think he misses Wiggo, too. No one adds the same injection of pace that Wiggo did for Cav's lead out at Sky.

 

[cockjol]

yeah, thought I heard something about that...a hugely significant move...we saw the difference again tonight...in previous years in Paris, Cavendish would always be launched to the line by Renshaw...tonight his team once again seemed to fade away in the last km and he was on his own against the other sprinters, having to come from behind

 

[nightgoat]

They have gone too early on a number of occasions this season. I think they also wore themselves out as they seemed to be doing far more work than either Lotto or Argos when none of the other teams seemed to want to chase the breakaway, and then Greipel veered over to the right when Cav was trying to come through and had to go round him instead.

 

[cockjol]

why do itv keep mentioning that froome was born in Kenya, or say the Kenyan-born brit, not born in uk etc...no-one cares...seems unnecessary to me...they did it a lot during live show and imlach just said it again during highlights...

 

[Bus-Conductor]

That was the best Tour since I've been watching properly. Froome is a very likeable character, he seems like a genuinely nice guy.

Leader values African roots​

Does Sky's pioneering champion and GB cyclist feel more at home on British shores or traversing the Ngong hills of southwest Kenya?​

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David Kinjah introduced Froome to road racing through the hills and townships of Southern Kenya (Khalil Senosi)​

ON WEDNESDAY afternoon, four hours before he would win the hilly individual time trial to Chorges, Chris Froome sat over lunch at the Hotel Les Bartavelles in Embrun and considered questions that cut to the heart of who he is: British or African?​

“Which would you rather be: the first African winner of the Tour de France or the second British winner?”​

“That’s a really tough question, but regardless of being first African or second British, the important thing is that I grew up feeling British even though I lived in Kenya. I rode for Kenya at the Tour of Egypt and in the Commonwealth Games but I always felt I was flicking the system, this one white guy in the Kenya team. I didn’t feel Kenyan.” Froome has never lived in Britain and after the first 13 years of his life in Kenya, he was then sent to boarding school in South Africa but would return to his mum’s home near Nairobi in the school holidays.​

His potential was first noticed by British cycling figures at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and he was approached by Doug Dailey from British Cycling, a former Olympian who wanted to know if he was eligible to ride for Britain.​

The following year, at the 2007 Giro delle Regioni, he knocked on the door of Rod Ellingworth, who was then in charge of the British under-23 road racing squad and inquired about the possibility of he, Froome, one day joining the GB system and benefiting from a structured coaching programme.​

He races now under a British licence, he’s long had a British passport and is regarded as a British rider — but it isn’t that simple. There are small transfers on his bike, put there by Sky’s South African mechanic Gary Blem, showing symbols taken from the Kenyan flag.​

“If you could take just one ride on your bike, where would it be?”​

“Without a doubt in the Ngong hills where I first rode and learnt to love riding my bike.”​

He was nurtured by a black Kenyan cyclist, David Kinjah. Fourteen years older than Froome, Kinjah became his cycling brother, introducing him to the group who would be his companions. They rode every terrain; road, trails, hilly, flat, five or six black guys with one white.​

They’d meet at Kinjah’s little house in Kikuyu township and begin the day’s ride from there. Froome spoke Swahili fluently, as did Kinjah and friends but they threw in so many Kikuyun words that, time and again, they lost him. They laughed at the wonder of it, a middle- class white boy wanting to ride with township blacks who were so much older and so much stronger.​

“Today, Chris, we are going to ride for five hours but you’ve got to take it in your own time. We’ll see you later.” But Kinjah might as well have told the kid to jump in a lake. The boy dreamt of one day riding in Europe, especially on long Alpine climbs and he had to be as good as Kinjah and his friends. His stubbornness made them laugh.​

He remembers one special ride. “It was Kinjah and a couple of other guys, we rode up to see his parents in the mounts and it took us a good few hours to get there.​

“His parents were on a farm and I remember riding back and everyone had an extra four or five kilos of some kind of root and all kinds of vegetables for the next week’s food. I was amazed at these guys carrying so much extra weight on the way home. I was let off lightly because I was young but I was still struggling to keep up with them.”​

During his holidays from the University of Johannesburg, where he studied economics, he would divide his time in Kenya between his mum, Jane, and Kinjah, two weeks with Jane, two weeks in the township with Kinjah. There were no comforts beyond the joy of riding with his mates but that was enough for Froome.​

Last Monday Froome’s brother Jeremy and three family friends, the Jethwa brothers, Kiran, Sam and Jaimin, turned up at the Team Sky hotel in Provence. Chris Froome had no idea his brother and friends had travelled from Kenya, a marathon journey that for Jeremy began with a flight from the Nandi hills to Nairobi, from there to Abu Dhabi, then Paris, a TVG to Marseilles and finally, a camper van to Orange. Jeremy wore a Kenyan rugby jersey and no matter what the kid brother says, they were in France to support a Kenyan trying to be the first from his country and his continent to win the Tour de France.​

When we spoke on Wednesday, Froome was careful about not believing he had the race won with three tough Alpine stages to come.​

“But if I do end up winning this race, I would like to try to use the opportunity of promoting cycling in Africa and other places where the sport is underdeveloped.”​

“OK,” I said, “one last question about your identity. At what moment do you say you are home?”​

“That comes when I land at Nairobi and hand my [British] passport to the official as I’m going through. He looks at it and grins, I grin too. He hands me the passport, I walk on and that’s when I think, ‘I’m home now’.” ​

Early promise​

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A British Olympian from Liverpool can take a lot of the credit for seeing the potential in Chris Froome. Doug Dailey, now 69, rode at the Munich Games in 1972 and later became national coach, writes Lionel Birnie. He was at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006 when a gangly Kenyan caught his eye. “He was the first man off in the time trial and he set a good time,” Dailey said. Froome eventually finished 17th.​

“I recognised [it] as a creditable performance. Then he did the road race and the mountain bike race, all with minimal support. I went to speak to him after the road race, just to give him a bit of encouragement but also because I wondered if he had a British passport. He confirmed he did so we kept in touch.”​

Froome became eligible to represent Great Britain in 2008. As Dailey, now retired, said: “There was no doubt he was a gifted climber and a good individual time trialist. He was very raw but I felt he had potential, but I can’t swear I thought he’d be a Tour de France winner.”​

 

[Bus-Conductor]

Why I believe in Chris Froome​

A terrific tour de France has delivered a great new champion in Chris Froome. Jeering crowds have accused him of doping. The same mob once idolised Lance Armstroong. They were wrong about him. And they are wrong about Froome.

David Walsh Published: 21 July 2013

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Real deal: Team Sky’s Chris Froome, for the past two weeks the proud owner of the Yellow Jersey, has had to put up with accusations that may be understandable for the leader of the first Tour de France since Lance Armstrong’s record has been wiped out, but they are misplaced for a rider with total focus on his goal (PETE GODING)​

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IT IS the night before the Tour de France begins. Twenty-three men climb on board a bus in the car park of the Hotel Golfe in Porto Vecchio, Corsica. The bus will not move until the next morning but for those filling the seats, standing in the aisle, the journey has already begun. At the front of the Team Sky bus, facing the other 22, stands Sir Dave Brailsford.​

Though the team are starting only their fourth Tour de France this eve-of-battle meeting of staff members has already become a tradition. There is laughter and jibing as relative latecomers try to beat the digital clock at the

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front of the bus: 8.55 . . . 8.56 . . . 8.57 . . . who will be late? No one.​

Brailsford knows the importance of such moments. As 8.59 changes to 9.00, the din of bonhomie fades to expectant silence. The team principal takes out his iPhone and says he wants to take a photograph of everyone on the bus. “Now the question I want you to consider is what memories this photo will evoke when you look at it six months from now.​

“You will want to say these were the best group of people I ever worked with, as good as any team could have had. You’ll want to look back and say we were good on that Tour.”​

I sit in the seat of the Belarus rider Kosta Siutsou, listen to Brailsford and recall Henry V and his eve-of-battle speech: And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here.​

For three weeks this group of people will work together, trying to ensure Sky’s nine riders are the best-supported in the race. Arriving at the team hotel each evening, their cases already in their rooms, they will find the carer Mario Pafundi waiting to greet them. Pafundi is neatly built, black hair, Mediterranean good looks, natural charm and an astonishing memory.​

Every day he is first at the hotel, gets the suitcases to all the rooms and then memorises the room numbers of every rider and every staff member. Four hours later they all arrive. “Chris, 214, second floor, key in your room; Edvald, 242, second floor . . .”​

“Mario, Mario, my room?”​

“402, fourth floor, suitcase is already there.”​

The team are addicted to detail; pineapple juice to make water more drinkable, every bike checked and passed by two mechanics, riders before staff in the restaurant and when the next day’s plan is distributed in the evening, you read it and think they could invade China.​

And then, on the stage to Alpe d’Huez, things went haywire. Marko Dzalo and David Rozman, two Slovenian carers, filled the big cooler box in the team car with ice the night before, thinking that for such a big day they needed to be ahead of themselves. In the morning, they topped up with one more bag of ice. But the previous evening’s ice had begun to melt and on the descent from the Col d’Ornon, 15km before the first of two ascents of Alpe d’Huez, mechanic Gary Blem, sitting in the back of the team car, heard water sloshing about in the cooler. Unknown to him, the water was escaping and dripping into the electronics of the Jaguar.​

This was the number one team car, driven by the director sportif, Nicolas Portal, and detailed to take care of Chris Froome. After the first climb, the dashboard panel had flashing warning lights everywhere. Blem reached back and saw the water all over the boot, causing the electrical carnage that foretold the day’s disaster.​

On the descent from the Col de Sarenne, 20km before the second climb of Alpe d’Huez, the car cut out. Blem coaxed the battery into renewed life but that lasted only a few minutes. They waited on the side of the road for the second team car to come, seven minutes that seemed like eternity, then they switched cars and tried to recover their number one place in the cavalcade.​

It was close to hopeless, for by now the leaders were climbing Alpe d’Huez for a second time and, on a road filled with fans, overtaking was dangerous and difficult. Needing to feed before Alpe d’Huez, Froome got teammate Pete Kennaugh to go back to the team car. “Car’s not there,” said Kennaugh on his return.​

At this point Portal was too far from Froome for their two-way radio to work. Having missed an opportunity to refuel, the race leader was becoming hypoglycemic; that is extremely low on sugar. Seven kilometres from the summit, Portal had worked his way through some of the race cars when he heard Froome’s voice on the radio. “Nico, sugar, sugar, I need sugar.” Portal still had some overtaking to do and by the time he was in position behind Froome, it was too late legally to give the rider the sugar-rich gels he sought.​

Still it had to be done; Porte dropped back, got the gels, passed them to Froome and the race leader would lose just 69 seconds to Nairo Quintana.​

Because Alberto Contador had a bad day, Froome increased his lead in the race to more than five minutes. That evening Neil Thompson, the Jaguar mechanic Brailsford has had with the team on the Tour, worked on the broken car from 6pm to midnight.​

This is Thompson’s second Tour with Sky. Before this, he had no interest in cycling. Football is probably his game. He manages his son’s team and when he says they went through last season without winning, he wants you to understand he could never see sport as a matter of life and death. But this car, he badly wanted it back on the road. Thought he had it, all those flashing lights went away, but then late in the night, a warning light for the air-suspension system triggered and he knew he was struggling. He went to bed worried, woke up worried; and when he went to the car first thing in the morning, he threw up, anxiety churning away until his stomach could take no more. “I know it shouldn’t matter so much but I want this team to win. We needed the car back in the race and now I’m probably going to have to pull it out.”​

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THIS evening in Paris, Froome will pull on his final Yellow Jersey and be acclaimed the winner of the Centenary Tour de France. He becomes the first African to win the Tour, after a race in which he has excelled and been accused of doping solely because he has been so good. Though many spectators have cheered, plenty have booed. Broken is the trust between athlete and fan.​

Six months ago I spent a week with Team Sky at a training camp in Majorca, the start of a project that would involve my living “inside” the team. Tomorrow night I will say goodbye to people with whom I’ve shared nine weeks since that trip. There was a week in Tenerife, another trip to Majorca, two days in Nice, two weeks at the Giro d’Italia, almost four weeks at Le Tour.​

The objective was straightforward: to determine as much as I could what was the culture inside the team, to see if they were ethical and free of doping. Because Froome was likely to be the team’s star rider, he was the one I most wanted to know.​

On the second rest day at the Giro d’Italia, I meet Richard Freeman, the team doctor, at a cafe in Bardonecchia. Freeman’s background is football, working for Bolton in the Premier League before accepting an offer from the British track cycling team and Team Sky. We have a coffee, go for a walk, talk for two hours and along the way he describes his reaction to Froome’s breakthrough performance at the 2011 Vuelta a Espana.​

He knew Froome as a rider with great talent but whose good days were followed by bad ones. Then, at that Vuelta, three weeks, not one bad day and second place overall.​

At first Freeman wasn’t convinced. “I was confused because Chris hadn’t performed with this consistency for the team and I wondered how he’d done it. Before I could be satisfied, I spent two weeks re-examining all of his blood samples from his two seasons in our team and looked at all the information in his biological passport.​

“What I wanted was to compare blood results from the Vuelta with the blood tests he’d done previously to see if there were changes. There weren’t. His blood values remained the same and whatever the reasons for him riding consistently in that Vuelta, in my opinion it wasn’t down to him doing things he shouldn’t have done.” Freeman’s admission of initial concern was reassuring. His desire to investigate even more so.​

Brailsford believes that Froome’s progress in 2011 was in part related to his successfully managing his bilharzia, a debilitating condition caused by a parasite that attacks red cells. The rider himself also believed that as he gained experience, he raced more intelligently. But who was he? How could a kid from a suburb south of Nairobi in Kenya get to the top of Mont Ventoux quicker than every other rider in the Tour de France.​

Picture him in 2006, a 21-year-old economics student at the University of Johannesburg, desperate to ride in the under-23 world championships in Salzburg. Kenya wasn’t organised or interested in that event. So he arranged his travel and equipment, acting as manager to a team in which he was the only competitor.​

He rode to the manager’s meeting in Salzburg but in the rain couldn’t find the venue. Twenty minutes late, he walked into the room with his bike under his arm. “This is a managers’ meeting,” someone said, “not for riders.” By now there was a pool of water by his feet. “I am a manager,” he said and everyone in that room with half a brain knew this kid had something about him.​

Think of him seven months later at the Giro delle Regioni, his second visit to Europe and first stage race in the old continent. Europe. “I got over to Regioni, third day was a mountain top finish, and I was surprised how easily I rode away from the leaders going up the last climb, I was with a Russian and a Slovenian. We dropped the Russian. The Slovenian was on my wheel and he begged me to slow down, saying he would give me the stage, ‘Just don’t drop me, don’t drop me’. ‘OK, OK’, I said, ‘not a problem’. We got to the last hairpin and they pulled the front vehicles off, into a ‘derivation’. I followed the vehicles off the course and as this was 100m before the finish line the Slovenian won the stage. I had to do a bit of a U-turn there.​

“Two days later we had another uphill finish in Montepulciano and I didn’t wait for anyone there, just went on my own, 5km from the finish, up through cobbled roads. It was beautiful, my first win in Europe. I was blown away.”​

Froome might have won that six-day race if only he had known how to ride his bike. “I had never done a descent before, not a proper descent with switchbacks. The descents I’d done in Africa were pretty straight, I never had to ride a technical descent and didn’t realise I had to use my front brake. I always thought that if I pulled my front brake, I would go over the bars. Using the back brake on the descents, I kept crashing. I wrote off three bikes that week, lost a trunk of time.”​

Geraint Thomas, Ian Stannard and Ben Swift, now his teammates at Sky, all rode the Giro delle Regioni that year. They couldn’t get near him on the climbs. On the descents, they tried to stay well clear.​

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MIDWAY through this Tour de France, I asked Sky’s chief doctor, Alan Farrell, about therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) which, traditionally, have been one route taken by cyclists seeking unethical advantage. They claim a medical reason for needing a banned corticosteroid, persuade the team doctor to apply for it and try to beat the system that way.​

“I’ve been with the team since April last year, almost 16 months. Applications for TUEs come from me and in my time, we have applied for two TUEs.”​

Farrell was at a medical practice in Dublin before joining Sky. On Thursday he travelled in a team car up Alpe d’Huez and felt as much under siege as every Sky car in the race cavalcade. Eggs smashed against the cars, beer too, and when a car slowed enough for the jeering mob to rock it from side to side, that’s what they did. The abuse was worst at those parts of the climb populated by Irish and Dutch fans. “Froome Dope” was one of the bigger signs at the Irish corner. All the way up to the top there were fans screaming at Sky riders while mimicking the act of injection into their arms.​

Two young men ran beside Froome, each with a “toy” giant syringe filled with an unknown substance. One got close, pressed the plunger and sprayed the substance directly into his face. The leader instinctively struck out with his right arm and punched the guy in the face, an act of physical violence utterly at odds with his character. “Some of the stuff went into my mouth, it might have been beer but I was conscious of not wanting to swallow even a drop and just kept spitting out. I was thinking, ‘What if there’s some product in that stuff’.”​

The ascents of Alpe d’Huez scared him. “Once there were riots in Kenya and my mum and I got stopped going through a particularly dangerous township. The protesters rocked our car, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Alpe d’Huez reminded me of that day.”​

Farrell met some Irish fans the next morning in Bourg d’Oisans and told his compatriots how disappointed he’d been by the reaction to Froome and Sky. “Our team is doing this sport in the right way,” he said, “and that’s what we get from you guys.” There were tears in his eyes as he spoke.​

A little later, four cyclists from Lakeside Cycling Club in Mullingar found Brailsford and told him they were sorry. A Dutch journalist told me he was shamed by the behaviour of his compatriots.​

Through it all, Froome has been a beacon of calmness. When Portal suggested appealing against Froome’s 20-second penalty for taking that feed on Alpe d’Huez, the leader advised him not to. “Nico, if I hadn’t got the gels at that point, I could have lost two minutes. Twenty seconds is OK.” This has been a terrific Tour de France and it has delivered a great new champion, one who started out in Kenya’s Ngong hills and learnt to love the bike while riding with a group of black friends. It was his good fortune to enter the sport when anti-doping controls were becoming more effective and attitudes changing.​

As for the mob reaction on Thursday, it was a reminder of how Lance Armstrong was regarded. Once he was the most loved sportsman on the planet. Partly because of that betrayal, the mob was baying for Froome’s blood on the Alpe. They were wrong when Armstrong was winning. And they are wrong now about Froome.​

History will correct this, as it did the Armstrong story.​

 

[Col_M]

Great story. Thanks for posting. That journalist hit the jackpot.

 

[nidge]

Great story. Thanks for posting. That journalist hit the jackpot.

David Walsh was about the only journalist willing to take Armstrong head on about his doping over the last decade and took untold amounts of abuse because of it. Top cycling journalist and always worth a read.

 

[Bus-Conductor]

David Walsh was about the only journalist willing to take Armstrong head on about his doping over the last decade and took untold amounts of abuse because of it. Top cycling journalist and always worth a read.

The most outstanding sports journalist of the last decade or two by a country mile. Let's not forget Paul Kimmage too. Both put their careers firmly on the line over a principle.

 

[Misfit]

Speaking of Kimmage....

http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-sports/paul-kimmage-shock-and-awe-but-little-joy-29436312.html

Paul Kimmage: Shock and awe but little joy
Everyone has their opinion on Chris Froome but nobody is using the 'g' word


We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously. – Albert Camus, The Fall

Thirty-five years ago, on a warm Sunday afternoon in July 1978, an American reporter called Robin McGowan stepped from a station wagon at the summit of L'Alpe D'Huez after the 16th stage of the Tour de France. It was his first time to cover the race and by the 16th stage – an epic 240km ride from St Etienne to L'Alpe D'Huez – he had reached a conclusion, memorably recorded in his book Tour de France.

"As I get out of the car, an English correspondent turns to me: 'This race sure beats anything I've ever heard of. Except for sailing single-handed around the world, I can't imagine anything so demanding.' I myself am in tears, as I have been most of the way up; it's the race and the altitude and the bravery hitting me all at once."

I thought of McGowan's words, late on Thursday evening, as I stood in the same place. The 165km stage from Gap had been one of the best for years. The American, Tejay van Garderen and the Frenchman, Christophe Riblon, had gone toe to toe twice on the mountain and their courage was a joy to behold.

But the battle for the yellow jersey has evoked no such joy.

Chris Froome has delivered shock and awe on almost every stage. He is the best climber in the race, the best time-trialist in the race and has defended the race lead for two weeks now with a severely weakened team.

On Wednesday, David Millar was astonished by Froome's performance in the time trial and immediately took to Twitter: 'For those who've just turned on the TdF coverage, Froomedog is going uphill. Yes, he is climbing, that is not a flat road.'

His performance last Sunday on Mont Ventoux was possibly the greatest I have ever seen. But no one has used that word to describe it; no one qualified to make that call – Merckx, Hinault, LeMond – has described Chris Froome as 'great'. He works extremely hard, they say. His performances have been exceptional, they say. But the 'g' word is off limits for now.

And there was an itch we couldn't scratch at L'Alpe D'Huez on Thursday – something odd, something different – when Froome had looked vulnerable and yet somehow extended his lead. What are we watching here? Where has this guy come from?

What's happened to our tears?

The press room at L'Alpe D'Huez in the Palais des Sports has always been a favourite. They've got these giant posters of previous winners: Andy Hampsten's solo win in 1992; Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond holding hands in 1986; LeMond, Gianni Bugno, Eric Breukink and Thierry Claveyrolat rounding the final corner in 1990; Peter Winnen and Jean-Rene Bernadeau almost falling across the line in 1981.

And my favourite, always my favourite, the day Michel Pollentier brought Robin McGowan to tears in 1978.

The photograph is great: Pollentier – with his crooked knees and elbows and facial contortions – is racing toward the summit with his team car alongside and we can clearly see the tanned and handsome features of his smiling manager, Fred de Bruyne. But it's the mechanic, hanging out the back window that makes it. Jean-Jacques Vandenbroucke's fist is clenched in triumph; his face is a portrait of absolute joy.

And you stand, staring at his smiling, happy face and it makes you want to cry. Why? Because he has no idea what the near and distant future holds.

That his rider, Pollentier, will be stripped of the yellow jersey that evening and ejected from the race for trying to cheat the dope control. That a Frenchman, Bernard Hinault, will take the lead four days later and seal the first of five Tours. That his son, Frank Vandenbroucke – one of the most gifted Belgian racers of all time – will develop a cocaine habit and die by the age of 34.

There have, of course, been many other doping deaths and we've had a succession of doping scandals but that's all finished now. This is a new era, we're told, the cleanest Tour for years. Cycling has only one problem now: the media. How dare they question Froome!

"If I was Froome, there would be no more press conferences," Bernard Hinault opined on Wednesday. "I'd have told the journalists to go fuck themselves."

"I'm really angry when I see all the criticism of Froome," Vincent Lavenu, the manager of the AG2R team, concurred. "They're trying to destroy cycling and the riders don't deserve it. But the public aren't fooled, and that's the most important."

"I know Froome is clean," David Millar chimed to L'Equipe. "The journalists are sceptical and that's normal – it's the Lance Armstrong effect – but in 15 years they will realise: 'Christ! We were horrible to Froome. He really didn't deserve that'."

Was this the same Froome he had tweeted about on Wednesday? The guy who pulverised the field on Ventoux without getting out of the saddle? The guy who races up climbs like he is racing on the flat? Where should we send the apology? Where did he find the 'certainty'?

On Thursday, the morning of the stage to L'Alpe D'Huez, there were contrasting headlines in two of the French dailies. L'Equipe led with 'Le Dossier Froome', a two-page analysis of Froome's power data (provided to the newspaper by the team) by Frederic Grappe, a respected physiologist. He broke his findings into four parts:

First observation: His power drops off normally: "The relationship between power and time is similar to what is known and is observed in all the riders that have been established in the record power profile. It shows, for example, a significant and normal power reduction of 60 watts (0.88w/kg) between 20 and 60 minutes effort."

Second observation: An exceptional aerobic power: "The extremely high maximal aerobic power (efforts of five minutes) confirms that he has an extraordinary high aerobic potential which means he has a VO2 max (this has never been measured in the laboratory by his team) close to the limits of known physiological science."

Third observation: A very stable weight: "His average weight over the two years is 68kg (in the morning) with less than 900g variations. This shows that the power he develops over two years is relatively stable when expressed in watts per kilogram (w/kg), a very important indication of the performances he has shown."

Fourth observation: Excellent recovery: "It is evident that to be able to operate with a power profile near 100 per cent of his maximum, Chris Froome must have excellent ability to recover between stages. Because if the level of fatigue accumulates too much, it is no longer possible to be close to his records."

Grappe, who works closely with the Francaise des Jeux (FDG) team, also reviewed Froome's performance in Wednesday's time trial and concluded that "the average power output was very well integrated and therefore completely expected."

The bottom line? Certainty. Froome is racing clean.

But a very different splash – 'The Tour of Doubt: Miracle or mystery? The incredible performances of Chris Froome, who won again yesterday, have reactivated suspicions' – appeared in Liberation, where Antoine Veyer, another physiologist, was one of three experts consulted. "On the Ventoux, Froome was the same as Armstrong and Pantani (416 watts) . . . I've asked Sky (his team): help me to believe you, help me to defend you, put everything on the table – his (power) data, his VO2, his blood values. You have nothing to hide."

They also quoted Gerard Guillaume, the team doctor at FDG since 1999. "Like every year on the Tour, we all want to believe but there are always questions, and doubt and incredulity.

"But things have definitely improved and guys who were humiliating us (with their performances) a few years ago are back in line . . . The thing that concerns me about Froome is how thin he is . . . you should lose muscle when you drop below a certain weight but . . . And Sky are talking about releasing his data to the World Anti-Doping Agency but they are only going to give what suits them."

The bottom line? Uncertainty. Is Froome racing clean?

On Thursday evening, after the stage to L'Alpe D'Huez, Froome was asked by a journalist from AP about 'Le Dossier Froome' and the analysis by Grappe that had appeared that morning in L'Equipe.

"What was your motivation in releasing that data? And what do you hope people will take away from that?"

"Okay, well, just so it's clear – it wasn't a decision that I took. The team owns all that data, and the team made the decision to release that data to the relevant analyst . . . but, yeah, I'm really happy to hear their findings and to hear their take on it, basically backing us up to say that these performances are very good, strong, clean sporting performances."

Then he added: "And just to back up what we've been saying all along . . . it's good that somebody has been allowed to see the data and after seeing the data they've said, 'These guys are doing all right . . . they seem to be doing things according to what they would expect'."

There was one word he didn't use to describe his performances – great. But he is unfailingly polite and modest. He knows, of course, that that's for others to judge and as my friend David Walsh once said, we reserve the right to applaud.