Froome unlucky to win in post-Armstrong fog of suspicion

In the first Tour de France of the post-Lance Armstrong era, the much reviled former seven-times tour winner played a disproportionately large role. Not so much Banquo's ghost at the feast as the ghosts of tours past, present and future, rattling his chain from his bunker in Texas, present in spirit, on screen and in the pages of Le Monde.

Armstrong got in there before the race by telling the French newspaper that in his day it was impossible to win the tour clean; after that the Texan’s spectre loomed large.

Chris Froome’s times for the toughest climbs were compared with Armstrong’s, irrespective of the fact that times and speeds in road racing are not an exact science.

The former Festina trainer Antoine Vayer conjured up power figures that claimed Froome was the physical equal of the Texan. Not surprisingly, when the A-word was mentioned at the tour leader's rest day press conference, Froome was not delighted: "Lance cheated and I am not cheating. End of story."

The Armstrong comparisons and references were inevitable. The influence the Texan made on cycling in his heyday was massive, the debate that raged from 2004 onwards about his probity was intense, and the immense mass of gory detail that was uncovered by the US Anti-Doping Agency and published in its “reasoned decision” last October was shocking.

His legacy is that any cycling performance viewed as being even an inch outside the norm – although no one is quite clear what that norm should be – is open to question.

French television, who drive the media agenda on the tour, felt free to ask the hard questions they largely failed to put to the Texan and speculate loudly during live commentary.

At times they were overcompensating. The French TV anchor Gerard Holtz made much of his "can you look me in the eyes, Chris Froome, and tell me you are clean?" moment. He could have asked the same question of riders within the Movistar team, who won two stages in the final week with Alberto Rui Costa, banned for doping in 2010, and who benefited from strong rides from their leader Alejandro Valverde, banned for his part in the Operación Puerto affair. But he did not.

'Scandalous'
The Alpe d'Huez winner, Christophe Riblon, said he felt the way Froome was being put on public trial was "scandalous", adding that he personally would rather learn how Team Sky approach cycling and work to improve his own performances.

David Millar, who has fallen out with the Team Sky head Dave Brailsford, was happy to defend Sky's race leader: "The press are sceptical and that's understandable. They have been fooled so often by false stars who lied to them. But they are mistaken. In 15 years' time they will look back at their views [of today] and will say: 'Christ, we were horrible to Chris.' I know Chris. I know the volume of training that he does. I know he's clean."

There were rational explanations for Froome’s superlative climbing performance on Mont Ventoux, the day in which he broke the opposition mentally and physically.

The effort was rehearsed dozens and dozens of times in training; remaining in the saddle gave him an aerodynamic advantage; he was in the slipstream of a television camera motorbike at the key moment; he remained in a lower gear to avoid possibly derailing his chain. Those explanations should have sufficed.

But rational reasons were presented for Armstrong’s success when he won his first tour in 1999, and were accepted at face value: weight loss after his cancer; special training regimes; the obsessive way he practised his sport.

However, there are plenty of differences between 2013 and 1999 for the pro-Froome camp to lean on. Drugs testing is more frequent and more stringent thanks to the biological passport. In 1999, Armstrong’s first tour, there was not even a test for the blood-doping erythropoietin (known as EPO).

The cycling milieu has lost any ambiguity it once had towards the needle – merely using a needle is banned. There is a gap in knowledge created by years of the doping culture, and teams and riders that once relied on doping are struggling to bridge it.

Sky’s Brailsford seemed to spend an unfortunately large proportion of his time attempting to fight Froome’s battles for him but his approach to proving his team’s probity was tactical rather than strategic.

As at last year's tour, when it was Bradley Wiggins in the firing line, Sky appeared to be scrambling to capture daily headlines. On Monday Brailsford stated that the World Anti-Doping Agency might come in to prove his team's probity; on Friday this was shot down.

On Tuesday he declared that he had contacted UK Anti-Doping in the hope it might give Sky a clean bill of health; that lasted 48 hours before Ukad politely said it was not its job.

Thursday's headline was the decision to release Froome's climbing data to L'Equipe for them to analyse, the only problem being that not even the French sports newspaper could make the figures public.

Its resident physiologist, the Française des Jeux trainer Fred Grappe, gave Froome a clean bill of health, which created a favourable impression until a little further research revealed that in 2001 Grappe had declared that in his view Armstrong was probably clean.

Proving a negative
Brailsford's struggles to present a convincing line stemmed from the fact that he had an impossible task – proving a negative. Sky's unwillingness to make Froome's physical data completely public had a rational explanation but gave the wrong impression. Such is the legacy Armstrong has left.

Even if cycling remains free of controversy that fog of suspicion will only dissipate slowly. Froome and Sky rode their luck on the road in this 100th tour, but it was their misfortune to win the race in this particular year.
Guardian Service