The 2017 Tour de France will be stupid, and that may not be bad

The Tour de France has a Chris Froome problem. The British cyclist has won three of the last four Tours, and might have become the fourth rider to ever win four in a row (fifth if you count ... you know) if he hadn’t been forced to abandon the race in 2014. He has been a part of almost every defining move and moment of the Tour since he ushered Bradley Wiggins to the yellow jersey in 2012.

The 2016 Tour was the height of Froome’s frightening hegemony. Until then, he had been the face of power meters and peloton wars of attrition that weren’t all that fun to watch. The argument went that he was a product of his system, devoid of racing spirit and panache. Then he shattered that argument, racing an individually brilliant Tour replete with surprise attacks, feats of strength, and quick-thinking in the face of utter wackiness.

The Tour de France doesn’t like hegemony. In response, Tour general director Christian Prudhomme laid out a course that feels like a direct attack on Froome. The 2017 Tour will feature shorter time trials, fewer mountaintop finishes, more extreme climbing gradients, and more flat stages than in years past. The stages themselves will be less interesting, but boring also works against Froome’s sensibilities.

Fewer chances to attack should mean tighter time gaps on the final general classification. That is a big deal in a field of contenders as deep as we may have ever seen. The seven-minute gap between Froome and 10th-place Roman Kreuziger last year was the smallest in the history of the Tour. Eight of those first nine riders after Froome are back.

The Tour is often criticized as dull compared to cycling’s less-publicized world tour races and Classics. This year’s course won’t help that perception, but by diluting the racing, Prudhomme may have already sown chaos in the standings. It’s a dumb and brazen gambit that will punish the yellow jersey (and there’s only one man Prudhomme could have had in mind) on the off chance he makes a mistake.

This year’s Tour de France will be stupid. The course is head-scratching, and many of the expected favorites, including Froome himself, seem to be riding in less-than-ideal form. More than usual, a moment or two could dictate the outcome, and if that’s the case, this may be the best chance in years to see someone beat a full-strength Froome, straight up, at the Tour.

One shouldn’t try to read too much into Froome’s non-Tour results. He and Sky are as singularly focused on the Tour as anyone, and have always been tuned to exactly where his conditioning needs to be throughout the year. No rider will ever win every race. That said, one race in particular has seemed to correlate with Froome’s success: The Critérium du Dauphiné.

The Dauphiné is a popular pre-Tour tuneup because it often uses routes and climbs that will appear in the Grand Boucle one month later. Froome has been a regular at the race, winning the Dauphiné before each of his three Tour victories. It has traditionally been a tip that he was rounding into form.

This year he took fourth in the race by some distance, finishing 1’33” back of winner Jakob Fuglsang. The final stage was a sign that something might be off. Froome entered the day more than a minute back of leader Richie Porte, and seemed hell bent on making up the time in the mountains. He had the gap he needed to win the Dauphiné at the base of the final climb ... then was stormed through in the final kilometers by Porte, Fuglsang, Daniel Martin, and others. He fell from second to fourth overall, and Froome’s body language indicated that what had happened was not by design.

Though Porte took second at the Dauphiné, he is the second betting favorite to wear the Maillot Jaune in Paris. For good reason: Froome’s former lieutenant has been riding consistently well for a long time. He finished a best-ever fifth in the Tour last year, and has two world tour wins (to Froome’s zero) this year at the Tour Down Under and Tour de Romandie.

That fifth place at the Tour is probably better than it looks, too. Porte likely would have finished on the podium if not for bad luck. He finished roughly one minute out of second place despite losing two minutes to a punctured tire on Stage 2 alone. He then went down alongside Froome in that bizarre crash on Ventoux, and still managed to pick his way up the general classification until a slip on the wet roads toward Mont Blanc on Stage 19 stopped his progress.

Froome and Porte are elite in the two skills most necessary to win a Grand Tour: climbing and time trialing.

Those skills will be less useful this year than usual, however. The two time trials add up to 36 relatively flat kilometers — compared to 54.5 more technical kilometers last year — and shouldn’t lead to insurmountable time gaps. As for climbing, the presence of just three mountain top finishes means that, even on the most brutal stages, trailing riders will have plenty of downhill and level terrain to mitigate any damage.

The Tour makes up for the lack of decisive climbs with novelty and difficulty. Here are the three most likely Queen Stage candidates:

Those spikes on Stage 9 are not deceiving you. Riders will be spending long stretches riding at gradients greater than 10 percent, and the steep, technical descent from Mont du Chat toward the finish line was a favorite at the Dauphiné. Stage 17 is a classic Alps monster, and riders will take it on one day before surmounting the Col d’Izoard and the third highest mountaintop finish in Tour history.

Those profiles are the blueprints to everyone else’s success. France’s Romain Bardet will tank in the time trials, but no one made a more impressive move in the mountains than he did last year when he soloed to a Stage 19 victory and vaulted himself into second place. Colombia’s Nairo Quintana might have been favored over Porte if he hadn’t also raced the three-week Giro d’Italia in May — he too is happiest on steep, high climbs. Spain’s Alberto Contador and Alejandro Valverde — now 34 and 37, respectively — are helped more than anyone by a less-taxing Tour that will give them several instances to showcase their guile.

The glut of flat stages means that, most days, you’ll probably be better off tuning into the last few kilometers and catching the highlights later. I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone sit through a Stage 10 that looks like this ...

... even knowing the images of duck fat delicacies that will be wafting across your computer screen in lieu of cyclists ambling their way towards a mass finish.

I imagine that Tour organizers know that too, and are consciously trading in a low rumble of attention for what they hope will be staccato bursts of true human excitement. They’re hoping to do what so many racing teams have failed at for years: Break the Sky train and make their weird race fun again.

It’s a bad bet. Chris Froome has yet to meet a challenge he couldn’t match anywhere in the Alps and Pyrenees of France. It’s hard to be mad at the attempt, however. As stupid as it is to think you can beat Froome, it’d be stupider not to try.