Geraint Thomas struggled to articulate what winning the Tour de France was like after Saturday’s time trial in Espelette. “I can’t speak man,” was more or less all the Team Sky rider could tell the interviewer before the tears began. “I don’t know what’s happened to me” were his final words before he buried his head in his hands.
You can hate Team Sky, but Geraint Thomas’ yellow jersey was teamwork at its finest
With its sixth Tour de France victory in seven years, Sky is making its case as the greatest Tour team ever.
Thomas’ win will be Sky’s sixth Tour de France overall victory in seven years for the team, which came into existence in 2010 with Murdoch money and the stated ambition of winning the Tour with a British rider. They accomplished their goal in just their third season with Bradley Wiggins’ landmark 2012 victory, and have kept winning ever since.
Team Sky have already accomplished something for the history books. Teams are a bit more ephemeral in cycling than in most other sports, regularly changing names and colors, but there are enough true franchises around to keep score. And the only team prior to this year to win six Tours in seven years was the legendary Renault machine of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. French icon Bernard Hinault won four times and Laurent Fignon won twice for the powerhouse.
And that’s it in terms of Sky comparisons.
Sure, Armstrong’s Postal/Discovery teams won seven in a row and eight of nine, but only Alberto Contador’s 2007 victory is still recognized. Miguel Indurain’s five wins started in 1991, three years after his teammate Pedro Delgado’s win, giving their Reynolds/Banesto team (now known as Movistar) six wins in eight years. Back in ancient times, Alcyon-Dunlop won eight Tours and Peugeot-Wolber seven, but never more than four in a row, and records from the 1920s are of a very different quality than those of the modern era.
Thomas’ victory would be a perfect bookend to Wiggins’ win — sandwiched around Chris Froome’s four titles — if it only their run was actually about to end. With Thomas in his prime and Froome not yet out of his, and with the young, ultra-talented Egan Bernal on the squad, Team Sky are poised to be the yesterday, today, and tomorrow of the Tour de France. Sky could far surpass the Tour success of any team we have ever seen.
Let’s stop for a moment and recognize Thomas and his great individual win.
As much as his team delivered, so too did he. I personally had no expectations for him. I assumed he would either extend his run of bad luck in Grand Tours (caused on a few occasions by poor bike handing) or that he would sacrifice his interests for Froome’s. My own prejudices against Thomas as a Tour winner date back to his early excellence in the classics, when he won the E3 Prijs Vlaanderen, a harbinger of Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix success. To shift gears and win the Tour de France would be like a top wide receiver deciding it was time to play quarterback — something not theoretically impossible ... but almost.
But Thomas’ climbing has improved steadily over the years, and wins in Paris-Nice two years ago and the Criterium du Dauphiné this June gave his supporters reason to believe.
During the Tour, Thomas benefited from excellent support and a lack of bad luck (“good luck” isn’t really recognized in cycling), which helped put him in the overall lead on Stage 11 while Froome and other contenders ceded time because of mishaps, or departed the race with injuries. Once he had the yellow jersey, though, Thomas was the strongest rider, dominating the decisive phase of the race with consecutive stage victories in the Alps and a strong time trial on Saturday.
We can wonder if Rigoberto Uran or Richie Porte might have kept pace had they not crashed out, or whether the crafty Nibali might have made headway in the Pyrenées, but that’s speculation. Thomas earned this win and those tears.
But there is no denying that the excellence of Team Sky had a lot to do with that individual accomplishment.
All six of Sky’s victories underline the oft-overlooked truth that cycling is very much a team sport, even if it lists its results in individual terms.
More proof is that all six victories have looked roughly the same. The most notable marker is monotonous domination of the mountain stages, where Sky domestiques, one after the other, take turns grinding the entire peloton to dust by riding an infernal pace in service of their captain. Wearing out rivals and tracking down anyone with the temerity to attack are the chief weapons of a strong team. When there is a team time trial on the schedule, the advantage becomes even clearer — and although BMC nudged past Sky on Stage 3 by four seconds, that was the day Thomas moved into position to win the Tour.
Sky assembled its roster with sheer purchasing power on top of its roots in Britain’s fertile track scene. But the hallmarks of Sky’s success extend, we are told, well out of view, where they apply their financial advantages to make marginal gains — the best equipment, the best clothing, the best nutrition, the best training advice, and other scientific discoveries that add up to seconds here and there.
And yes, “marginal gains” reeks of more salacious practices. Both Froome and Wiggins have been accused of abusing the therapeutic use exemption (TUE) to use otherwise banned products for alleged medical issues like asthma. But few would dispute the team’s overall strength, if not a few of its claims to legitimacy.
The individual-vs-team element of cycling makes it difficult to compare Sky’s success to other sports. It resembles, perhaps, Tom Brady’s accomplishments within the New England Patriots, in that Sky are dominating at a time when parity should be more the norm — every team has wind tunnel testing, nutrition experts, biometric data, and more. An even better comparison might be Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid if you consider Froome to be the center of Sky. Both Real and Sky are power franchises that can buy their competition’s best players to be backups in case their first two international stars are tired or hurt.
Sky deserve full credit for developing Froome and Thomas, and other top British riders. But they started their run by buying Wiggins away from the American Slipstream team (now EF Education First-Drapac), and they have surrounded their British captains with domestiques who are strong enough to be captains on other teams. This year it was Wout Poels and Michal Kwiatkowski, both expensive riders developed first by other top teams. Kwiatkowski had a World Championship on his resume when Sky called.
The acquisition of 21-year-old Bernal was like giving the Golden State Warriors the top pick in the NBA draft. At the 2017 Tour they relied on Mikel Landa, who took fourth overall while assisting Froome and then became a leader for Movistar. Top riders like Uran, Porte, Sergio Henao, Mikel Nieve, and Thomas himself have all served Sky as helpers during their run.
The power of money to create a great team is undeniable, but so too is the power of teamwork.
Sky has always shown that by winning the Tour, but never more so than this year.
Many fans despise Sky for their success, which is not unlike the antipathy generated by the Patriots, Warriors, and Blancos. But each of those teams is at least occasionally (if not relentlessly) recognized for its contribution to the noblest notion in sports: That people working collectively can create something greater than the sum of their individual qualities.
The team is picked apart by fans for any whiff of ethical lapse (hello, Deflategate), even though the sport has seen far, far worse than anything Sky has been accused of. Throw eggs at them if you must (which literally happened to the Team Sky car this year); that reaction isn’t without justification. But with a different set of glasses you can just as easily see in their success the roots of what’s great about cycling.
The end of Sky’s Tour dominance is difficult to predict.
Next year Froome will be 34, a ripe age for a Tour winner, and frankly his grasp on the race had begun to weaken in 2017, before he put the leg-draining Giro d’Italia in front of his Tour ambitions in 2018. Nobody will dismiss his chances if he’s healthy and rested for the 2019 event, but it won’t be a shock if he doesn’t spring back into form, either.
Thomas, the defending winner, will have all eyes on his back, and if someone of similar strength is as fortunate, the race for yellow will truly be on. Dumoulin and his Sunweb team will hopefully come to their senses and skip the Giro to focus on Paris, and maybe — just maybe — Porte will stay upright for three whole weeks. And if Thomas can’t be the leader, even someone as hypnotized by youth and Colombian genes as myself can’t say whether Bernal is quite ready yet.
For Sky’s detractors, they must now spend another offseason hoping for more sponsors to level the financial playing field so that the sport’s mountaintop can be fought over rather than just ceded to a single squadron. But to want to deny them the mountaintop is a failure to see the mountaintop for what it is: The full power of teamwork, the existence of which cycling fans spend years trying to describe to their less interested friends.
Yes, we need more than one great team, but Sky deserve loads of credit for raising the bar. It’s everyone else’s job to find a way over it.
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