Jeremy Whittle looks at the unique circumstances that have combined to make his move elsewhere almost inevitable.
It would have been hard to imagine Chris Froome ever leaving Team Ineos as he rode up to a country pub in the picture-postcard village of Linton, watched with a beaming smile by Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, a little over a year ago.
Ratcliffe had flown in for the unveiling of his new project, Team Ineos, shortly before Froome rode up. One colleague still insists he heard the Ride of the Valkyries as his helicopter landed dramatically in a nearby field and Ratcliffe mutter “I love the smell of a sports franchise in the morning,” as he strolled across the village green to the Fountain Inn pub.
For a long time, Froome, with his multiple Grand Tour wins was Mister Big in Team Sky, but the power moved to Ratcliffe once he took over ownership of the team. That shift was accentuated when Froome crashed into a wall during a time trial recon in June last year, forcing an extended layoff and a long period of rehab. Meanwhile, the racing went on and the power slipped away even further, as Egan Bernal claimed his first Tour de France title and an under-cooked Geraint Thomas finished second.
Two other life-changing events then tilted the axis further. First came the pandemic and a creeping paranoia within cycling’s transfer market as the racing ground to a halt, then, soon after, the sudden, devastating, death of Nico Portal, Froome’s sports director and long-time collaborator.
Describing Portal as “irreplaceable,” Froome said, “it’s hard to know where to go from here.”
“He was with me through the hard times, picking me up any time I doubted myself, and right by my side encouraging me to every success.”
Now, Portal is gone and Froome’s contract with Ineos is up.
Injury or no injury, the cold hard facts are that Froome hasn’t won a race for two years. He’s on £5 million a year. Is he still worth it? Well, if he has more Grand Tour wins in him then maybe, but even so, in the post Covid 19 marketplace, with sponsors running scared and riders worrying for their jobs, it’s a huge amount to invest in a 35 year old coming back from major injuries.
Ineos won’t see the point in paying Froome £5M to finish fifth in the Tour, or to win a stage in the Dauphine. Froome insists he can win big again, that his ambition is undimmed, but after such a bad crash, the doubts will remain.
“My dream, when I retire, would be to have won more Tours de France than anyone else,” Froome insisted in April.
Responding through the media, team mate Bernal didn’t flinch.
“…I’m not going to throw away an opportunity to win another Tour de France, that’s for sure,” he said. “That I would sacrifice myself, being at my 100 per cent… I don’t think I’m going to do that, nor will he (Froome), nor will anyone.”
Hovering, with £5M in his pocket and a ready-made team is Canadian Sylvan Adams, philanthropist and billionaire, sponsor of Israel Start-Up Nation, and coincidentally, the man responsible for bringing the Giro d’Italia to Israel in 2018 — the year of Froome’s extraordinary breakaway to final victory on the Colle Delle Finestre. Adams, an accomplished cyclist and Masters champion, is fast-tracking his team towards Grand Tour success.
Froome knows that leaving the familiar surroundings of Ineos, where he has built his career and his reputation, will be a wrench and a gamble, but it now seems inevitable. Adams’ team, much like his roster of riders, combines grizzled staff that have years of World Tour experience with relative newcomers to the European scene.
The timing too is important.
Right now, Froome remains the most successful Grand Tour rider in the peloton. Leaving mid-season would be a huge play, but say he falters in August and September, misses a podium finish in the Tour or elsewhere, in a market where budgets are increasingly contracting, how will he be seen then? How will he be valued then?
Ratcliffe, for all his easygoing charm, is not a sentimental man. He has ridden roughshod over his critics around the world for years, dismissed environmentalists as ignorant snowflakes, attacked governments for what he sees as their economic shortsightedness. He has multiple sports franchises and business projects.
Chris Froome is just another asset, one of the many pieces in Ratcliffe’s global jigsaw puzzle. And as every veteran pro will tell you with a weary shrug, the brutal truth is that when it comes to contracts, cycling remains a ‘what have you done for me lately?’ sport.