Tour de France 2017: Chris Froome takes significant step to fourth victory in five years

Chris Froome took a significant but by no means definitive step forward towards his fourth outright victory in five years in the Tour de France on Wednesday when the Team Sky rider distanced his most dangerous overall rival, Fabio Aru on the race’s second last major mountain stage.

Froome responded well to a relentless series of short, punchy, climbing accelerations by France’s overall contender, Romain Bardet, on the highest slopes of the Galibier, the Tour’s toughest Alpine ascent this year.

Rather than Froome, the biggest victim of Bardet’s repeated attempts to shed the Briton proved to be Aru. The Italian National Champion has slumped from second to fourth, and whose time loss on Froome has tripled to nearly a minute.

Third on the gruesomely hard Alpine stage behind solo breakaway Slovenian Primoz Roglic, Froome’s chances of Tour victory still stand on a knife-edge compared to other years at this point in the Tour.

But the gaps are broadening in his favour. Bardet and Colombia’s Rigoberto Uran are now Froome’s closest pursuers, at 27 seconds back.

With Saturday’s final time trial the ace up the sleeve of Froome’s yellow jersey, the Tour leader’s rivals were all but obliged to drop the Briton. Bardet tried his utmost but failed, and Aru seems to be sinking out of contention fast.

“I was surprised by Fabio Aru getting dropped today, I expected him to go on the attack. There’s certainly no hiding in the third week of a Grand Tour,” Froome said afterwards.

“Certainly, for myself, I felt a lot better than I did in the Pyrenees a week ago. Hopefully I’ll have the same legs tomorrow.

“I think I just felt certainly in control at that point on the Galibier when it got very selective. I didn’t want to get into the situation I’ve seen in the last week, where one of the guys who was there or thereabouts on GC attacks and nobody wants to chase, and suddenly this gap turns into one minute or one and a half minutes.”

Whilst Froome is looking stronger, the prospects of Simon Yates following his twin brother’s tracks of 2016 and winning the Tour’s Best Young Rider white jersey dimmed somewhat yesterday. Yates almost cracked on the Galibier and lost over a minute and a half to his closest challenger in the classification, Louis Meintjes.

Despite dropping a spot to seventh, overall the rider from Bury still has a two minute cushion of time over the South African climber and is in typically bullish mode after the stage, but on Thursday’s final mountain stage, Yates can ill afford to lose more time.

“There’s not much to it. I went full gas and I wasn’t quite strong enough,” the Orica-Scott rider said afterwards.

“We’re pretty far into the Tour, I think I did well to limit my losses.”

Certainly neither Froome nor Yates can afford to sleep on their laurels, though as Wednesday’s abandon by the points classification leader Marcel Kittel showed. After winning five bunch sprint stages in a fortnight, a few days ago the German sprinter’s advantage on second-placed Michael Matthews was so great that Kittel seemed guaranteed to conquer the points title outright.

Instead, after two bad crashes yesterday the German has abandoned and, four days out from the finish, Matthews has now soared into pole position to capture the points classification. As Froome warned earlier in the Tour, “things in this race can change at the drop of a hat.”

The mountain climbers’ last opportunity to reverse a Tour tide flowing increasingly strongly in Froome’s favour, will come Thursday on the arduous, lengthy, ascent of the Izoard, the Tour’s third and final summit finish. But round one of this year’s two Alpine stages has seen Froome consolidate his lead, and they may find this second round even tougher.