A strange kind of glory - Chris Froome’s was a career like no other

Although Chris Froome remained a professional bike rider until the end of 2025, his career as a Grand Tour contender came to a halt on June 13, 2019, when he suffered horrific injuries in a crash while reconnoitring the time trial at the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Everything changed when that fateful gust of wind caught his front wheel just as he lifted his hands from the bars. Before the incident, Froome was the favourite to win a record-equalling fifth Tour de France. Afterwards, and not for the want of trying, he would never come remotely close to being the same again. 

Froome spent more than a week in intensive care after suffering a double femur break, a broken elbow, fractured vertebrae, a fractured sternum, and a collapsed lung. He was already 34 and the assumption was that this laundry list of injuries would spell the end of his career.

Remarkably, Froome was back in the peloton the following February at the UAE Tour, and when the COVID-19 lockdown brought the world to a standstill, he might even have wondered if it would buy him the time needed to return to the top level.

It wasn’t to be. When the season resumed in the summer, Ineos left Froome out of their Tour selection altogether, and they didn’t stand in his way when Sylvan Adams offered him a lucrative five-year contract to lead Israel Start-Up Nation. Ineos have made plenty of bad decisions since Jim Ratcliffe began bankrolling the team, but this wasn’t one of them.

It was, depending on your point of view, a hopelessly ill-informed gamble by Adams or a masterful piece of negotiating by Froome. Either way, the pair were locked into a five-year marriage that began with optimistic noises and ended with Froome becoming an increasingly marginalised figure in his own team.

Froome raced the Tour in his first two seasons with Israel, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters about the supposed indignity of a former champion spending his time struggling in the gruppetto.

In the modern era, Greg LeMond was the only other previous champion to have struggled so publicly in his final Tours, but the American abandoned the race in both 1992 and 1994 once it became clear that he couldn’t keep pace with the best. Froome, by contrast, ground to the finish of the 2021 Tour in 133rd place, the lowest-ever finish by a previous champion.

Before the start each day, Froome would arrive in the mixed zone and speak optimistically about his prospects of returning to his old level and competing with Tadej Pogačar. It was hard to tell if he really believed what he was saying. No matter, it was difficult not to feel a curious admiration for his resolve as he clocked in each day and took beating after beating at the race he had once dominated.

There was one, brief flicker of his old heights in 2022, when he joined the early break and placed third at Alpe d’Huez, but that was as good as it would ever get for Froome in that strange epilogue to his career at Israel-Premier Tech.

He didn’t ride a Grand Tour in his final three years at the team, and he was largely relegated to delivering anonymous performances in minor races across the calendar. Where men like Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin had left cycling as soon as cycling had begun to leave them, Froome kept on going. 

The sporting returns were diminishing year on year, but the hefty contract was still rolling. Faced with that fiscal reality, Froome opted to fade away gradually rather than burn out. It wasn’t his fault that Adams had chosen him as his vanity signing. 

It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t romantic, but as Charly Wegelius memorably put it, cycling is no fucking fairytale. 

When Laurent Fignon retired in 1993, he scoffed at the significance of going out at the top. History remembers what you did as a rider, he insisted, not how you exited the stage. He wasn’t wrong. His reputation rests on those two youthful Tour victories in the early 1980s and that harrowing defeat to LeMond in 1989. His abandon at his final Tour is a mere footnote.

Cycling history will thus remember Froome in his pomp at Team Sky and not for his low-key leave-taking at Israel-Premier Tech. But it’s still hard to say where exactly in the pantheon he will feature. 

La Dernière Heure offered a damning appraisal of Froome’s legacy in an editorial last January entitled, ‘What will remain of Chris Froome? Virtually nothing...’ in which the newspaper argued that he was retiring to “general indifference.”

Yet in purely statistical terms, Froome is one of the greatest Grand Tour riders in history. He is one of only eight men to win all three Grand Tours, and only three – Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil – have surpassed his total of seven victories.

On the other hand, his achievements have been quickly eclipsed by the supersonic career of Tadej Pogačar, while Froome’s period of dominance – the Team Sky era – has become a byword for staid, formulaic racing by comparison to the no-holds-barred fare of the 2020s. 

Sky’s strength in depth typically saw them bolt down the race by riding tempo on the front before Froome unleashed shock and awe on the final climb. From Ax 3 Domaines to Pierre Saint Martin, the menu rarely changed.

Cycling memory can be superficial too. While Froome’s results were astonishing, his aesthetics were rather less pleasing. He always seemed to be perched awkwardly on his bike, and his pedalling was furious rather than fluid. To use the jargon of today, Froome never had the aura of an Anquetil or an Hinault.

Even so, Froome had one of the most remarkable backstories in cycling history. Born in Kenya and schooled in South Africa, his journey to the top level was a tortuous one. Froome was a product of African cycling and of his own sheer force of will, but he would enjoy his greatest successes under the British flag, having transferred his allegiance at the start of his professional career.

That decision undoubtedly helped his passage to Team Sky for their inaugural season in 2010, and it’s hard to imagine that Froome would have scaled anything like the same heights on any other team. Yet even then, his unexpected emergence as a Grand Tour rider on the 2011 Vuelta caught his own management completely by surprise. 

In his first two seasons at Sky, Froome hadn’t been selected for the Tour, and he hadn’t been offered a contract for 2012. At the age of 26, he seemed locked into a career as a water-carrier rather than a star, but the trajectory of his cycling life shifted dramatically in August 2011. 

It led to an awkward co-existence with Bradley Wiggins at the following year’s Tour. Froome was clearly the stronger of the two in the high mountains, but Wiggins was Team Sky’s anointed leader. Unlike Froome, Wiggins had developed under British Cycling’s aegis, and the raison d’être of Team Sky was to replicate the nation’s track success on the road by winning the Tour with a British rider. 

Those optics meant that Wiggins would be chosen as the first man on the moon. Froome quietly acquiesced in the hope that leadership would pass to him the following year.

It did, and Froome would go on to win four Tours, as well as the 2017 Vuelta (and the 2011 Vuelta after Juan José Cobo was snared by the biological passport) and the 2018 Giro. Yet although his achievements surpassed those of every other British cyclist, he never received the same recognition in the country he represented.

The roll of honour of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year illustrates the point. Tom Simpson (1965), Chris Hoy (2008), Mark Cavendish (2011), Bradley Wiggins (2012) and Geraint Thomas (2018) all picked up the gong, but Froome was pointedly overlooked time and again. He was shortlisted three times, but he never finished higher than sixth in the public vote. 

Proof, if it were needed, that he was seen as a citizen of the world rather than as a British athlete.

The reception to Froome’s achievements was mixed elsewhere too. Team Sky was founded with the stated aim of producing a clean British Tour de France winner, but the squad’s failure to live up to its own lofty promises of transparency meant that its dominance would divide opinion. 

Froome perhaps also had the misfortune to start winning the Tour in the immediate aftermath of Lance Armstrong’s downfall; his performances would face a level of scrutiny afforded to few yellow jerseys before or since. 

It didn’t help his cause that Sky – and Dave Brailsford, in particular – reacted so tetchily and defensively to any questioning of their bona fides. Advice from a succession of public relations consultants – including Alastair Campbell, according to several sources – seemed only to exacerbate the situation. For an outfit sponsored by a media company, Sky’s hierarchy was often embarrassingly inept when it came to managing media relations.

Froome himself was an exception to the rule. Throughout his years winning the Tour, he was always a calm and unruffled performer in press conferences, nodding politely in response to even the most loaded of questions and keeping his emotions in check even when abused by roadside fans. 

He also showed sharper PR instincts than his team on occasion, most notably when he agreed off his own bat to an in-depth interview with Paul Kimmage ahead of the 2014 Tour.

It all made for a curious combination. Sky’s crushing superiority and Brailsford’s defiance inevitably led to unflattering comparisons with US Postal, but Froome himself had far more in common with the consensus-building of an Induráin than the ritualistic bridge-burning of an Armstrong. 

In the third week of the Tour, Froome tended to grant the break considerable leeway, and he had little interest in anything other than carrying yellow to Paris. Yet unlike Induráin’s gift-giving in the 1990s, Froome’s divvying up of the pie seemed to do little to improve Sky’s image, in the peloton and beyond.

In the spring of 2017, when the infamous Jiffy Bag affair threatened Team Sky, Froome was pointedly late in expressing public support for Brailsford’s position, but both men would find themselves back on the same side of the barricades that winter, when it emerged that the rider had returned a positive test for salbutamol en route to winning the Vuelta.

The case posed an existential threat to the team, still bound by Sky’s so-called ‘zero tolerance’ policy, and no expense was spared in assembling the legal team that produced Froome’s defence. In the meantime, he resisted calls to recuse himself from racing, and he would go on to win the 2018 Giro in the most astonishing of circumstances. 

For almost three weeks, Froome had looked a shadow of himself in a race that was essentially a duel between Simon Yates and Tom Dumoulin. Froome’s one bright spot, a gritty stage win on the Zoncolan, was followed by a near collapse on the road to Sappada. On the morning of stage 19, he was fourth overall, some 3:22 off Yates’ pink jersey.

What happened next was the defining moment of Froome’s career. When he attacked alone on the gravel of the Colle delle Finestre with 80km to go, it looked like an act of desperation or even of folly. Instead, he would win by three minutes at Bardonecchia to seize the maglia rosa at the last, to the amazement of his peers. “He did a Landis, Jesus,” was George Bennett’s immortal assessment of a day that seemed to defy all rational explanation.

As Froome crossed the line, the speaker compared what we were witnessing to the sepia-tinted age of Coppi and Bartali. “An attack from another era,” he proclaimed of a day where the previous logic of the Giro and of cycling itself seemed to collapse upon itself. 

In hindsight, it was a glimpse of the future, not the past. The Hail Mary effort that so shocked us in 2018 would become the new normal in the 2020s. Froome was the precursor, if not the inventor, of what came to be known as the ‘new cycling.’

In the moment, of course, it still wasn’t clear if Froome’s win for the ages would endure in the record books, and that informed much of the unease surrounding the occasion. A month later, however, the UCI dropped the salbutamol case, and the virtual asterisk was removed. The Giro was Froome’s, and he was the favourite to complete the double at the Tour.

It didn’t turn out that way. Although Froome would stay in the peloton for seven more seasons, that dizzying, divisive 2018 Giro would be the final victory of a career like no other.