Sky's Armchair Ride

While few Tour wins are a breeze, Sky rarely looked troubledas Geraint Thomas offered them a sixth win in seven seasons.So how should their rivals respond to the challenge?

- Geraint Thomas

In the aftermath of Geraint Thomas’s Tour de France victory, which sealed Sky’s sixth success in seven years at the sport’s biggest race, there has been plenty of talk about changes that could be made to the structure of teams and race routes in order to loosen the British team’s grip on the race. UCI president David Lappartient suggested that six-man teams were likely the best way to counter Sky’s domination, Tour boss Christian Prudhomme mooted the banning of power meters, and there have also been calls for the introduction of a salary cap. Oddly, though, there has been little discussion of how rival squads might alter their approach to the Tour, whether there were tactical options that were not being explored, and whether they could adopt some aspects of Sky’s methodology to boost their potential.

It is now often forgotten that Sky endured plenty of travails in its quest for the yellow jersey, not least in its first two seasons when it failed to muster any kind of challenge for the Tour title. Yet, its fortunes changed in 2012 when Prudhomme delivered a route that suited Bradley Wiggins to a tee and Chris Froome began to emerge as this decade’s Grand Tour giant. Over the subsequent half-a-dozen seasons, Sky have dominated, but, crucially, have also repeatedly demonstrated their gift for planning and adaptability. To an extent, this was easy to do while Froome was at his dominant best. But that supreme ability to adapt to changing circumstances was particularly apparent both before and during the 2018 Tour.

Every team had to answer two essential questions going into the race: how best to respond to a route where Prudhomme set ambushes at almost every turn and how to do so with eight riders instead of nine. Sky were also set a third: how to defend the Tour crown with the defending champion possibly missing from their line-up.