Racing Towards History

Froome’s dream of a Tour-Vuelta double and joining the elite band of five-times Tour winners is starting to look like it could come true...

- Vern Pitt

Chris Froome is out of puff. “It feels like I'm breathing through a straw up here,” he tells Cycling Weekly from his altitude camp in the Isola in the Alps ahead of the Vuelta a España. “We’ve just finished a big time trial effort now but most of it was above 2,000m so it was like, arrgggh…”

When we speak to Froome he is coming to the end of his Vuelta preparations but still has two criteriums to ride, in Kazakhstan and the Netherlands, before a final big training session on the Tuesday, five days before the race starts. Towards the end of the week Froome, and his training partners Wout Poels and Diego Rosa, will join their other team-mates for team time-trial practice in Nîmes, France, where the race starts.

It’s safe to say Froome hasn’t been taking it easy since racking up his fourth Tour de France title just three and a half weeks ago — he’s even lost the 1.5kg he put on in the second half of the Tour by stuffing himself to avoid a repeat of his bonk in the Pyrenees.

To reign in Spain 

Combining big-money post-Tour crits with altitude training in the short three week window between Grand Tours means there’s no time to relax. Froome is now halfway towards completing a historic Tour-Vuelta double. When he lines up at the start in Nîmes he will have the chance to become just the third person to complete the Tour-Vuelta double in the same year, and the first to do it since the Vuelta moved to its current slot in the calendar starting in late August in 1995.