November 2018 – Beyond The Peloton

When the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France, the sport’s two biggest Grand Tours, release their respective routes for the following season, there is always chatter about which race each favorite will choose to target. Chris Froome’s failed attempt at the Giro/Tour double in 2018 has likely put serious attempts to bag both to rest for the near future. This means each major favorite will be forced to choose a Grand Tour to target. While we know that Froome, the defending Giro champion, will mostly skip his title defense in an attempt to join the five Tour club, and Geraint Thomas, the defending Tour champion, will most certainly show up to the Tour to defend his 2018 title. While the path looks set for the two Sky stars, the 2017 Giro champion and rising star Tom Dumoulin is faced with an incredibly difficult decision in the 2019 season. Does the time trial crushing Dutchman head to a climb-heavy, TT-light Tour de France, or play it safe at the more suitable, but less prestigious Giro d’Italia?

The Dutch contender won his first and only Grand Tour to date when he took the 2017 Giro d’Italia title and has been tipped as a ‘star of the future’ since. But at 28, Dumoulin is rapidly entering his prime and needs to start winning Grand Tours on a semi-regular basis if he wants to be considered a true star. His runner-up placings at the 2018 Giro and Tour was a truly impressive feat, but the fact remains that Dumoulin needs to start winning on the sport’s biggest stage sooner rather than later. Another Giro title would certainly be a worthy feat, but if Dumoulin wants to ascend to the level of Froome, Nibali, and Thomas, he needs to Tour de France win.

Putting his Giro ambitions aside to go all in for a Tour de France title would the standard move for an ascendent Grand Tour star. However, Dumoulin, who thrives in time trials, must be concerned by the recently released Tour route that features a mere 27km of individual time trials.

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This is the second fewest amount of TT kilometers in any recent edition, behind only the paltry 15km in 2015. The lack of TTs is compounded by a course so laden with climbing that Tour director Christian Prudhomme has deemed it the ‘highest’ route of all time. If Geraint Thomas shows up in 2019 with the climbing form he sported in 2018, he would be close to unbeatable on the five mountaintop finishes.

In contrast to the Tour’s route, the 2019 Giro d’Italia route features a whopping three individual time trials that add up to a total of 56 kilometers. On the surface, this is a route designed to easily serve Dumoulin up his second Giro title, but if we dig a little deeper, a few cracks in this theory appear. The opening 8km time trial on stage one features the steep 1.8km climb to the San Luca basilica in Bologna (in recent years, the 10.8% average climb has been used as the finish for the Giro dell’Emilia race).

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The 34.7km TT on stage 9 features close 3,000 feet of climbing, with the entire second half of the course climbing at a 5-7% grade to the microstate of San Marino.

Even the ‘flat’ final 15.6km TT on the final stage in Verona features a 4km-long climb right in the middle of the course that features close to 700 feet of vertical gain.

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These climb-heavy TTs are paired with an extremely mountainous final half of the race. Stage 20 features four brutal climbs deep in the Dolomites and will ensure the eventual winner of the race is a legitimate climber.

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While Dumoulin isn’t thought of the climber on par with Chris Froome, Simon Yates, Vincenzo Nibali or even Geraint Thomas, the results speak otherwise. The chiseled Dutchman was present in the lead group at every mountain top finish in the 2018 Tour, and showed up to the World Championships looking leaner than ever. The new physique likely cost him some raw power, which was evident when he surrender his World TT title to Rohan Dennis, but saw him hang with the absurdly steep climb specialist on the final Höttinger Höll climb. The 3.2km climb had an average gradient of 11.5%, and even hit grades up to 28% in sections. If Dumoulin, who traditionally just looked to hang with the best on the long climbs in the Grand Tours, was able to stay within seconds of the lightest and punchiest climbers in the world at the end of a long, brutal race, then it seems likely to expect him to be able to stay with the lead group on any climb the Tour and Giro can serve up.

Dumoulin’s 2018 season, in which he finished 2nd in both the Giro and Tour, in addition to a 4th place at the World Road Race Championships, was a spectacular feat of endurance and versatility but saw him fail to get a single mass-start victory. This means that he needs a statement win more than ever if he wants to continue to advance his star power. He most certainly would prefer that win to come at the Tour de France, but the lack of any significant time trial kilometers means he would need to take time on the mountains, versus simply limit his losses as he’s done in the past. With its lumpy TTs and mountainous last half, the Giro d’Italia presents challenges, but surely represents his best chance to get his bank his second Grand Tour victory.

If Dumoulin wants to play it safe and pad his palmares with a second Grand Tour title, he should focus solely on the Giro. But if he feels like rolling the dice and face steep odds in exchange for a massive payoff in the unlikely event of success, he should go all in for a highly unfriendly Tour route. If he goes in with the ultra-slim physique he had at World’s, he could upset the pure climbers on the supposedly shorter, punchier climbs spread throughout the Tour.

Since the 2019 Tour de France route was unveiled last week, speculation of who will benefit from the time trial-light course has been rampant. Two major narratives have emerged since the release of the course details. The first is that ASO has designed a course with minimal time trials and a preference for shorter, punchier climbs to benefit homegrown contenders like Romain Bardet and Thibaut Pinot. The second is that the arbiter of the race, Christian Prudhomme and ASO, are tired of watching Team Sky send out their formidable armada of word class riders to sit on the front of the peloton for three weeks with a pace that inevitably and methodically asphyxiates the competition.

ASO, a vestige of the old-school French cycling establishment, would certainly prefer a French winner of the national tour, and it is no secret that Sky’s stranglehold on the Tour since 2012 has stolen some of the race’s iconic luster. However, the assertion that ASO is tipping the scales in an attempt to foil the British squad has some major flaws.

The first major flaw in this argument is that if the French organization truly wanted to put the brakes on Sky’s dominance, they surely wouldn’t have included a 27km team time trial on the second stage. While Sky has never won a TTT at the Tour, the event has seen them solidify their GC leads whenever the discipline has been included in the route (2013, 2015, and 2018). Their collective team strength has seen them put time into their GC rivals and forced them into the unenviable position of chasing the world’s best stage race team with a deficit.

In theory, the event allows lesser time trialists like Bardet and Pinot to hide behind the collective strength of their teams and attempt to limit their losses. However, it is tailor-made to accentuate the team with the budget to afford the world’s biggest engines and makes it difficult for superior time trialist with weak teams, like Tom Dumoulin, to get an edge on the Sky leaders.

The second flaw in the theory is that, realistically, an anti-Sky route simply does not exist. When Chris Froome is on form, he is the best climber and time trialist in the world. To add to the team’s wide swath of dominance, at last year’s edition, his teammate Geraint Thomas proved himself to the strongest climber, while missing out on victory during the stage 20 time trial by a mere second. And even if their two veteran riders find themselves on the wrong side of their best performances come July, the team still has the young Colombian climbing sensation Egan Bernal. In short, Sky will likely show up to the 2019 Tour with riders that can potentially win over any and all terrain

Is an Anti-Sky Route Possible?

While there are riders that can challenge the Sky triumvirate of Thomas, Froome, and Bernal in the respective disciplines, nobody can match them as a combined force. If ASO substituted an individual time trial in place of the team time trial, hybrid time trialing/climbers like Tom Dumoulin could challenge Sky, but strong climbers with dubious TT pedigree like Quintana, Bardet and Pinot would hemorrhage time to Thomas and Froome before the race got to the mountains.

If ASO eliminated time trials from the route altogether, Thomas, Bernal, and Froome could outclimb the competition in the high mountains. Thomas won back-to-back mountain stages in the 2018 Tour, and looked like the strongest rider nearly every time the race tilted skyward. Even though age looks to be slowing him down, Froome would ritually slaughter every so-called climber on the opening mountain stage early in his reign, and his mountain ambush to win the 2018 Giro d’Italia on stage 19 proved he can still deliver knockout blows on the most demanding mountain stages. Bernal awed during the 2018 Tour with his ability to set a blistering tempo for an absurd amount of time up Alpe d’Huez, which prompted many pundits to anoint him the star of the future. Bernal wrestling team leadership away from his older teammates in 2019 would be a drastic departure from Sky’s familiar blueprint, but it wouldn’t be entirely shocking.

Since Sky’s top talent has proven to be the best at climbing and time trialing, while being competent in descending, tactical nous, dealing with the ‘chaos’ of the new, shorter mountain stages and winding roads of the rolling ‘trap’ stages, what route could ASO possibly serve up that could set them at a disadvantage?

Looming Issues in 2019

Even though Sky can’t be thwarted by a specific route, they do have a few major questions marks looming in 2019.

The defending Tour champion, Thomas, has spoken about inter-team tensions that arose during the race. For example, prior to the stage 3 team time trial, team directors informed Thomas that the team would not wait up if he flatted. This decision was made despite assurances that he would be a ‘protected’ rider going into the race. While he went on to win, these issues will arise once again at the 2019 Tour. While having two leaders can present an obvious advantage, it also doubles the odds of an ill-timed flat or mechanical derailing the team’s plans. For example, if Froome flats early on and Thomas is the closest rider, will he offer his bike to Froome as he did on stage 19 of the 2016 Tour, or will he ride on as Froome is left to wait for a spare from the team car? It is difficult to imagine a defending champion deferring leadership to a teammate, which means Sky will likely have to deal with the accommodating two full leaders from stage one.

The second major obstacle is the age of their top two riders. Froome will be 34 and Thomas 33 when the pair line up for the 2019 Tour. Winning a tour at this age is incredibly rare, with grand tour performances dropping off drastically after the age of 32 (Cadel Evans became the oldest rider to take a Tour title in the modern era when he won in 2011 at the age of 34). Also, once a ‘senior’ rider loses a Grand Tour, they almost never return to their winning form.

As Froome and Thomas find themselves on the downslope of their careers, Sky has the luxury of an insurance policy in Bernal. However, a nasty crash at the San Sebastian put him out of action for a few months, and his return at the late-season Il Lombardia saw him distanced on the final climb by Pinot and Vincenzo Nibali. If Bernal is looking to assume a leadership mantle at Sky, getting dropped by the likes of Nibali and Pinot isn’t a great sign. In addition to the questions of his ability to return to his Tour de France form, young Colombian stars have a history of burning bright at extremely young ages, only to plateau and struggle to improve the final few percentage points (i.e. Quintana, Uran, Henao). A similar development trajectory for Bernal would throw a wrench in Sky’s plans.

The 2019 Tour de France, while featuring limited time trial kilometers and a few punchy climbs, should play right into a Sky team at full strength. However, keep an eye out for increased team tensions and age considerations to potentially trip up Sky when the 2019 Tour finally gets underway.

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This piece has since been published by The Outer Line.