Eventually even the extraterrestrial was excited. There on the highest podium of the Tour, among the sparkling Parisian lights of the Champs Elysées, Chris Froome fully savored the taste of the feat achieved on the roads of France, a triumph legitimized day after day with his all-tech cycling, always on the attack , whirling his legs until he releases mutant watts. What the British, born in Kenya, raised in South Africa, did on Mont Ventoux will remain in the history of the Grande Boucle as one of the most beautiful competitive pages, an impressive athletic gesture, the most precious pearl among the many that this runner gave us who until 12 months ago was relegated to the role of Bradley Wiggins' wingman. And that only three years ago at the 2010 Giro d'Italia he had gone into crisis on the Mortirolo so much that he got towed by a motorbike. He was discovered and the jury expelled him from the pink race at the end of the 19th stage. Also in this Tour Froome suffered a small penalty of 20 seconds in the fraction that ended on Alpe d'Huez: the fault of two sugar cubes taken by his faithful Porte and swallowed to tame a sudden hunger crisis that had seized the yellow jersey four km from the finish, by which time the regulations forbade any refueling from the flagship. With the shining eyes of Paris, this was the only moment in which Froome appeared human like the others: a domain, his, announced right from the demonstrative shot in the second stage on the ups and downs of Corsica, which has become a dictatorship after the exploit in the Pyrenees at Ax-3 Domaines.
Although this year Team Sky has not always been as compact and invulnerable as last year, Froome's opponents, Alberto Contador in particular who with the white Kenyan was one of the two super favorites of the centenary Tour, soon realized that only second place was up for grabs for them. And the fight to get on the podium was uncertain until Saturday, with Nairo Quintana and Joaquin Rodriguez who on the last ascent of the Tour, towards Annecy-Semnoz, beat Contador, who was increasingly drained of energy. For Froome, absolute master of the race, the Tour has transformed every day into a sort of stage on which to exhibit the new strength of his cycling, made up of computers, training on the verge of recklessness, continuous pre-race rollers to warm up the muscles (a novelty of Team Sky imitated, along the way, by all the other teams). A Tour that Froome has interpreted brilliantly, at all times, as if it were for him the occasion for definitive liberation from the role of subordinate to which he had been relegated until a few months ago, in the service of Wiggins, to the point of having to lose races who, free from team constraints, would in all likelihood have won as was the case in the 2011 Vuelta, second behind the Spanish Cobo because Wiggins was the candidate for success in Team Sky's plans. The same happened in last year's Tour with Froome who almost had to brake in the mountains in order not to detach his captain in yellow. It is no coincidence that the whole world believes Wiggins when he says, contradicting Lance Armstrong, that a clean Tour can be won, while these days, faced with the performance of Froome, capable of sprinting uphill with his 120 pedal strokes per minute, a curtain of suspicions has arisen that will also hold sway after the Tour. Cycling has been too recurring in the scourge of doping for people today not to distrust big companies even before getting excited. And beating suspicion is the only victory, which Froome still lacks in this triumphal season. Everyone's hope is that he will be able to hit it as soon as possible.
