It may look like team SKY is one big family with Chris Froome winning the first "minor" mountain stage while team leader Bradley Wiggins grabbed the yellow jersey away from Fabian Cancellara. But look again.
As I have written last week, Froome is not only a threat to the yellow jersey ambitions of teammate Wiggins at team SKY, he is clearly the better rider at this point than the other 5-star favorites in this years race, even better than defending champion Cadel Evans. And the scary thing about this Kenyan-born rider is that he can do all these things while doing the dirty work for Wiggins.While SKY management is happy with the results, there, "strength in numbers" mantra is not exactly the proven formula in winning the yellow jersey.
Rewind to the 1985 and 1986 Tour de France.Bernard Hinault was still smarting from losing the 1983 and 1984 Tour to Laurent Fignon. And he wanted badly to win a record-tying 5th Tour. Fignon was out with an injury and the only rider standing in the way was the American upstart, Greg Lemond. What what better way to demolish the opposition by signing them up?
So Hinault thought that a 5th Tour was in the bag but the team forgot that Lemond wanted to win it, too! Clearly, Lemond was the better rider that year but team machinations and backstabbing left Lemond out from the top spot. Until today, Lemond thought that the 1985 Tour was his. A similar thing happened the next year but eventually, talent and youth triumphed, and Hinault was stuck with 5 Tours and Lemond would win his first of three.
In those days, the internal struggle within team LOOK was laid out in public, maybe because PR skills were not as savvy as today. That's why it's hard to read the press statements and interviews about the real story within team SKY and how this "abundance of richness" is affecting team loyalties and morale.
I doubt that we will be seeing a Wiggins-Froome struggle, ala Hinault-Lemond, in the front pages as the team will surely kept lid on the goings on in the team. Don't forget that this is not just a two way struggle, you have to kept in mind that another teammate, Mark Cavendish, the current world champion, is a part of this equation. If Cavendish had just his usual support in the sprints, I think he'd have 3 stage wins now instead of one, and I bet he is not 100% happy, even if he says he supports the team.
Froome is just 92sec behind Wiggins and he has shown that he is the better climber than Wiggins. He can time-trial, too, in fact, he was better than Wiggins in the 2011 VueltaaEspana ITT. Will he get the itch for yellow or will he stick to his words?
The 2012Tour de France is just a week old and a lot of things can happen. Stay tuned. - THE FREEMAN