Why I believe Froome’s Giro win is legit

Now that Chris Froome has won the 2018 Giro d’Italia in an incredible fashion, a lot of critics have come out to say that he didn’t deserve to win it.

Why all fury?

Here’s a backgrounder:

Last December, 2017, the International Cycling Union (UCI) announced that Froome tested positive for salbutamol, a drug used to open up the airways for asthma patients. But he was not suspended since according to UCI rules, salbutamol belongs to a group of drugs that when a rider tests positive, is not mandatorily suspended from racing. In other words, Froome can still race until the investigation is concluded.

A lot of current pundits and current riders, including runner-up Tom Dumoulin, had said that Froome shouldn’t be in that race. Even the great Bernard Hinault, a 5-time Tour de France winner, and the last Frenchman to win the Tour thirty three years ago, said after the Giro that Froome shouldn’t have been allowed to start at the Giro. But Hinault forgot that he was suspended for 30 days after the 1982 Tour when he refused to take a drug test.

So why all the anger after the fact?

Well, Froome was not expected to win the Giro. He had a bad start, crashed even before the race started in Israel, and even though he won a very tough mountain stage, he was dropped again the next stage. In fact, just before he did a “Lazarus”, on stage 19, he was almost 4 minutes behind the overall leader at that time, countryman Simon Yates.

But then with 80km to go on stage 19 and three mountains more to ride, he dropped all  those riders in front of him and when the dust cleared, Froome was ahead of Dumoulin by 40sec with just two days left in the race. I think that this fact is so unpalatable for his critics to swallow.

The thinking of his critics was this simple: If somebody wins in an unbelievable fashion, like a long distance breakaway, then it’s too good to be true and ergo, not trie at all. That athlete must be using performance enhancing drugs.

Cyling’s history is rife of noble exploits that didn’t turn out to be noble at all.

In the 1992 Tour, Claudio Chiappucci went on a long distance break to Sestriere in 1992, in the 1998 Tour, it was Marco Pantani on the Galibier and Floyd Landis's in 2006 in Morzine. Chiapucci and Pantani were eventually found to be doping while Landis was stripped days after winning the 2006 Tour.

So why do I believe that Froome won it fair and square? Well, look at his competition. Of the 2nd to 5th rider overall, only Dumoulin won a grand tour, the 2017 Giro. The rest- Miguel Angel Lopez (3rd) and Richard Carapaz (4th), are newbies, and in fact were stupidly fighting for the best new rider, when they should have been trying to unseat Froome and Dumoulin! Thirty-five yo Domenico Pozzovivo’s (5th) best was a 5th place twice in the Giro overall and 33rd in the Tour.

Therefore, it was peanuts for Froome to ambush the inexperienced when they were either too tired on the final week or just watching each other. If the competition had included Vincenzo Nibali, Nairo Quinta, Alejandro Valverde, Richie Porte, Rigoberto Uran or Romain Bardet- then it would be a different ballgame.