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Team Sky announce Tour de France line-up (+ video)

Now that Chris Froome has been cleared to ride the Tour de France, Team Sky have become the 22nd and final team to announce their eight-man line-up for the race, which starts on Saturday.

Among those riding alongside the 33-year-old, who is seeking a record-equalling fifth overall victory are Geraint Thomas and Luke Rowe, the latter less than a year after shattering his leg on his brother's stag weekend.

They are joined by Egan Bernal, Jonathan Castroviejo, Michal Kwiatkowski, Gianni Moscon and Wout Poels.

We're excited to announce our lineup for #TDF2018 , with the big race kicking off on Saturday: @chrisfroome @Eganbernal @jcastroviejo @kwiato @GianniMoscon @WoutPoels @LukeRowe1990 @GeraintThomas86 > https://t.co/naEeowLyyU pic.twitter.com/unQhbuOCVc — Team Sky (@TeamSky) July 3, 2018

Froome, the reigning champion of all three Gramd Tours, said: “The last 12 months have been the hardest but also the most incredible of my career. 

"I’ve never started the Tour de France after riding the Giro d’Italia and it has meant a completely different approach to my season. But I learnt a lot from riding the Vuelta straight after the Tour de France last year which has given me confidence coming into this race.  

“I want to make history with a fifth Tour de France win and fourth consecutive Grand Tour. I am under no illusion about the challenge, but I am feeling ready and I couldn’t ask for a better team to support me. 

“This is the biggest race in the year, in front of the most passionate cycling fans, and I can’t wait to get racing,” Froome added.

Team principal Sir Dave Brailsford commented: “We go into the Tour with a lot of confidence. Chris is in great shape after the Giro - mentally and physically - and the whole team want to build on the success we had in Italy. 

"Chris is already one of the greats of the sport. This is a chance for him to cement that reputation even further.  

“We have chosen the Team to support him that we believe is best equipped to meet the demands of this year’s race. It is a team of real versatility and one that balances youth with experience.

"We are really proud that Gianni Moscon and Egan Bernal will be making their Tour de France debuts with us. They are both very talented bike riders and will have a lot to offer.

"It is also fantastic that Luke Rowe will be riding the Tour again as our road captain after his serious accident last summer. It is testament to his ability and determination that he has come back so strongly."

He added: “These are very special weeks every year. We love riding in France and we are all looking forward to starting racing.”

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Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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That's a team and a chance for Froome to really be considered the GOAT!

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The science behind Chris Froome and Team Sky's Tour de France preparations

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When Chris Froome is racing, he imagines he has a bag of coins to spend. Every time he wastes energy, he needs to pay. He pays whenever he's pedalling against the wind. He pays when he moves up the peloton during a climb instead of waiting for a flat road where he can get maximum drag off the riders around him. He even pays for trivial manoeuvres such as collecting bidons of water from the support car that follows riders during a race. He pays because all these moments imply an acceleration, an intensification of effort that puts Froome in the red.

In physiological terms, the moment that requires payment is called the threshold: the point beyond which you cannot ride comfortably for a long period of time. At any given stage of a race, Froome will try to spend as little time over that threshold as possible, even if that means losing his position within the group. Froome is attuned to it. As he crosses that threshold, he starts feeling his body screaming at him to slow down. He starts breathing faster as his muscles demand more oxygen.

Then comes the pain. When it comes, he embraces it, knowing that it's highly likely that his rivals are in even more discomfort. He might look around the peloton checking for symptoms in the riders' body language. Alberto Contador, the Spaniard from team Tinkoff and winner of all three Grand Tours - Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España - hides it well, grimacing for just a second. Nairo Quintana, from Colombia, sits very still on the bike, his face expressionless.

Froome, on the other hand, is perhaps the most obvious in his suffering. Elbows out, head down, ungraceful. But pain is sometimes a signal for Froome to make his move, especially if he has made his savings, carefully 
considering the energy that went into every single pedal stroke. He knows that when it comes to the final climb at a key stage of a Grand Tour, the rider with the most coins left is the one most likely to win.

That's what happened during stage ten of the 2015 Tour de France . It was the first mountain of the Tour, a hilly 166km stretch of road between Tarbes and La Pierre-Saint-Martin in the Pyrenees that finished at an elevation of 1,610m after 15.3km of climbing. Froome, who weighed 67.5kg at the time, averaged a power of 414 Watts during that climb. With 6.5km to go, he accelerated for 24 seconds, averaging 556 Watts. It was a devastating attack that left Quintana, his nearest opponent, for dust, and a performance so spectacular that journalists questioned its provenance.

In the subsequent press conference, Tim Kerrison, Froome's coach, told reporters that it was not unexpected considering some of the numbers the rider had achieved in the past. For instance, Froome's average power over 60 minutes, including the run-in to the climb, was 366 Watts, and Kerrison pointed out that Froome had exceeded that level on 15 occasions since 2011, in racing and training. Furthermore, his heart rate readings indicated that he had reached the stage feeling fresh and in good physical condition. In other words, he had saved most of his coins. "It's great when you manage to save as much as possible and you're ready for the last climb," Froome says.

"You know you're going to lay it all out there and just go for it." Of course, Froome's extraordinary performance wasn't just a direct result of his natural ability, but a by-product of his training. Kerrison was able to cite exactly how many times Froome had exceeded the power output number that he registered at Pierre-Saint-Martin; after all, he's been tracking data from every single pedal stroke his riders take, both in racing and training, for more than four years. That data is the foundation for the comprehensive and detailed training programme that all Team Sky riders undertake. "I work on the basis that everything we do is probably wrong," Kerrison says. "There are sure to be better ways of doing things. Pretty much every day we do things differently. The riders understand why we do things the way we do. They can always see how it relates to the overall picture."

Chris Froome, 31, has blue eyes and close-cropped hair. His body shape is ectomorphic, with long, lean limbs. His demeanour is quiet but polite and inclusive. When we sit down to talk in the living room at Team Sky's house in Nice, he asks for permission before reclining on the sofa. He either looks straight at the ceiling or across his shoulder directly at WIRED when making a particularly salient point, such as the moment he began to have confidence in himself as a rider and started being smarter about his racing style. He used to be careless with his energy. He was impulsive. Or sometimes team tactics dictated he had to attack at the beginning of the stage and, by the time the race reached the key moment of a climb, he would have nothing left to give.

It's not that Froome lacked the natural capacity; he always knew he had, as he puts it, a "big engine". He just didn't know how to use it. When he was tested in a physiology laboratory in July 2007, in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was told that the maximum rate at which he could consume oxygen - a physiological parameter that goes by the name of VO2max - was 80.2ml of oxygen per minute per kilo of body weight, and his threshold power sat at a 420W. These were the numbers of a potential Tour de France champion.

When Froome joined Team Sky in 2010 from Barloworld, he would produce incredible numbers in training, frequently much higher than his teammates, even though unbeknown to him at the time his body was ridden with parasitic flatworms (a disease called bilharzia, for which he was eventually treated). And yet, he was inconsistent when competing. By the 2011 season, Team Sky's performance director Dave Brailsford was considering dropping him from the squad. His standing in the team was such that the pre-race plan for the 2011 Vuelta a España said: "[Teammates] Xabier [Zandio], Morris [Possoni] and Froome will do their best to survive as long as possible and will fetch bottles, etc." He finished that Vuelta in second place, ahead of Bradley Wiggins, Team Sky's leading rider at the time. That, he says, was the big turning point in his cycling career. A year later, when Wiggins won the Tour de France, Froome finished second.

"I began to understand that I belonged with the best climbers," Froome says. "I wasn't struggling the way I thought I would be." He gained confidence and learned how to use his internal engine. When he repeated the physiological test in August 2015, his values hadn't shifted much - VO2max was now 84.6 and his threshold power 419W - the difference was due to his weight 
loss of 5.7kg. These were the numbers of a two-time Tour de France winner.

In 2009, when Dave Brailsford announced the creation of Team Sky, Britain's only professional race cycling team, the goal was to win the Tour de France within five years - a bold target considering that Britain never had much tradition in road cycling.

Winning the Tour de France had been a dream Brailsford had harboured since he was a teenager. He was brought up in a mining village in North Wales, and in 1983, aged 19, he decided to try competing in the Tour de France. He stuck his bike inside a cardboard box and bought a one-way ticket to France. "I grant you, I was a bit naive and didn't really appreciate the magnitude of the challenge," Brailsford says. "I went to the end of a bike race, when everybody arrived with their cars. I looked around for the nicest kits, went up to them with my bike in its box and said,
"Hi, can I race for your team?" And they were all like, "What?"

Brailsford ended up spending four years in Saint-Étienne, failing to race at the Tour de France, failing even to become a professional. He eventually returned to the UK and completed a degree in sports psychology followed by an MBA at the University of Sheffield Management School.

In 1997, he was hired by British Cycling as an operations director to look over its business side. The programme was run by Peter Keen, a respected sport scientist known for his innovative approach to coaching. As performance director, Keen was taking steps to modernise an underfunded, understaffed team with no infrastructure for proper training. In 1998, after the announcement of Lottery funding for sports in the UK, Keen put together an ambitious and detailed plan entitled the World Class Performance Programme. He stated his vision clearly: to make the UK the world's top cycling nation by 2012. Few people believed it was possible.

At the core of his plan was the application of a scientific and rational method to the art of cycling performance. It was a clear break from a past dominated by a mindset rooted in tradition, low self-belief and an unwillingness to explore new technology. British Cycling hired performance analysts, physiologists and biomechanists. "We had a lack of history in terms of cycling. There were no 
professional cycling coaches, so we hired smart sport-science graduates, "Brailsford says. "You might say that with hindsight that was a great decision. We were lucky to have this group who came up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ideas. Nobody ever said that something 
was not going to work."

Perhaps the most significant step early on was the acquisition of a set of power meters for the bikes, which allowed the measurement of the energy per second the cyclists could produce: their power output, in other words. Whereas before, cyclists had to rely on monitoring heart rate, speed and perceived exertion - all parameters that were easily influenced by environmental factors and had nothing to do with performance - power output was an objective measure and was the perfect tool for performance-based training. It allowed track cycling to become a data-driven sport.

The power meters, along with other technologies like video analysis and aerodynamic testing, allowed British Cycling performance analysts to create a systematic analysis of the numbers - lap times, cadences, power outputs, drag factors - that their riders could produce. They would also do an in-depth analysis of the numbers that were needed to win races, a process they called analysis of the demands of the event. "We would go to the nth degree in terms of truly understanding what winning looked like," Brailsford says. "This allowed us to create a document called 'What It'll Take to Win'. We spent more time than any other team in the world doing that particular work."

By the time Keen left in 2003, Brailsford had inherited a British Cycling team that had already accrued significant success in the Olympics. Alongside its emphasis on sport science, Brailsford introduced an organisational principle called "Performance by the aggregation of marginal gains". As a philosophy, it was akin to a widely known business concept known as Kaizen, popularised by Toyota, which requires the implementation of a culture of continuous improvement. In fact, the name "marginal" came to Brailsford as he was reviewing some studies he had done during his MBA on marginal costing. In cycling terms, it meant breaking down everything that goes into riding a bike and looking for the one per cent shifts that would make a difference. It seemed obvious to Brailsford that going after big ideas was difficult to do on a daily basis, but small gains, which were often overlooked, could be regularly aggregated to create meaningful change.

"Marginal gains came out of the magnitude of change required, in terms of where we were and where we wanted to get to," Brailsford says. "And then, equally, I know this sounds a bit contradictory, the margins of victory. You could win a race by one-tenth of a second. And you're thinking, 'OK, if we could win a race by one-tenth of a second, all these little things over here could equate to one-tenth of a second. So, why won't we do them?'"

After the Beijing Games in 2008, with Brailsford still at the helm, British Cycling had become one of the most extraordinary success stories in the history of sport. Atlanta 1996: two medals, 12th place; Sydney 2000, four medals; Athens 2004, four medals and third place; Beijing 2008: 14 medals and first place. This was the sort of epic British success story that Brailsford wanted to replicate 
in road cycling with Team Sky.

"When we created Team Sky, we sat down with a blank sheet of paper and said: "Right, we're going to create a professional cycling team. How should we do it?'" Brailsford recalls. "We took what we'd learned and tried and tested over the years in British Cycling 
and put it all on the page."

During its first year of operation, Team Sky became well known for its relentless application of marginal gains, in stark contrast with the traditional professional teams at the time. Team Sky's jerseys were designed with a thin blue line that ran down the spine to symbolise the narrow margin between victory and defeat, made from a special black fabric that reflected heat. It hired Honda's Formula 1 logistics manager Gwilym Mason-Evans to gut the inside of the team bus and completely redesign it. It employed a team of carers who would go to the hotels where the riders would be staying to remove mattresses, vacuum the beds underneath and replace them with mattresses and pillows made of elastic foam that had been individually customised so that the riders could maintain the same posture every night. It taught its riders how to wash their hands properly, made them carry hand gels at all times and forbade handshakes to prevent the spreading of illnesses during competition. It had bike-fitting sessions using 3D motion-capture technology in Valencia, Spain. It ordered the manufacture of a Perspex cocoon in which the team could warm up away from crowds and the media.

The sporting results, however, were disappointing. Bradley Wiggins had finished fourth at the previous Tour de France riding for Garmin-Slipstream. Now Team Sky's main contender, he finished the next in 24th place. "We'd come into the sport thinking that we knew a lot, we'd won all these Olympic medals and it was going to be easy," admits Fran Millar, Team Sky's director of business operations and head of winning behaviours. "Bradley was having ice baths and drinking cherry juice and all sorts of stuff, but he just wasn't fit enough. Dave said that we had concentrated too much on the peas, and not on the steak."

Prior to the start of the 2010 season, Brailsford hired Australian performance analyst Tim Kerrison. He was a former rower with extensive experience of coaching and as a sport scientist for swimming. He had been exclusively involved in swimming since 1998, working with a group of female sprinters who went on to have a very successful 2004 Olympics in Athens. "There was this ingrained culture of swimming which was very conducive to developing good aerobic distance-based, endurance-based athletes, but not sprinters," Kerrison says. "We recognised if we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've always got. That needed to change. Let's forget everything we know about swimming and the way everyone trains and think from first principles. What do we know not just about swimming, but other sports and physiology and training science?"

Most training programmes at the time were based around the idea of periodisation. "It's essentially the way the emphasis of training shifts over time," Kerrison says. "This can include a greater emphasis on workload or recovery, or a shift in the emphasis of the type of training within a training block." Traditionally, periodisation involved an initial training period which was predominantly focused 
on endurance and aerobic capacity, with more intense anaerobic workouts that included speed and power training added later in the year as a competition approached.

"We turned the conventional periodisation idea around," Kerrison says. "It made more sense. One of the foundations of sports training is specificity, which means that everything you do in training has to be related, to some degree, to what you need to do in competition. So we began working on the team's anaerobic systems from the very beginning, developing their strength, speed and power. Only later did we lay on more aerobic training."

Kerrison had been working as a sports scientist for the British swimming team since 2005 when Brailsford contacted him. He had already received a job offer from England Cricket that he was about to sign, and although Kerrison had never worked with cyclists, Brailsford convinced him to join Team Sky. "I grew up thinking that the Tour was one of the ultimate sporting challenges," Kerrison says. "I still think it is. I can't think of many things more challenging and special to me than winning the Tour de France. So it's a meaningful goal. How realistic it was, I wasn't sure."

When Kerrison joined Team Sky in late 2009, Brailsford told him that they were not expecting anything from him until November 2010. His mission was just to follow the team around as they competed for their first Tour de France. They hired a camper van, nicknamed Black Betty, which Kerrison shared with fellow performance analyst Matt Parker, then Team Sky's head of marginal gains. Kerrison spent this time taking notes and talking little. "He travelled round with the team working with our power data and not really visibly much else. Everyone was just, 'Who is this weird Australian who lives in a camper van?" Fran Millar recalls.

At the end of 2010, after the first season of racing, Brailsford told Kerrison, who had been in cycling for about a year, that he was going to coach Bradley Wiggins and that he had to formulate a plan to win the Tour de France. "I did what I had done with the sprint swimmers in Australia: go back to the very first principles," Kerrison says. "It was a huge benefit to not have my judgment clouded by all the other stuff I didn't know and just quickly work out exactly what I needed to know. We needed to forget about the culture, and forget about all the bullshit and the peripherals."

One of the first things Kerrison did was to try and find out exactly what it would take to win the Tour. After all, much of the success of British Cycling had been built around a methodical analysis of an event's demands and knowing what it took to win. "Riders used power and trained for power to a certain extent," Brailsford says. "They would download their training information into the system and get nothing back, so they stopped doing it. Kerrison changed all that. Our compliance rates, in terms of riders, when they're at home downloading the data, went through the roof, because they all started seeing how it affected their training plans."

Kerrison adopted a database system called Training Peaks in which the athletes could download the data so that he could study it. Using this data, Kerrison did a power curve analysis for each athlete that showed, for a given duration - from one second to three hours - how much power a rider could sustain. ("It's an ongoing thing now," Kerrison says. "Every day we have a new current power curve for the riders. Over time we have built up a knowledge of what this means and how to interpret it.") Then, based on the data available for previous Tour de France winners and on extrapolations, he estimated the power curve corresponding to what it would take to win the Tour de France. "Those were the demands of the event," Brailsford says. "We compared the capacity athletes had against what was needed to win and trained the athletes against that."

Kerrison also understood that Team Sky would need good climbers that could perform at altitude and at high temperatures. "A lot of decisive moments in the Grand Tours are performed at well over 1,000 
metres, sometimes as high as 2,500 metres," Kerrison says. "So if you're not able to perform at that level, then you're screwed, basically."

The body adapts to training at altitude, mostly through respiratory adaptations, recalibrating to different levels of oxygen. To address this, Kerrison scouted Europe for high-altitude camp locations, eventually deciding on Tenerife. "Britain doesn't have high mountains and heat so our cyclists weren't used to it," Kerrison says. "I did start to question if we were going to be able to compete with guys who spent their whole lives growing up riding in the mountains at altitude in the heat."

Still, Kerrison wondered how quickly the athletes would be able to adapt, so at the start of their first Tenerife camp, they tested their athletes' efforts at altitude and at sea level. On day one, the average difference in the athletes' threshold between sea level and 2,100 metres was about 70W. By day three, it was 35W. After two weeks there was no difference. The riders had acclimatised.

When Kerrison presented his plan to win the Tour de France, he essentially said that they had to forget about the details until they got the basics right. For Wiggins, those basics were conditioning, weight management, time trialling and performing at altitude and in the heat. "We were so caught up with the bells and whistles and all the clever stuff," Brailsford says. "We delivered all of that in year one and it didn't work. We didn't get our basics right. That was a big learning and Kerrison was a bit part of that. We decided on a new mantra that winter: 'Doing the simple things better than anybody else.'" That year, Bradley Wiggins crashed out on an early stage of the Tour, breaking his collarbone. In 2012, however, he became the first British rider to win it.

One afternoon in April 2016, Kerrison is at the wheel of one of Team Sky's Ford Mondeos following Froome as he pedals a few metres ahead in the hills around Nice, in the south of France. He had already completed most of this training plan for the day: two flat efforts on the time trial bike - 15 minutes and 12 minutes - with about five minutes of recovery in between. Then he took part in a 20-minute climbing effort on the time trial bike before switching to a road bike and was now on his final effort: 12 minutes of "spiked efforts" building up to four minutes of threshold. "Froome's anaerobic threshold is on around 450 Watts, but he rarely does anything at a constant pace," Kerrison explains. 
"He might do one minute about 30 Watts over threshold and then three minutes with ten Watts under threshold. Overall, the effort over that period of time would be at threshold."

This goes back to Kerrison's idea of specificity. While sometimes the pace is constant at a race, other times it is very dynamic, with pace changing all the time. That's what Froome is training for. Of course, on a more fundamental level, what Kerrison is manipulating in his mind is a more complicated set of equations describing the various cause-effect relationships between a training load and a physiological adaptation.

Consider the interplay between the distinct aerobic and anaerobic motors of an athlete. In simple terms, below the physiological landmark of the lactate threshold, the body is able to clear lactate as fast as it is produced. Above that threshold, it accumulates.

"People think developing the anaerobic system is a bad thing because it produces lactate and lactate is bad," Kerrison says. "It's only bad if you can't remove it. Otherwise, it gives you power. When I was in Australia we had some distance swimmers who, no matter how hard we pushed them, just didn't produce any lactate. I'm not sure whether that was because they weren't producing any or because they were efficient at removing it. We found out when we first measured Chris that it was the same. He would do a maximum effort and when we measured lactate there was nothing. Based on what I knew from swimming, I knew this was really promising. He was producing incredible power and whatever lactate he was producing he was able to remove. That indicated that we needed to increase his anaerobic capacity - his ability to produce lactate - because he had an ability to remove it."

Kerrison then adds another layer to the consideration of Froome's physiology: the nutritional fuel he uses for this aerobic effort. This fuel is a mixture of carbohydrates and fats, which are metabolised in different proportions depending on the intensity of the effort. The more intense the effort, the more carbs are required. But to Kerrison, even the way the body fuels can be trained and adapted, shifting it towards a type of metabolism that specifically benefits a rider racing the Tour de France.

"We restrict carbs in training and this shifts the metabolism," Kerrison says. "It drives an adaptation that makes the body become more efficient at using fat as fuel. So up to a certain intensity, say 200 Watts, Froome will predominantly be using fat as fuel. A significant portion of a typical five-hour stage is ridden at a relatively low intensity, meaning he'll be burning mostly fat, saving the carb stores for the more intense stages of the stage where it's needed the most - for example, the final mountain climb."

According to Kerrison, the interaction between those three types of metabolisms - carbohydrate-fuelled aerobix, fat-fuelled aerobic and anaerobic - is the foundation of Froome's training plan. When we return to Team Sky's house, Kerrison shows WIRED a five-page checklist that he keeps for each of his riders. It includes items such as power curve analysis, demands of the events, fat-carb metabolism, heat and altitude. There are 74 factors, qualitative and quantitative, that encapsulate Kerrison's understanding of what it takes to win.

It's the blueprint of what it takes to become a Tour de France winner, a title that Froome is defending this year after victory in 2015. He won it pretty much the same way as he had in 2013: by riding the first mountain stage very aggressively and earning a substantial advantage early in the race. That strategy caught everyone off guard. It wasn't part of Team Sky's plans; it was a decision that Froome made a couple of weeks before the start of the Tour and even Kerrison wasn't sure it was the best way to race.

Indeed, by the penultimate stage, Froome was struggling physically, exacerbated by a chest infection. Quintana, second in the general classification and 3'10" behind the leader, attacked relentlessly. "It was one of the days I had to fight the hardest to keep the yellow jersey," Froome recalls. "The pain was severe, but I knew that once I got to the finish line it would be done."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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Tour de France

Velonews stories of the decade: team sky’s tour de france domination, team sky revolutionized the way the tour de france was raced, winning seven tours in eight years. the team garnered plenty of criticism for its budget and its penchant for pushing the rules..

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This story appeared in the November/December print issue of VeloNews Magazine. 

It all started innocently enough. In 2010, new arrival Bradley Wiggins drew curious stares and even a few laughs when he was spotted warming down on rollers outside bus of Britain’s new cycling team, Team Sky .

Many laughed, a few took notice.

“When we started warming down on the trainers, people laughed at us,” Wiggins said this summer on his Eurosport podcast. “Within a year or two, everyone was doing it. Those are the kinds of things that Sky did that today is commonplace in the sport.”

That after-race warm-down was just the first incarnation of Sky’s revolutionary and sometimes derided “marginal gains.” And just like about any innovation in cycling, be it a new twist like handlebar extensions or even a highly effective doping product, it soon swept through the peloton like wildfire. Flash forward 10 years, and soigneurs are hauling trainers to the top of the most secluded mountain summits in Europe so its star riders can spin down after the hard effort.

A decade on, no one is laughing anymore.

Unrivaled success

Backed by the biggest budget in cycling, by the close of its first decade, Team Sky had won seven of the past eight yellow jerseys, with four different riders. The team’s methodology and success forced every team in the peloton to take a hard look at itself and how it was managing its squad.

“They’ve forced the rest of us to up our game,” said EF-Education First sport director Juanma Gárate. “We’ve all been forced to push ourselves. Everyone was playing catch up to Sky.”

Today, Team Sky has morphed into Team Ineos , and the team still boasts the largest budget in the WorldTour, estimated to be as high as $45 million annually, a tally that can be as much as four times more than the poorer neighbors in the WorldTour.

No one’s had a closer look at Sky-Ineos’s decade-long run than Nicolas Portal. Now 40, the cool Frenchman joined Sky in its inaugural year in 2010, and morphed into one of the team’s top sport directors.

“Those early days were not so easy for the team,” Portal said. “It might look easy from the outside, but everyone has worked so hard. It is sometimes difficult to believe what we achieved when you stop to think about it. It’s been amazing.”

Team Sky came into the peloton talking a big talk. After a few false starts, it surprisingly delivered on its promise sooner than anyone could have imagined. In fact, Team Sky far surpassed even the wildest dreams of its team boss, guiding light, spiritual leader and some say dictator, Dave Brailsford.

“The way that Dave structured the team, the way we work, the investment, you can call it boring sometimes, but that is the winning way,” Portal said. “There are no stage victories for us, it’s all about GC. The level is so high, so we said, let’s push higher than everyone else.”

Plenty of critics

It’s now been 10 years since Sky, Brailsford and Wiggins strutted onto the scene. The squad’s debut season was little short of a disaster. Wiggins cracked under pressure and limped through the 2010 Tour with a distant 21st on GC. The team picked up a few wins along the season, but nothing that would really reveal it was set to revolutionize the peloton.

Team Sky righted its ship. Brailsford and groundbreaking trainer Tim Kerrison transformed Wiggins into a GC-killing machine. The ever-obsessive Brailsford broke down the entire system of training, preparing, racing, aerodynamics, tech, equipment, diet, nutrition, rest and recovery, looking for advantages that he dubbed marginal gains.

Wiggins was their perfect guinea pig. Equally obsessed, the former trackie shed weight to stay close in the mountains but maintained his power in the time trials. By 2012, it proved a deadly combination, and Wiggins barnstormed to Britain’s first yellow jersey.

Sky soon defied expectations, tapping a then largely unknown Chris Froome as its chosen GC captain. Froome would go on to dominate grand tours, winning four Tours, two Vueltas and one Giro in dramatic fashion in his 80km solo attack over the Colle delle Finestre.

Then came Geraint Thomas ’s surprise win in 2018, followed up by Egan Bernal ’s history-making victory in July. More than any team, the 2010’s were the decade of Sky-Ineos domination.

And not everyone liked it. That success didn’t come without its scandals. The blot of Jiffy-Bags, Tramadol and TUE’s and the financial advantage it boasts thanks to its budget are also as much a part of the Brailsford legacy as those eight yellow jerseys and feel-good PR statistics about a record number of British people riding their bicycles.

For some critics, Sky-Ineos is nothing more than an extension to the win-at-any-cost ethos that has long dominated professional cycling. Sky wasn’t shy about tiptoeing right up to the ethical line.

Things got so bad in the wake of the Fancy Bears leak—which revealed Wiggins used the powerful corticoid triamcinolone under the guise of a TUE ahead of his 2012 Tour win—and pushed the team to the brink. The British Parliament investigated and castigated the team on some of its practices, but Brailsford never admitted to having doped his riders.

“There is a fundamental difference between process failures and wrongdoing,” Brailsford said in 2018. “Our commitment to anti-doping has been a core principle of Team Sky since its inception.”

Then came another bombshell: Froome tested for high levels of Salbutamol en route to winning the 2017 Vuelta. After a long and expensive legal battle, Froome and Sky came out on top. Froome was cleared of any wrongdoing, and WADA and the UCI were forced to walk back its Salbutamol anti-doping protocols.

For the haters, it was all too much. Sky was just as bad as any other of cycling’s dirty players. For Brailsford, Froome’s clearance and Bernal’s victory, it was all sweet redemption.

When Sky announced it would be leaving the sport at the end of 2018, many thought it was the end of an era. Instead, Brailsford had the pick of several suitors, and settled on Ineos, a petro-chemical company owned by England’s richest man. Sports-washing claims aside, Brailsford and the team emerged even stronger and wealthier than before.

“Tough times don’t last, but tough people do,” Brailsford told Jeremy Whittle in July. “You can’t do this job without a thick skin. In sports management you need to be resilient and decide what’s important to you and what you are prepared to take on board.”

Big pockets, bigger wins

One long-held criticism of Sky and its success is its peloton-leading budget. At more than $45 million annually, Ineos certainly packs more financial punch than any team. Some even describe it as a form of “financial doping,” allowing Brailsford to do things other teams simply cannot afford.

“When Bradley won the Tour, Sky was not the richest team, but we were already looking at new ways of doing things,” Portal said. “The budget increases came because if we wanted to keep our winners, we had to pay them more.”

Indeed, riders who started out as helpers at Sky/Ineos have gone on to be leaders on other teams, including Richie Porte, Rigoberto Urán, and Mikel Landa  and  Wout Poels , who head to Bahrain-McLaren for 2020.

More than anything, it was the “Sky way” that set them apart. The team’s legacy will be Brailsford’s mania for detail, the team’s deep pockets, and its unrelenting drive for success.

“We have a way that works,” Portal said. “We do not want to sleep with this. Cycling moves quickly, and we cannot win on our palmares. We know that every team in the peloton wants to beat us.”

The team has helped transform the sport and reduced much of cycling’s mystery to mathematical formulas, and not everyone agrees it’s for the better. The “Ineos Way” works. It might lead to sometimes methodical, almost robotic racing, but it’s highly effective at winning grand tours.

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Chris Froome or Geraint Thomas? Team Sky to decide Tour de France leader on Alpe d'Huez

Decision over Team Sky leadership to be made after the Alps

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Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome on stage one of the 2018 Tour de France

The question over who is Team Sky 's out-and-out leader at the Tour de France will be decided after the next three Alpine days, finishing with the Alpe d'Huez summit stage, says Geraint Thomas .

Chris Froome has won the Tour de France four times, but Welshman Thomas continues to improve with the years and sits higher up in the overall on the first rest day, just 43 seconds off the yellow jersey and 59 seconds ahead of Froome

"I think it's early to be talking about that," Thomas said about any disputes over leadership between him and Froome.

"Maybe if I'm still right there after Alpe d'Huez [on stage 12], it's a bit different then. But we haven't even done a proper climb yet. I'm certainly not getting carried away."

>>> Geraint Thomas sends best wishes to 'biggest threat' Richie Porte after Tour de France crash

Thomas led the race for four days in 2017 after winning the opening time trial in Düsseldorf. However he was forced to abandon due to a crash in stage nine.

Nether Thomas nor Froome have shown any signs of discontent such as those that surfaced in 2012 when Froome was deployed as a domestique to Bradley Wiggins but was capable of dropping his team leader on the climbs.

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"We've spoken in general about things," Thomas said. "He's keen for me to try… if I do have the chance to stay up there, to let me have that. But we're honest with each other."

Watch: Tour de France stage nine highlights

Out of the next three days, the Alpe d'Huez stage on Thursday should have "the biggest selection" in the overall classification. Team Sky take decisions about who will be their leading GC contender after that stage and before the race reaches the Pyrenees.

"I don't think so," Thomas said of any potential inner-team rivalry. "Hopefully we'll be the last two guys anyway, and we ride the same as a team up until that point anyway. And then you go from there.

"But I don't think so at all. I've ridden with Froomey for a number of years now and we can certainly be honest with each other, and not lie about how we're feeling, to get one of us to ride for the other one. It should be all right."

>>> Nairo Quintana: 'The cobbles were hard, but from here the terrain is in our favour'

For his part Froome said the 2018 Tour is "a totally different situation" to 2012 when he and Wiggins seemed to clash on the road.

"He [Thomas] is riding extremely well and it just puts us in an even better place," Froome said.

"I think the race, as always, will decide [who leads]. For us it's fantastic to have different cards to play. Movistar have come here with three leading riders, and with only one GC contender it becomes difficult to cover all three.

"If you look at all the GC riders, G is right up there. It's for other teams to attack us now."

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Gregor Brown is an experienced cycling journalist, based in Florence, Italy. He has covered races all over the world for over a decade - following the Giro, Tour de France, and every major race since 2006. His love of cycling began with freestyle and BMX, before the 1998 Tour de France led him to a deep appreciation of the road racing season. 

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How to watch Tour de France live stream — 2024 stages and schedule

Expect fierce competition to win the world's greatest cycle race

Watch Tour de France: live streams

Watch tour de france 2024: preview.

It is time for the second Grand Tour of the year and, for most cycling fans, the Tour de France 2024, is the big one. However, there is some shift from tradition this year. The Grand Départ is in Florence and the finish in Nice, not Paris.

We are in for a brutal battle for the Yellow Jersey. The field includes Carlos Rodríguez and Egan Bernal leading the Ineos Grenadiers and Jonas Vingegaard of Team Visma - Lease a Bike. He's a back-to-back winner of this legendary race, having won in 2022 and 2023. Can he make it a hat-trick?

It's Tadej Pogacar who they'll all be trying to keep pace with though. The Slovenian has already won the Giro d’Italia this season. Can he become the first rider to do the double since Marco Pantani in 1998?

And there's no need to leave these questions hanging. You can watch the Tour de France 2024 for yourself with every stage available to stream free. Read on for how to watch the Tour de France live streams from anywhere and all the TV channel and cable-free options you'll need for this three-week feast of cycling.

How to watch a FREE Tour de France live stream

One of the best things about the Tour de France is that it's completely free to watch in lots of countries around the world. For example:

UK – ITV4 and ITVX streaming service / S4C and S4C on BBC iPlayer

France – France TV Sport

Belgium – RTBF  

Italy – Rai Sport

Australia – SBS

If you're from any of the countries listed above but you're abroad right now, don't worry about missing out on that free coverage. All you need to do is subscribe to a VPN to watch a free Tour de France live stream and re-connect to your home streaming coverage.

How to watch Tour de France 2024 from outside your country

If you're keen to watch the Tour de France but you're away from home and the coverage is geo-blocked, then you could always use a VPN to access it (assuming you're not breaching any broadcaster T&Cs, of course). You may be surprised by how simple it is to do.

Use a VPN to get a Tour de France live stream from anywhere.

NordVPN – get the world's best VPN We regularly review all the biggest and best VPN providers and NordVPN is our #1 choice . It unblocked every streaming service in testing and it's very straightforward to use. Speed, security and 24/7 support available if you need – it's got it all. The best value plan is the two-year deal which sets the price at $3.69 per month , and includes an extra 3 months absolutely FREE . There's also an all-important no-quibble refund if you decide it's not for you.

- So, try NordVPN 100% risk-free for 30 days

USA: How to watch Tour de France live stream 2024 without cable

Cycling fans can watch the Tour de France on both NBC and Peacock in the US.

NBC is the official US broadcaster for the Tour de France 2024.  Peacock will live stream the race too.

How to watch Tour de France 2024 without cable

Peacock costs from $5.99 a month for an ad-supported version of the service that also offers live coverage of every big WWE event, plus the NFL and plenty more live sports. You also have the option of paying $12 a month for commercial-free coverage.

OTT streaming service  Sling TV  is reasonably priced and includes both NBC and USA Network in select markets, as part of its  Sling Blue  package. The usual cost is from $40 a month, but if you're new to the service you can get  your first month half-price .

Another over-the-top streaming service that includes USA Network and NBC in select markets is  Fubo . It's a much more comprehensive cable replacement and carries more than 100 channels including Fox, CBS and ESPN.

Prices start at $79.99 a month but new users get a 7-day FREE trial .

If you subscribe to Peacock, Sling or Fubo and find yourself unable to access coverage because you're out of the country, consider using a VPN as outlined below. Try NordVPN with a 30-day money-back guarantee .

• Related: how to watch Peacock from outside the US

How to watch 2024 Tour de France: live stream cycling in Canada

FloBikes is the place to watch live Tour de France coverage in Canada.

A subscription costs CA$29.99 (roughly $22) per month or CA$150 (roughly $110) for the year.

Not in Canada to catch that FloBikes stream? Use a VPN to make sure you don't miss a moment.

How to watch 2024 Tour de France: live stream cycling in New Zealand

Sky Sport is the place to watch the 2024 Tour de France in New Zealand, though be warned that most of the action takes place in the dead of night.

If you're willing to stay late enough to tune in, Sky Sport subscribers can watch every stage online using the country's Sky Go service, while cord-cutters and anyone else can try the Sky Sport Now streaming-only platform. A pass costs $24.99/week, $44.99/month or $449.99/year.

Away from home? Use a VPN to watch a Tour de France live stream from abroad.

How to watch a free Tour de France live stream in the UK

ITV always goes all-out with its coverage of the Tour de France, and cycling fans can watch every stage of the race for free on ITV4 in the UK. 

Use a VPN to watch a Tour de France free live stream from abroad.

That means you can fire up a free Tour de France live stream on  ITVX , which has an excellent app that's available on nearly everything that plugs in these days - just give it a search on your device, phone or console of choice.

More ways to watch the 2024 Tour de France:

Welsh-language coverage of the Tour de France is available from  S4C , which is available to stream for FREE in Wales via BBC iPlayer.

If you’re out of the UK but still want to watch, make sure you install a VPN so you can continue accessing UK streaming services from anywhere.

How to watch Tour de France 2024: live stream cycling FREE in Australia

Cycling fans Down Under can also watch every stage of the Tour de France for free on SBS . The only catch is those brutal broadcast timings.

If you stay up late enough to tune in, you can also live stream Tour de France coverage on the free-to-use SBS On Demand platform.

As well as apps for Android and iOS, you can access SBS On Demand on Android TV, Amazon Fire TV stick, Apple TV and most smart TVs.

Outside Australia? Don't worry if you're out of the country and want to catch that free SBS live stream – just grab a VPN and you can watch the race as if you were back at home on your laptop, mobile or other TV streaming device. 

Today at the Tour de France 2024

After three weeks of amazing cycling, this is the final stage of the Tour de France 2024. Due to the Olympics, it's not the traditional ride into Paris, but an individual time trial from Monaco to Nice. It's a 33.7km course with one category two climb towards the start. Today will be the final time we see record stage winner Sir Mark Cavendish ride in the Tour de France.

Barring catastrophe, Tadej Pogacar will become the eighth man, and the first since Marco Pantani in 1998, to win the Giro and the Tour de France in the same year. He put in yet another stunning performance in the mountains yesterday, breaking the resistance of Jonas Vingegaard on the final climb. He has now picked up five stage wins and don't bet against him claiming a sixth. Richard Carapaz is set to be crowned King of the Mountains after his brilliant finish to the race. Biniam Girmay will win the Green Jersey.

Tour de France 2024 stages and dates

Stage 1 | Saturday, June 29: Firenze – Rimini, 206km

Stage 2 | Sunday, June 30: Cesenatico – Bologna, 200km

Stage 3 | Monday, July 1: Piacenza – Torino, 229km

Stage 4 | Tuesday, July 2: Pinerolo – Valloire, 138km

Stage 5 | Wednesday, July 3: Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne – Saint Vulbas, 177km

Stage 6 | Thursday, July 4: Mâcon – Dijon, 163km

Stage 7 | Friday July 5: Nuits-Saint-Georges – Gevrey-Chambertin, 25km ITT

Stage 8 | Saturday, July 6: Semur-en-Auxois – Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, 176km

Stage 9 | Sunday, July 7: Troyes – Troyes 199

Rest day | Monday, July 8

Stage 10 | Tuesday, July 9: Orléans – Saint-Amand-Montrond, 187km

Stage 11 | Wednesday, July 10: Évaux-les-Bains – Le Lioran, 211km

Stage 12 | Thursday, July 11: Aurillac – Villeneuve-sur-Lot, 204km

Stage 13 | Friday, July 12: Agen – Pau, 171km

Stage 14 | Saturday, July 13: Pau – Saint-Lary-Soulan Pla d'Adet, 152km

Stage 15 | Sunday, July 14: Loudenvielle – Plateau de Beille, 198km

Rest day | Monday July 15

Stage 16 | Tuesday, July 16: Gruissan – Nîmes 187

Stage 17 | Wednesday, July 17: Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux – Superdévoluy, 178km

Stage 18 | Thursday, July 18: Gap – Barcelonnette, 179km

Stage 19 | Friday, July 19:  Embrun – Isola 2000, 145km

Stage 20 | Saturday, July, 20: Nice – Col de la Couillole, 133km 

Stage 21 | Sunday, July 21: Monaco – Nice, 34km ITT

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Charlotte Henry is a journalist who has covered all things tech and media for a number of years for various publications. She reported in-depth as tech companies became media companies and vice versa. In her newsletter, The Addition , she focuses on the ever-changing streaming ecosystem as the likes of Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney+ fight for supremacy. Charlotte is also a close follower of sport (she’s a Spurs fan…) watching everything from Premier League football to Major League Baseball. Charlotte’s first book “Not Buying It: The Facts Behind Fake News” was published in 2019. Away from work, she can often be found at heavy metal concerts and festivals.

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Our Tour de France coverage

Friday 1 July 2011 15:19, UK

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Join us throughout the Tour de France for the best coverage around of cycling's greatest event.

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Mark Cavendish breaks Tour de France record for stage wins

At 39 years old - having come back from a heartbreaking crash in what was meant to be his final Tour de France, and five winless years marked by illness and injury which contributed to a diagnosis of depression - Mark Cavendish surpasses Eddy Merckx to achieve the historic milestone.

Wednesday 3 July 2024 17:38, UK

Mark Cavendish has broken the record for Tour de France stage wins.

The British cyclist secured the historic milestone after triumphing in Saint-Vulbas, eastern France, to win the 35th stage of his career.

Cavendish, from the Isle of Man, had been level with Belgian great Eddy Merckx on 34 victories.

"I'm in a bit of disbelief," the 39-year-old Astana-Qazaqstan rider said shortly after the win.

"Astana put a big a gamble on this year, to make sure we got here, the Tour de France.

"A big gamble to come here and come and win at least one stage, you know?

"You have to go all in and, yeah, we've done it."

More on Mark Cavendish

British Cycling chief hopes Sir Mark Cavendish puts off retirement again after making Tour de France history

Related Topics:

• Mark Cavendish
• Tour de France 2024

His teammate and lead-out rider Cees Bol simply said: "He f****** nailed it."

It comes after bitter disappointment for Cavendish when he crashed out of last year's Tour - which he had said would be his last - and breaking his collar bone.

His victory comes just four days after he struggled in the heat of a punishing opening stage out of Florence, vomiting on the bike in concerning scenes - and two days after he missed the opportunity to contest stage three after being caught behind a late crash in Turin.

Read more Crash ends Cavendish's hopes of winning record Tour de France stage Cavendish says inspiring growth in cycling 'worth more to me than any medal'

The rider won his first Tour stages in 2008, taking four that year, and would be up to 20 by 2011.

But his four stage wins in 2021 counted as one of sport's great comeback stories, his first victories at the Tour in five years after a period of time marked by illness and injury which contributed to a diagnosis of depression.

He had equalled Merckx's record with his victory on stage 13 of that year's race, in Carcassonne.

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How to watch stage 20 of the 2024 Tour de France

The Tour de France heads into the end game with a mountain stages and the final time trial

• Free streams
• USA & Canada
• Watch any streams

The 2024 Tour de France nears its end with just five more stages to go before the finish in Nice. Friday's stage 19 brings the race nearly back to where the action started in the Alps.

The next two stages are short but packed with climbing as the Tour de France overall contenders fight to move up in the GC standings .

Race leader Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) goes into the last two stages of the race with an advantage of 5:03 on defending champion Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) with Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quickstep) in third place at 7:01 in arrears.

Pogačar's final challenges include stage 20, only 132.8 kilometres long and with and four climbs ending on the Col de la Couillole before the final individual time trial in Nice.

Read on to find out how to watch the last three stages of the Tour de France.

The Tour de France is free to air on ITVX (UK) and SBS On Demand (AUS) . Away from home? You can watch free from anywhere using a VPN .

Dates: June 29-July 21

Free streams: SBS on Demand (Australia), ITV4 (UK), S4C (Wales)

Canada: FloBikes

UK: Discovery+ , ITV4 , S4C

Australia: SBS

Watch anywhere: Try NordVPN , 100% risk-free

How to watch the Tour de France for free

The 2024 Tour de France will be broadcast in Australia on SBS on Demand , in the UK by ITV4 , and in Wales by S4C .

If you live or are on holiday in any of these countries then enjoy the month of racing with no subscription fees to pay. However, if you're away from home on holiday during the racing then it's possible to keep up with the racing without resorting to shelling out for a local streaming subscription.

A VPN could solve your problem, and we have all the information on h ow to watch the action using a VPN below.

How to watch the Tour de France in the USA & Canada

The Tour de France will air on NBC Sports the USA and on its streaming service, Peacock TV .

FloBikes is the Tour de France host for Canada. An annual subscription will set you back $29.99/month or $150/year.

Peacock TV offers a seven-day free trial for those who want to try before you buy. A full subscription to the service starts from $4.99 per month.

NBC is available via cable plans and, if you're a cord-cutter, you can watch the network via Hulu ($7.99 per month with a 30-day free trial), DirecTV (from $64.99 per month with a five-day free trial), and FuboTV (from $74.99 per month with a seven-day free trial).

What time does the Tour de France finish today?

Thursday's stage of the Tour de France - stage 19 from Embrun to Isola 2000, is scheduled to finish at  16:28 CET . You can follow their progress in our live report.

How to watch the stage 16 Tour de France in the UK

UK viewers can find the Tour de France on ITV4 , Welsh-language channel S4C as well as on Eurosport and Discovery+ .

A 'standard' subscription to Discovery+, which includes Eurosport's cycling coverage, will set you back £6.99 per month or £59.99 per year. A premium subscription, which includes all that plus TNT Sports (Premier League, Champions League and Europa League football plus rugby, wrestling, UFC, and MotoGP), costs an additional £29.99 per month.

How to watch stage 16 of the Tour de France around the world

For a local feel and full French-language coverage of the race, head to France TV Around Europe, broadcasters include ARD in Germany, Sporza and RTBF in Belgium, Rai in Italy, and RTVE in Spain.

Watch live cycling on any streams

If you are outside of your home region and need to access your live streaming services to watch the action, you may find your access to be geo-restricted.

In this case, a VPN service will come in handy, allowing your computer to pretend it's home and let you log into your streaming accounts to catch all of the racing action.

Our colleagues at TechRadar thoroughly tested several VPN services and came up with a few great recommendations below.

1. NordVPN - get the world's favorite VPN We've put all the major VPNs through their paces and we rate NordVPN as the best for streaming Netflix as our top pick, thanks to its speed, ease of use and strong security features. It's also compatible with just about any streaming device out there, including Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Xbox and PlayStation, as well as Android and Apple mobiles.

There are a couple other very good options that are safe, reliable and offer good bandwidth for streaming sports. Check out two other top options below - ExpressVPN and the best budget option, Surfshark .

2. Try ExpressVPN risk-free for 30 days ExpressVPN offers a 30-day money back guarantee with its VPN service. You can use it to watch on your mobile, tablet, laptop, TV, games console and more. There's 24/7 customer support and three months free when you sign-up.

Try the 12-month plan for the best value price.

3. Surfshark: the best cheap VPN

Currently topping our charts as the fastest VPN around, Surfshark keeps giving us reasons to recommend it. It's a high-value, low-cost option that's easy to use, full of features, and excellent at unblocking restricted content. 

With servers in over 100 countries, you can stream your favorite shows from almost anywhere. Best of all, Surfshark costs as little as $2.30 per month, and it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee to try it out.

Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the Tour de France - including breaking news and analysis reported by our journalists on the ground from every stage of the race as it happens and more.  Find out more .

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Laura Weislo has been with Cyclingnews since 2006 after making a switch from a career in science. As Managing Editor, she coordinates coverage for North American events and global news. As former elite-level road racer who dabbled in cyclo-cross and track, Laura has a passion for all three disciplines. When not working she likes to go camping and explore lesser traveled roads, paths and gravel tracks. Laura specialises in covering doping, anti-doping, UCI governance and performing data analysis.

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