Tour de France 2018: Team Sky is perhaps the biggest cycling team

Geraint Thomas had trouble explaining what was the Tour de France after the Saturday time trial at Espelette. "I can not speak man," was more or less all the Team Sky pilot could tell the interviewer before the tears started. "I do not know what happened to me" were his last words before he put his head in his hands.

Thomas' win will be Sky's seventh win in seven years for the team, which was born in 2010 with Murdoch's silver and declared ambition to win the Tour with a British. They reached their goal just after their third season with Bradley Wiggins' historic win in 2012, and have continued to win since.

Team Sky has already accomplished something for the history books. Teams are a bit more ephemeral in cycling than in most other sports, regularly changing names and colors, but there are enough real franchises to keep points. And the only team before this year to have won six Tours in seven years was the legendary Renault machine from the late '70s and early' 80s. French icon Bernard Hinault won four times and Laurent Fignon won twice for the plant.

And that's all in terms of Sky comparisons.

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Of course, the teams of Arnold / Discovery have won seven games in a row. but only the victory of Alberto Contador in 2007 is still recognized. Miguel Indurain's five victories began in 1991, three years after the victory of his teammate Pedro Delgado, giving his team Reynolds / Banesto (now Movistar) six victories in eight years. In ancient times, Alcyon-Dunlop has won eight Towers and seven Peugeot-Wolber, but never more than four in a row, and the records of the 1920s are of a very different quality than the one in the world. ;modern era.

Thomas 'Victory Would be a perfect bookend for Wiggins' victory – sandwiched around Chris Froome's four titles – if only their race was about to end. With Thomas at his peak and Froome not yet out of his own, and with the young and ultra-talented Egan Bernal in the team, Team Sky is about to be yesterday, today and tomorrow. tomorrow of the Tour de France. Sky could well surpass the success of the Tour of any team we have ever seen.

Let's stop for a moment and recognize Thomas and his big individual winner.

As much as his team did, he too. Personally, I had no expectations for him. I assumed that he was going to prolong his series of bad luck in the Grand Tours (caused a few times by improper bike handling) or that he would sacrifice his interests for Froome. My own prejudices against Thomas as the winner of the Tour go back to his early excellence in the classics, when he won the E3 Prijs Vlaanderen, heralding the success of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. Changing gears and winning the Tour de France would be like an elite catcher deciding that it was time to play a quarter – which is not theoretically impossible … but almost.

But Thomas's rise has steadily improved over the years, and he won in Paris-Nice two years ago and the Critérium du Dauphiné in June has given reason to his supporters [19659012] Geraint Thomas sprints to a victory Getty Images

During the Tour, Thomas enjoyed excellent support and a lack of bad luck ("good luck" is not really recognized in cycling), which allowed him to take the lead in the overall standings. While Froome and other suitors yielded time because of incidents, or left the race with injuries. Once he had the yellow jersey, Thomas was the strongest driver, dominating the decisive phase of the race with consecutive stage wins in the Alps and a strong Saturday time trial.

One may wonder whether Rigoberto Uran or Richie Porte could have kept pace if they had not collapsed, or if the astute Nibali could have made progress in the Pyrenees, but it's speculation. Thomas won this victory and those tears.

But there can be no denying that Team Sky's excellence has a lot to do with this individual achievement.

Sky's six victories underscore the often-ignored truth that cycling is a team sport, even though it enumerates its results in individual terms.

One more proof is that the six victories were almost identical. The most notable sign is the monotonous domination of the mountain stages, where Sky domestic one after the other, alternately, crush the entire peloton pushing an infernal pace to service of their captain. Bring rivals and hunt down anyone with the temerity to attack are the main weapons of a strong team. When there is a team time trial, the advantage becomes even clearer – and even though BMC has exceeded Sky during Phase 3 of four seconds, it is the day that Thomas took the start to win the Tour.

Sky has assembled his list with pure buying power, in addition to his roots in the fertile scene of Britain. But the features of Sky's success extend, we are told, out of sight, where they use their financial benefits to make marginal gains – the best equipment, the best clothes, the best nutrition, the best advice and the best Training and other scientific discoveries. add up to seconds here and there.

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And yes, "marginal gains" weigh on more salacious practices. Froome and Wiggins have both been accused of abusing the Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) to use otherwise banned products for alleged medical conditions such as asthma. But few would dispute the strength of the team, if not some legitimacy.

The individual element of cycling makes it difficult to compare the success of Sky to other sports. It may sound like Tom Brady's feats in the New England Patriots, where Sky dominates at a time when parity should be the norm – each team has wind tunnel tests, nutrition experts, biometric data and more. An even better comparison could be Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid if you consider that Froome is the center of Sky. Both Real and Sky are power franchises that can buy the best players of their competition to be backups in case their first two international stars are tired or injured.

Sky deserve all the credit for the development of Froome and Thomas, and other great British riders. But they started their race by buying Wiggins from the US Slipstream team (now EF Education First-Drapac), and they surrounded their British captains with domestic strong enough to be the captains of the other teams. This year it was Wout Poels and Michal Kwiatkowski, the two most expensive riders were first developed by other top teams. Kwiatkowski had a world championship on his resume when Sky called.

The acquisition of Bernal, 21, was like giving the Golden State Warriors the best choice in the NBA draft. In the 2017 Tour, they counted on Mikel Landa, who took fourth place overall while assisting Froome and then became a leader for Movistar. The best riders like Uran, Porte, Sergio Henao, Mikel Nieve and Thomas himself all served Sky as aids during their race.

The power of money to create a great team is undeniable, but the power of team work is too.

Sky has always shown that by winning the Tour, but never more than this year.

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A Lot of Fans despise Sky for their success, which is reminiscent of the antipathy generated by patriots, warriors and whites. But each of these teams is at least occasionally (if not relentlessly) recognized for its contribution to the noblest notion in sport: That people working collectively can create something greater than the sum of their individual qualities.

The team is set aside by fans for a whiff of ethics (hello, Deflategate), even though the sport has seen far, far worse than anything that has been blamed on Sky. Throw eggs on them if you must (which literally happened to the Team Sky car this year ); this reaction is not without justification. But with a different set of glasses, you can just as easily see in their success the roots of what is great in cycling.

The end of the Sky's dominance Tour is hard to predict.

Next year Froome will be 34 years old, a mature rider for a Tour winner, and frankly, his grip on the race has begun to weaken in 2017, before putting the Giro back on track. Italy in front of its Tour ambitions in 2018. Nobody will miss his chances he is in good health and is resting for the event of 2019, but it will not be a shock if he does not does not get in shape either.

Thomas, the title winner, will have all eyes on his back, and if someone of the same strength is so lucky, the yellow race will be really launched. Dumoulin and his team Sunweb will come back to reason and do without the Giro to focus on Paris, and perhaps – perhaps – that Porte will stay up for three weeks. And if Thomas can not be the leader, even someone as hypnotized by young people and Colombian genes like me can not tell if Bernal is still quite ready.

For Sky's detractors, they must now spend another season off. level the financial playing field so that the top of the sport can be fought rather than simply surrendered to a single squadron. But wanting to deny them the top of the mountain is a failure to see the top of the mountain for what it is: The full power of teamwork, which cycling fans spend years trying to describe to their less interested friends.

Yes, we need more than a great team, but Sky deserves a lot of credit for raising the bar. It's everyone's job to find a way to overcome this.

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