Tour de France: Are Team Sky learning to win hearts as well as races?

It’s not unusual to see a Team Sky rider crossing the line first, and certainly not Chris Froome, but yesterday’s stage was anything but the norm. It also followed another Englishman’s win, and one that juxtaposes two very different success stories. Something “expected, but strangely unexpected”: that’s how Ned Bolting summed up the nature of Steve Cummins stage 7 win at this year’s Tour. He’s a rider that could have his eye on a few stages, and even though you maybe shouldn’t, you always hope he’s going for one soon.

The tale of Cummins’ twilight achievements runs as a salient counter-narrative to that of Team Sky’s success: an outfit that likes to control races, and its riders. Almost since their inception they have achieved a great deal of success with this approach, but while they win races, hearts and minds have been harder to crack.

Cycling is a sport that romanticises passion, grit and guts. These are things not lacking in Team Sky, but they can be eclipsed by more clinical approaches to racing. While does Cummins ride for a smaller team he, most importantly, is a freelancer, often a self-made breakaway man. A profile any fan can get behind, regardless off their nationality.

This is clearly not a model for an outfit the size of Sky’s, but for a team sponsored by a media brand, they seem to have struggled (or perhaps ignored) with the need to win over a wide range of fans. Of course the team do their press, but they don’t seem to have felt the need to pander to tradition, or play up to it. For Sky, never could a better time for something new, something unexpected be needed.

While not the most elegant style, Froome’s high-cadence/low-body technique carved an important amount of time on the downhill but it was the set up, jumping from the KOM point (having raced for the previous mountain’s points — something David Millar picked up as something peculiar at the time) to attack, that made the move possible. As Dave Brailsford said after the result: “When people think you’re predictable, you’ve always got the element of surprise.”

There is a fantastic moment, just before Froome makes his move, where Quintana is visible behind him reaching for a drink. As the Columbian looks back from collecting the bottle, Froome is already away and suddenly the chaser hurls the bidon, it spins away as he looks around for his Valverde to support, already too late.

It seems hard to go along with Froome’s effusive denials that any more planning than some training ride messing around and impulsive where the building blocks of the attack. Knowing Sky, there is a lot more than that. It would seem Brailsford’s additional interviews compound this suspicion.

Overall the tactics, and that’s the way it seems, created an exciting and unexpected stage, but the win still comes from a spreadsheet, from a planning meeting, from data, but that doesn’t seem such a problem if it creates exciting racing like this. Perhaps Team Sky are now learning (or at least factoring in the need) to win hearts, as well as races.