Why Chris Froome's Giro D'Italia Win Was The Best Grand Tour Victory Of 2018

Ranking yearly achievements can often be skewed through recency bias.

- Paul Knott

Ranking yearly achievements can often be skewed through recency bias. Two British Grand Tour winners have come along since Chris Froome’s Giro d’Italia victory, making it almost seem a lifetime ago that Froome completed the GT set in late May.

However, the achievement of winning the Giro d’Italia was as much a testament to the mental strength to block out everything going on around him, as it was to his outstanding physical capabilities on the road from Israel to Italy.

Whether Froome should have been racing in the first place can be debated all day, but the situation he was faced with by no means helped him and, as he now admits in these pages, hindered his hopes with constant media and fan scrutiny throughout the season leading up to the Giro and during the race itself.

Usually his racing does the talking but this wasn’t a stereotypical Froome win. For two weeks he ground through subpar stages, dropping out of the elite group and out of the top 10 as late as stage 13 — it looked as though Italy wasn’t for him.

The brutality of the Giro's course and weather would claim Thibaut Pinot, Fabio Aru and Simon Yates as victims. Even as the race’s stellar line-up depleted, Froome still had to contend with defending champion Tom Dumoulin pushing him all the way.

Winning atop Monte Zoncolan was seen as a race salvaged successfully, but what was to follow five days later-single-handedly took the race and cycling history by the scruff of the neck.

Cycling is built on romance and epic moments; Chris Froome and Team Sky have gained detractors for not living up to this mantra with their robotic approach. But the way Froome rode from Venaria Reale to Bardonecchia was anything but.